How To Self Publish, Part 1

There's a lot of hype on the ol' internets about self publishing. A significant amount of said hype ("Quit your day job! Sell millions! Get tons of royalties! Unless you're too lazy and stupid to succeed!") comes to you courtesy of people who, coincidentally, offer a book or a webinar or a personal appearance where they will tell you how to succeed just like them. (Funny that they're spending energy hawking these books on how to self publish rather than just publishing. Makes you wonder...)

Well, fuck those guys.

I published a book by myself, and it was and continues to be a great experience.  But I think a lot of people have inflated expectations about the process and what it's going to do for  them.  

And those expectations have often been inflated  by people selling information on how to self publish. And people who have shelled out their hard-earned money for a glorified pamphlet padded out to book length.

So the hell with that. I'm going to tell you what I did and how I did it.  For free!   Here we go!

Why I did it:

Because traditional publishing is dead, and I am the future, man!  Just kidding! Actually it was because no one wanted to publish my book! I wrote a really kickass superhero book.  Seriously, if you like action and superheroes in a dark, urban vein, this book is totally for you. It's about loss and inequality and the importance of friendship, and kicking terrible people in the teeth. 

And nine publishers passed on it, usually with the rationale, "superhero books don't sell" or, possibly, "we've already got a superhero book on our list."  

It went to some smaller publishers but didn't make it to any of the tiny presses, in part because I'd been burned by the Night Shade Books debacle, and while I'm sure that most small independent presses actually run professional operations where they do things like have a way to keep track of royalties, the Night Shade thing still haunted me.

This is the great thing about the current publishing world:  I didn't have to just leave my work on my hard drive, languishing for want of readers.  I could get it out into the world!  But I wasn't willing to do it in a halfassed way.  So I had to take stock of what I was good at, what I was not good at, and what I was willing to take the time to learn.  

Here are the three things you must do in order to publish a book:

1.)Formatting.  You can't just publish a Microsoft Word document. You have to do stuff to it to make it work as an ebook. Or a paper book.  Do you know how to do this? Me neither!  So you have two options: learn how to do it or pay someone to do it.  My friend Kirsten decided she wanted to learn how to do it, so for her book No Alligators in Sight, she did her own ebook conversion. This involved her learning about something called "kerning."  This was not something I wanted to mess with.  So I had to pay someone to get it done.  

2.) Cover design. If you know something about design and have command of some design software, this is something you can do yourself if you devote some time to studying and making a bunch of terrible covers before you make a good one.  If, like me, you know nothing about design, and applying filters on Instagram is the limit of your image software ability, you should hire someone to do this. 

 3.) Editing.  If you are an English teacher with two decades of experience, as I am, guess what? You still shouldn't do this yourself.  You might be able to catch all the comma problems and every misspelling, but you will lose out on the experience of modifying the book for a reader who isn't you.  And, after all, that's who you want to buy and read your book, right?  I knew I could do a competent job at least with copy editing, but I didn't want my book to be competent--I wanted it to be awesome.  

So, great.  I had to invest some money to make this happen!  If you have a couple of thousand bucks lying around, this shouldn't be an issue.  I think Kirsten Feldman's take on this is very smart: lots of people have hobbies that they spend a lot of money on: fly fishing, cycling, xbox, whatever.  So if publishing books is your hobby, it's okay to spend money on it.  I think this is a much better way to look at it than investing in your career because publishing a single ebook is an incredibly risky investment.  

But I didn't have a couple thousand bucks lying around!  So what could I do?  Tune in tomorrow for Part Two!