Why Self-Publish a Book?

In the old days, if you wanted to sell a book, you would need to write it and then pitch it to a publisher. You needed a query letter to sell a publishing company on the idea that your book was marketable and convince them to pay you for the rights to publish it. Failing that, you'd have to query an agent that could do that part for you.

Nowadays, there are many tools available to authors that allow them to publish stories on their own. The question then is: why do it yourself instead of going with a traditional publisher?

Flexibility

When writing to be traditionally published, you have to cater your book to the sensibilities of the mainstream audience or at least the publishing houses available to you. This might mean compromising on your creative vision. Many authors find their books rejected because they are considered too niche. If you want to go against the grain, self-publishing gives you a lot more freedom. Best of all, it's possible to do this for free or minimal cost.

Self-Publishing vs Vanity Presses

Beware of vanity presses. These are publishing houses that offer to publish your book at a cost. If you pay them, they'll do all the legwork for you. It might seem nice at first, but there are a couple of points to consider.

You need to understand that these vanity presses have no motivation to help you succeed. They already made their money upfront. If your book sells 0 copies, it doesn't hurt them. This differs from a traditional publisher in that the trad publisher pays you and thus needs to make the money back by your book actually selling. The vanity press will put in minimal effort and use the cheapest solutions to get it done 'quick and dirty'. The problem is, you can do everything they do, so do it yourself!

Editing

One of the big things you'll need to tackle is the editing of your book. Many publishing houses employ their own editors that they'll use to copy edit what you submit. On your own, you don't have this resource. While you can hire editors that do developmental and copy editing, it may also be possible to self-edit. I'll go into more detail about hiring editors in another article, but for now, let's talk about doing it yourself.

Keeping in line with doing this all for free, you may have the skills necessary to edit your own work. After all, professional editors have written books themselves. This gets trickier if you're writing in a language that's not your native one, however. You need a solid grasp of the language and grammar rules in order to successfully edit.

The first thing to keep in mind is time. Never try to edit a draft while it's fresh. Your brain will autocorrect every mistake to what you know you wanted to write. It's best to leave a story sitting for several months before returning to look it over. You want to forget what you wrote when you're reading it again.

You're not only looking for typos. You need to ask yourself a lot of questions when reading. For fiction, here are some things you might ask:

1. Am I setting the scene properly and describing things clearly?

2. Are my sentences flowing well or are they clunky to read (reading it out loud helps here)?

3. Am I varying my sentence structure at all?

4. Am I repeating the same word(s) too much?

5. Does my characters' dialogue make sense and feel natural?

6. Am I showing how characters think/feel through their body language?

7. Does my resolution to the conflict make sense? Is it satisfying or did I just hand-wave the problem away?

8. For every sentence in passive voice: Is there an effective way to rewrite this so the sentence becomes active and would doing so make it sound better?
   

Since you don't have another pair of eyes on it, you need to scrutinize well and likely repeat this process multiple times with long gaps between each attempt.

Feedback

Regardless whether you hired an editor or edited yourself, you still need input from other people. There are two main forms of this: Critiques and Beta Readers. I highly recommend using both resources before finalizing your manuscript for its last run of editing.

Critiques

A critique generally comes from a fellow author. They will read over your story and offer advice from the standpoint of someone else who writes books. They may not be within your target audience, but can offer generalized advice based on their experience. There should never be a cost involved in this, as it works as a mutual exchange. You read their stories and they read yours. You can either join a critique group that periodically meets up to swap and discuss chapters, or a critiquing site. Critique sites generally work on some sort of credit system. You critique stories to earn credits that then allow you to post chapters of your own to be critiqued in return. Popular examples included Critique Circle and Scribophile.

Beta Readers

Beta readers, on the other hand, give their opinion of your story from the perspective of a reader rather than an author. They may not be writers themselves and thus are less likely to offer technical suggestions. There are services to pay people for their time, though it's perfectly possible to get people to beta read for free. You just need to find people interested in the type of book you're making who will agree to provide input in exchange for being able to read a free book.

It's important when selecting your beta readers, that you target people in your target audience. If you're writing a romance novel, someone who only reads horror won't give you an accurate measure of your real audience.

Advance Reader Reviews

Think you're ready to publish? Not yet! Get some reviews ahead of time that you can use to promote your new book and make people think more of it. This can be achieved through Advance Reader Copies (ARC). There are sites that you can pay that will distribute the free copies for you, but you can also do this yourself for free. If you're good with networking and social media, reach out to people and just offer free copies of your book. Get it in front of influencers and people who cover your genre. If these people review your book, you can use quotes to post on your author profile, the book's listing, and/or your personal website.

Author Website?

Yeah, let's talk about that! If you're here, then you should know that I made an author website for my writing adventures. It's a good idea to set one up before you launch your book. There are many free services, such as Wordpress and Wix that let you set up a basic website. You can purchase a domain to link to the site when you're ready, but this isn't necessarily required to start out.

Aside from a place to learn more about your books and possibly purchase them, an author website shows your personality. You can share pictures, your hobbies/interest, your experiences, and give updates on your writing. It's a place where readers can connect with you, the human being behind the book.

Marketing

Yes, even this can be achieved for free. In the modern world where social media reigns supreme, you can get a lot done by forming connections across various platforms. Before you publish, you should make a marketing plan. Identify good people to give your book to so they can promote it for you. Research various social media platforms and how other authors are letting people know about their works. Make fancy images and other promotional materials. Plan launch events. The answer isn't always "ads". In fact, for many people, ads are a waste of money that don't see clicks lead to sales. Starting out, it's much more efficient to build your connections through hard work and word-of-mouth than try and pay for ads.

The Cover

They say "don't judge a book by its cover", but the reality is people do all the time. People are attracted to things that are eye-catching and a good cover can also set expectations on the tone of the story. A lot of thought should be put into your cover design. What do you want to convey? While you can hire a professional to design one for you or at least make the art assets for it, this isn't always necessary. Just about every print-on-demand service (Amazon, IngramSpark, Lulu, etc.) has a cover creator feature. They generally provide templates that you can then add any images you may have and the text. Don't forget to throw your blurb on the back!

Finally: Publishing

I've spent an enormous amount of time talking about all the things you need to consider before publishing, but the final step is getting the book out there for sale. There are many ways to do that and this comes with its own slew of considerations.

One of the major reasons self-publishing is more viable now than it was decades ago is the advent of eBooks. Since it's all digital, it doesn't incur any publishing costs. In theory, you could sell an eBook yourself if you can sort out a medium to do so. Otherwise, there are many services that will facilitate the sale in exchange for a cut of the profit. These online retailers include Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, and many others. There's no reason to limit yourself to just one, either. There are many aggregate services that will push your book to multiple retailers. Draft2Digital is one that comes to mind and they provide you with a free ISBN with it. Some may elect to publish to Amazon directly for more control over the listing. This is important since Amazon is such a major player. Choose the most important ones to you to publish to directly and use an aggregate service to cover the rest.

But of course, many dream of having their book in physical stores. Luckily, you don't need to hire a printing press or order 100 copies to distribute yourself. Many places have turned to print-on-demand services. These services will only print books when they're ordered. Amazon KDP can do this for both paperback and hardcover at a reasonable price. Barnes & Noble is fairly competitive with them as well and will ensure the possibility of your local Barnes & Noble store being able to order and stock copies of your book. IngramSpark distributes to several places, including Target. Amazon's Extended Distribution pushes to other retailers as well.

Just make sure to order a proof before you finalize the publishing process. You want to make sure your book is printing correctly before you allow the world to order it. The last thing you want is a poor-quality book making you look amateur.

In a future article, I plan to compare several of these print-on-demand retailers in terms of price and print quality.

Summary

In short, self-publishing can give you a viable alternative if your story is one that is difficult to get published traditionally or you just want more freedom in what you can create. Some things will cost money and can be thought of as an investment into the success of your book, but many aspects can be done for free if you have the time and energy to do them yourself.