Self-Publishing Step-by-Step

It just occurred to me that some of you might be interested in seeing the overall process / progress of self-publishing. The steps and the order those steps go in. Or at least, the steps I take, and the order they go in for me.

I think I’d also like to be able to look back and remind myself of the journey.

So, for both those reasons, I’m going to start telling you – possibly in a sort of weekly digest format – what I’ve done, in increments you can follow.

For this first post in the series, I need to go back. Because I’m right in the thick of it now, I really should explain how I got here.

I’m going to address two things here:

(1) Researching

Before I decided to take the leap and self-publish, I’d been reading about self-publishing for – literally – years. The whole time I was submitting, and re-writing, and submitting again, I was reading all sorts of writing blogs and articles on writing websites. At first, I mostly read information about how to get an agent and how to get a publisher, but then, bit by bit, I started finding self-publishing sites.

Here’s how my thinking on self-publishing progressed:

- A few years ago: I would have to be completely desperate to self-publish. It’s a last resort.

- Eighteen months ago: If this was a business decision, I’d probably self-publish. But it’s not a business decision.

- For the last few months: Why isn’t this a business decision? This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want this to be a career. Why wouldn’t I make this a business decision?

This progression was fuelled by two things. One was me learning more about self-publishing over time, and the second was self-publishing changing over time. This progression led me to the second thing I want to address in this post:

(2) Deciding

When it came right down to it, this was much easier than I would have ever guessed it would be. In fact, it was so, so easy that, once I’d decided – which was right before Christmas - I forced myself to not do anything about it. To go away to Wales. To empty my mind of writing and publishing decisions. To take some time, and let it percolate, and see if I still felt the same way when I got back.

Rewinding a bit, late fall / early winter 2013 was spent working on an on-again, off-again adult novel I’ve had underway for about ten years. I keep making progress, and getting a bit farther, and then other things come up and I don’t touch it for months, or even a year, at a time. Whenever I come back to it, I have to re-write half of what I’ve already written. It’s very much a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back process.

I had decided, this last time, that I was going to finish it, and I was going to publish it. I knew my YA publisher wouldn’t publish an adult novel, and there was no way I was going through the endless publishing submission cycle again. I could say quite a bit about this cycle, but that would make this post ridiculously long and tangential. Suffice it to say, no way I was doing that again.

So, clearly, I would self-publish my adult novel. This was a super-easy decision – not even requiring a cooling-off period. To be honest, it was a complete no-brainer. I had a story which had already taken far too long to see the light of day, so I’d make sure it saw the light of day myself. The thing is, though, it wasn’t ready (it still isn’t ready), so all this was still in the undefined future.

And then, one day, I thought “You have a YA novel that’s publication ready. It’s done. Your current novel has some momentum. You should capitalize on that. You could stay in limbo, waiting for a firm publication date, and a contract, or you could just publish it on your own.”

It was, quite literally a light bulb moment. It had never occurred to me before that I could self-publish the book I already had ready. And then, immediately after the light bulb turned on, I wondered why I’d been sitting in the dark for so long. And that’s when I decided to leave the light bulb in Canada, go away, not think about it at all, and then think hard when I got back, and when I got back the light bulb was still there shining at me, and I knew I had to do it.

Of course, after that, there was the telling (mostly fun / partly painful) and then … well, then there was the next part of the process, which I’ll write about in my next post!

As always, with anything I write, please feel free to contact me if you want more particular information / details about anything.