Anatomy of a Book… Deciding to independently publish a book… Part 1: DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU NEED TO DO?

Okay, so you’ve written a book. Okay, so you want the book published. Okay, you’ve decided to independently publish your book. Okay, so you’re ready to take the plunge. So what do you do?

In a recent blog post, I discussed submitting to a commercial publisher. So you’ve researched commercial publishers (large or small), and perhaps even submitted to a few and been rejected. And now you want to try your hand at publishing your book yourself. Are you really ready? Are you REALLY ready? REALLY?

As a reminder of the basic steps of publishing I mentioned in another blog post, here they are again. There are several basic stages to publishing:

• Acceptance and negotiation
• Pre–production stage:
  • Editorial – developmental, copyediting, proofreading;
  • Design – making your book look like a book, and making it so that the printer you choose can print it;
  • Sales and marketing – selling the book, to booksellers and the end consumer: readers
• Printing
• Distribution

You really can’t forego any of the steps in the publishing “process”, even the “acceptance and negotiation” stage. You still have to “accept” that you want to be a publisher and “negotiate” with yourself as to how much of the process you wish to take on yourself and how much you wish to contract out.

There are some steps you can take on yourself, so long as you’re willing to put in the time and effort into learning those skill sets, and some money into getting the basic tools that you need to achieve those steps.

But there are some steps you can’t really avoid contracting out unless you’re willing to buy some very expensive equipment and networks and your rich widowed childless “Great–Aunt Martha”, whose husband “Great–Uncle Arthur” had the surname Rinehart, Packer or Hancock (on the list of Australia’s wealthiest family names) or Vandebilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, or Gates (on the list of America’s wealthiest family names), left you bucket loads of cash that she’d kept stuffed under her mattress.

I would never recommend that an author self edit their own work. There are always things that you will miss. An author will see what they think they’ve written, not what they’ve actually written, and you, the author, are the only person who can see what it is in your head that you think you’ve written. It’s happened to me. I’ve seen it happen to other authors. And there are things that you just won’t know about a subject and get wrong. This is where an editor should (and I say should cautiously, because even the greatest of editors will miss things) be able to pick up on an aspect and suggest to you “this doesn’t work, you need to take some care here and rework it”.

Printing is one of the things that you can’t do solely by yourself… unless your “Great–Aunt Martha” left you bucket loads of cash. The machinery needed to print and bind a book professionally (so it looks like a book in the way readers expect books to look) costs tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of dollars.

And distributing a book is another of the things you can’t do solely by yourself. Self–distribution requires contacts with booksellers and time to promote to booksellers so that they buy your book so that they can sell your book to readers. But this doesn’t mean you can’t leverage some of your contacts that you have, to sell to friends and relatives, and seeking the assistance of friends and relatives to sell to their friends and relatives. (This is part of the publishing process where the distribution and sales and marketing can interact.)

The sales and marketing aspect of selling your book is one of the parts of the publishing process where an author can take on some of the task themselves. (And most, if not all, commercial publishers would expect an author to take on some responsibility in terms of sales and marketing.) An author can develop an “author platform” – a website, Facebook, Twitter, a blog, Google+ and the other “social media”. If you’ve decided you want to independently publish on your own, you’ll need to take on these tasks. You can also engage a book publicist, or a book marketing firm, to help you with this. But you will have to educate yourself first and you’ll need to decide what you want to take on yourself and what you want to contract out.

The design phase of a book is probably the only phase of the publication process where an author can leverage the “most bang for your buck” and biggest cost saving… but only if an author is willing to put their time and effort, and emotion, into learning how to make a book look like a book and put it into a format that a printer can print. There are several high level tools and professional programs that are available to make a book look like a book. There are also lower cost programs, and even open source (free or low cost) programs available to assist indie authors to publish their books. But it you’re not willing to put in the time or effort to learn these skills, hire a professional. If you know you couldn’t design a book cover with more than stick figures on it, hire a professional.

Jonathan Gunson, an author who provides advice on selling and marketing books, suggests that there are ways you can sabotage sales of your book. One of the things he suggests is that “writing more than one book really is essential if you want to succeed as an author”. That’s true… but it also applies if you’re going to be a publisher, indie or otherwise. The “real” truth is that if you’re an indie author, or an indie publisher, is that “authoring” and “publishing” is a business. And you have to look at indie publishing as a business and decide whether you want to go into the “author” business or the “publishing” business.

Well written and edited books sell books. Covers sell books. Interiors that look like books should sell books. So… Are you ready to put your money where your book is? Are you ready to put your money where soul lies?

Next up, the “real” cost of publishing…