self-publishing
Not for the faint-hearted.
Self-publishing involves
finding a responsible/respectable organisation through which to produce your book
checking what you're committing yourself to if you even make a query, let alone sign up with any company (cf. below re my burning my fingers), especially –>
knowing precisely how much money is involved in every facet of the procedure!
once satisfied you're not dealing with Mephistopheles, learning how to use the organisation's software - PROPERLY!
coming up with a good design for your book's cover (really important)
looking into every aspect of potential sales areas (really confusing, and also potentially dispiriting)
I did this, during the time I was waiting on Finch Publishing (a) to open its Memoir Prize competition and (b) to judge it. Sitting around with my finger up my nose and not the faintest idea of how long I'd be doing so didn't appeal; and – although this may come as a surprise – I was not sanguine regarding my chances of winning the Prize.
Happily for me, I fell in early with Amazon's CreateSpace – imnsho, the leader in the self-publishing market. More on them in a moment …
Unhappily, I also asked questions of some other organisations who handle self-publishing; and by far the least germane and most annoying of these is Balboa Press, a division of a company called Hay House. These useless bastards have never left me alone since first I made contact with 'em, and that was as brief a one as I could manage, in terms of their pricelist. But since then – and we are talking several years, now – they have peppered me with sales emails on a semi-regular basis. I've unsubscribed myself to every one of these; I searched the site to find any other way of unsubscribing and failed; I even sent an email to their marketing people (the only email address provided on the bloody site) containing some somewhat pithy comments regarding Balboa Press' unwanted correspondence and a request to pass on my demand to be removed from their dB. The sole result of that was a greatly increased amount of sales email.
Bottom line: do not go near Balboa Press or Hay House, not if you want to stay sane.
But back to CreateSpace ... After what I remember as just about a lifetime, I was able to produce a nice-looking version of what was then my book – editing has since taken place, and it is even nicer, she said modestly – and a cover that quite pleased me. It was the cover, however, where things went wrong; and you should be aware of this kind of potential problem if you have self-publishing in mind.
CreateSpace couldn't get it straight. This was vital, as the top half of the cover was a photo, and anyone can see that a photo defines the shape of a page, so to speak. The first time I printed out my book – you get a trial freebie sent to you – I was a bit disappointed to find that, although the contents looked fine, the cover was skewed. I re-designed it somewhat, in an effort to bypass the same problem; and paid for a second copy. Same thing – identical. The cover was skewed to exactly the same degree.
By now the Memoir Prize was history and my communications with Fremantle Press underway, so I let CreateSpace know that I wouldn't be proceeding with my book, and why. To be honest, I would've done my utmost to sort out this problem with them, had real publishing not intervened; but, of course, there's no way of knowing if I would've succeeded.
If you're considering self-publishing – and why not?: many books have found publishers by being submitted to them as self-published hard copies – I reckon there's not much point wasting your time in looking around. Just go to CreateSpace and be prepared to have to ask for help. And don't hesitate to complain when something goes wrong: the bigger the company, the more likely it is to respond to help queries.
