Chapter 14
Self-Publishing: Is It for You?
In This Chapter
Weighing the pros and cons of self-publishing
Summarizing various publishing options
Demystifying the publishing process and players
Deciding whether self-publishing is right for you
The publishing world is in transition. Digital publishing, print-on-demand, freemium . . . it seems as if new formats, methods, and players are emerging every day. The growth is both exciting and overwhelming. One of the biggest shifts in this age of transition has authors taking matters into their own hands — that is, self-publishing. This chapter tells you what self-publishing is, outlines the author’s role in the process, and helps you determine whether self-publishing is the right path to publication for your young adult fiction.
What’s So Different about Self-Publishing?
In the traditional publishing model, the author’s role is to write the manuscript and submit it to publishers until landing a book contract; then the publisher takes over, designing, producing, marketing, and distributing the bound book. Although savvy writers supplement the publisher’s marketing efforts to help increase book sales, self-marketing is optional in this scenario. The author gets paid a royalty on each book sold (about 15 percent, with an advance against the royalties) as he moves on to his next project. But here’s the rub: What if you don’t land that book contract? Or what if you don’t want to settle for 15 percent of the sales? What if you don’t want to let someone else drive the fate of your book? Then maybe self-publishing is for you.
Self-publishing cuts out the publisher — and the agent, if that’s part of trying to land your book contract. Self-publishing puts you in the captain’s chair, writing, designing, producing, marketing, and distributing your own book. You fund the expenses and keep all the profits. As with all business ventures, self-publishing has both benefits and drawbacks.
Eyeing the benefits
The reasons for self-publishing’s appeal to writers are valid and compelling:
Money: In self-publishing, you keep all the profits. All the money you make after paying your production- and marketing-related costs goes straight to your pocket, without detouring through your publisher’s and agent’s coffers. And if you choose electronic or print-on-demand publishing options, you don’t have to fork out for warehousing or shipping (more on those options in a bit).
Control: Not only do you have final say on everything — you have all say. This control gives you the freedom to print any type of content, with any type of design, and run whatever marketing campaign you want.
Time: Your book is available for sale sooner than in the traditional publishing model because you work on your own timetable. No waiting for editors or wending through a publisher’s production queue and release schedule with scores of other books.
Realizing the drawbacks
Writers’ reasons for concern about self-publishing are valid and sobering:
Money: You pay all the costs and thus assume all the financial risk. Producing your own book costs several hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on your choice of bound books or electronic books (e-books) and your commitment to content and packaging quality. Professional editors and cover and interior designers don’t come free. Marketing costs may extend well into the thousands for professional publicists and campaigns, and even basic marketing items such as websites and promo materials can add up. (I go into detail about marketing options in Chapter 15.) Can you sell enough books to recoup your expenses and then turn a profit?
Control: You must make all the decisions and thus must educate yourself in all aspects of the publishing process. You can hire freelancers and other experts, but the buck starts and stops with you, so you’d better understand what the hired help is offering and advising.
Time: Designing, producing, promoting, and distributing a book takes a lot of time — time that you could spend writing.
Stigma: Like it or not, a stigma lingers around the label self-published. Some people will assume the story wasn’t good enough to get a “real” publisher. A significant number of self-published books exhibit inexpert or downright poor quality, bringing down the public’s perception of the entire category and creating a serious hindrance to your credibility.
Understanding Your Publishing Options
The publishing industry is morphing, but at this time you have three publishing options for your young adult fiction: traditional publishing, print-on-demand self-publishing, and digital self-publishing. This section gives you an overview of all three.
Traditional publishing
In the traditional publishing model, a publisher buys the rights to your manuscript and then produces, markets, and distributes the book, paying you a royalty for each book sold. These publishing companies use offset printing methods on traditional printing presses, printing batches of hardcovers or paperbacks that must then be warehoused. The publisher assumes the financial risks, taking a significant share of the profits in return. This approach is a long-established path to publication and the model that I focus on in this book.
Hardcover books have cardboard covers wrapped in cloth and sewed or glued to a block of paper pages. Hardcovers, which are often wrapped in book jackets, have a high perceived value with consumers. Paperback books have thick paper covers glued to a block of paper pages. Paperbacks are significantly cheaper to produce, which is why they carry lower cover prices. Although young adult fiction is published in both hardcover and paperback, paperback versions are typically printed and sold in higher numbers.
Traditional publishing can make your life easier. A publisher brings to bear a staff of experts in bookmaking and bookselling, so the quality of traditionally published books is dependably high. These books get stocked in brick-and-mortar stores as well as online because publishers offer bulk deals and sell on credit. And because publishers accept returns of unsold books, retailers are willing to risk buying books by untried authors. Your trade-off for these benefits is minimal control over the book-making process and the packaging of the final product, lower cuts of the profits than you’d get if you self-published, and publication dates that are determined according to your publisher’s schedule, which takes into account all the books that house is producing, not just yours. See Chapter 13 for info on submitting manuscripts to traditional publishers.
Print-on-demand (POD)
The print-on-demand (POD) model is how you get physical, printed-and-bound books without signing with a traditional publishing house. Instead, you pay a POD publisher to handle everything from designing your book to printing and distributing it. A POD publisher prints the book in any number of formats (such as hardcover or paperback), registers the copyright and obtains the ISBN, gets the book listed with online booksellers, and fills orders from customers. The publisher uses high-end laser printers to print books one at a time as ordered. Within days of an order, the book is printed and then shipped to the retailer, customer, or distributor.
Your costs depend on the services you choose. For example, you may use the POD publisher’s design templates to lay out the text and cover yourself, or the company can design the book for you. POD companies are able to customize books, such as by pasting CDs onto covers or using higher quality paper, but the writer pays extra for the enhancements.
POD has its share of pros and cons:
Publishing process: The full-service menu of POD publishers simplifies the publishing process for self-publishing authors, although the companies’ staff expertise may not compare to that of traditional publishers.
Cost: POD books are printed only after they’re ordered and paid for, making them pricier per copy than in the traditional model. The flip side is that you don’t have to pay for warehousing.
Distribution and sales: Brick-and-mortar retailers and distributors don’t typically stock POD books because POD publishers don’t allow them to buy stock on credit, nor do these publishers accept returns of unsold books. Also, with high sales unlikely, retailers don’t order enough books to qualify for shipping discounts, so the cost of stocking a POD book is higher for them than stocking books from traditional publishers. This means that online retailers and author websites are the primary selling fields for POD books. Without a strong platform or aggressive self-marketing, books published using POD typically sell only a few hundred copies.
If you’re intrigued by POD publishing, start your research with two professional organizations for self-publishers: the Independent Book Publishers Association (www.pma-online.org) and the Small Publishers Association of North America (www.spannet.org). SPAN sponsors a self-publishing Yahoo! group that welcomes newcomers at http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/self-publishing.
Digital publishing
Also called electronic publishing or simply referred to as e-books (electronic books), digital publishing allows readers to download electronic text onto a dedicated digital reading device (e-reader) or onto any PDA (personal digital assistant) or computer. E-books are typically distributed via the Internet, usually through online booksellers. As long as a person has a device that can store and display the text, he or she can read the e-book.
E-books . . . free books?
Millions of e-books are available for free on the Internet. How do writers make money if they’re giving their books away? Simple: The free stuff is a marketing tool for their paid stuff, that’s how.
People like it when you give them stuff. Getting free stuff makes folks want to give you stuff — their money. The business concept is called freemium (as in “free” and “premium”), and it works like this: You give people something for free, and then they’ll pay for other products that are similar or related to it . . . namely your other books or the rest of a book they’ve just sampled at no cost. With their low production costs and easy delivery, e-books fit well in the freemium model:
Loss leaders: Loss leaders are products people give away or sell at unprofitable prices with the goal of driving sales of future products. Just as coupons and sales lure you into retail stores where you then buy a whole basket of nonsale items, you can give e-books away in order to build a customer base. If you hook people with your giveaway, they’ll come back and buy new books from you because they know you’ve got the goods. Plus, they’ll tell their friends, creating word-of-mouth that will (you hope) increase sales of your for-sale books. This model works if you have multiple novels or perhaps a series with the first volume in the series being the loss leader.
Short-story teasers: You can give away a short story or novella, something related to your main book, for free. The hope is that this teaser hooks readers, and then they fork over money for your main selection. Your only real cost with this kind of giveaway is the time it takes to write the shorter pieces. Fantasy series lend themselves to this kind of freemium thanks to their deep fictional worlds, which offer many possibilities for ancillary stories.
Limited-time free downloads: You can build interest and word-of-mouth by offering your e-book for free for a limited time. Make the giveaway period long enough for people to hear about the book, start reading it, and tell their friends about it but not long enough for the entire world to come and download. Also, an end date puts people in the “I gotta buy this before it’s gone!” mindset. Your gamble is that those who do download your book for free will love your novel and return to buy your other books.
Digital publishing allows authors, readers, and publishers immense flexibility. E-books can be of any length, and because they’re virtual, they don’t require warehousing or shipping. Since the introduction of e-readers in the early 2000s, digital reading devices have made great strides in onscreen readability, making them more appealing to readers. Visually, the pages appear onscreen in the same layout as they do in a book. Although you must design and format your text according to the set specifications of each reading device, this formatting can be relatively quick and easy to do.
Consumers have shown their approval by making e-books the fastest-growing segment of the publishing market, with the 2011 Digital Book World Conference announcing that e-book sales reached almost $1 billion in 2010 and Forrester Research predicting nearly $3 billion in e-book sales in 2015.
Because the price of e-readers is going down and the popularity of PDAs and tablet computers is rising with young people, your young adult fiction audience is poised to be a major consumer of e-books. The trick, as with any of your format options, is to make those young people aware of your book so they’ll download it. See Chapter 15 for ideas on how to publicize your young adult novel to your unique audience.
Digital publishing can be part of any self-publishing plan thanks to the relative simplicity and low cost of formatting your novel’s text. If you choose the POD option and write, edit, and design the book yourself, go the extra step of formatting your electronic text for the main e-reading devices and make it available to an entirely new audience. Traditional publishers do this with the books on their lists. More formats, more readers, more sales.
Knowing the Players
With self-publishing still finding its feet as a publishing alternative, specific players are constantly emerging, merging, and folding. If you decide to pursue self-publishing, you should tap into the self-publishing community online to get up-to-speed with the companies currently offering the most useful, most cost-effective, and highest-quality services. No matter which path your self-publishing endeavors take you on, though, you need to be familiar with five roles in the self-publishing world. I cover them in this section.
Odd tasks you didn’t know publishers do
When most people consider self-publishing, they assume that they’ll be taking over the publisher’s production tasks. And they’re right. But that’s more complex than most writers realize. Here are six tasks you probably didn’t know you’d be taking on . . . and six more reasons for pledging to learn everything you can about self-publishing before you make the final call to do it:
Ordering ISBNs: An ISBN identifies both the publisher and the book. With rare exception, you can’t sell your books through retailers without one. Publishers buy their ISBNs in bulk from R. R. Bowker, the official ISBN agency of the United States. Because each ISBN is coded to identify the publisher who purchased the number, ISBNs cannot be resold or reassigned. An ISBN purchased through an author services company remains assigned to that company; it does not transfer to the self-publishing author. Therefore, the author services company remains the publisher of record for that book. Self-publishers can buy their own ISBNs (singly or in bulk) directly from Bowker at www.myidentifiers.com. Because every edition of a book (paperback, hardcover, large print) needs its own ISBN, consider buying blocks of ISBNS. For more information, check out R. R. Bowker’s question-and-answer section for self-publishers at www.bowker.com, or go to www.isbn.org.
Filling out an Advance Book Information (ABI) form: When a book has an ISBN, it can be registered with Bowker’s Books in Print (the industry’s largest bibliographic database) via www.bowkerlink.com. Filling out the Advance Book Information form is part of listing your title in the directory. If you’re using an author services company, that company can take care of this step for you.
Ordering bar codes: The bar code encodes your ISBN in black bars for retailers to scan, with your numerical ISBN running along the bottom of the bars. Bar codes are obtained from Bowker Bar Code Service after you have an ISBN. You position your bar code on the back cover of a paperback book or on the front flap of a hardcover jacket.
Determining categories: Publishers use the Book Industry Study Group’s (BISG) industry-standard categories to tell booksellers where to shelve books and to tell readers what they have in their hands. Ever seen something like JUVENILE FICTION/Fantasy & Magic on the back cover of a book? That’s the Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) classification. The BISG website explains it all (www.bisg.org). Search for “subject headings list, juvenile fiction” or go directly to the BISAC juvenile fiction listings at www.bisg.org/what-we-do-0-108-bisac-subject-headings-list-juvenile-fiction.php.
Applying for control numbers: If you want to sell your book to libraries, you first need to get it cataloged by the Library of Congress (LOC). Normally your publisher takes care of this step, although your publisher gets something called a CIP (Cataloging-in-Publication) instead of a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN). Publishers with an established history of producing books that are widely acquired by libraries apply for CIP data through the LOC before the book is published and then print the CIP data on the book’s copyright page. The publisher eventually sends a copy of the final bound book to the Library of Congress, which adds the book to its collection and uploads the CIP into its database for all libraries to access. But self-publishers don’t qualify for the CIP program because of the unlikelihood of wide library pickup. This doesn’t lock you out of libraries, though. Individual libraries that decide to carry your book can catalog it locally, or you can apply for a Preassigned Control Number (PCN) at http://pcn.loc.gov before your book pubs. The PCN program assigns your book an LCCN, which you print on your book’s copyright page to facilitate cataloging in libraries.
Registering copyright: In traditional publishing, your publisher registers the copyright for your bound book with the United States Copyright Office (www.copy right.gov). In self-publishing, you do it yourself.
Author services companies
Author services companies provide publishing services to authors for a fee. Essentially, they’re printers that offer extra services such as design and distribution. You may use these companies to print POD (print-on-demand) bound books or to create e-books. Big-name players include Lulu (www.lulu.com) and Amazon’s CreateSpace (www.createspace.com).
The distinction between vanity publishing and using an author service company is a blurry one. I talk about vanity publishing in Chapter 1, calling it a dangerous no-no. The big evil is that vanity publishers are subsidy printers that offer themselves up as full-scale publishers even though they provide author services for a fee. That is, after they make you pay for manufacturing the book and for their marketing efforts, they take a cut of your profits as if they were a traditional publisher with an actual stake in your book. Not good. Vanity presses may require you to assign your rights to them (instead of just acting as your hired company for manufacturing your book), and they own your book’s ISBN (the 13-digit International Standard Book Number that uniquely identifies each book), so they’re technically the publisher of record.
When you hire a true author services company, you pay for the services you want and keep all your profits. That sounds simple enough, but the water gets murky when you consider that many author services companies own the ISBNs and may require some claim to digital or e-publishing rights. (Note: ISBNs are coded in a way that identifies the purchasing company and cannot be reassigned if even an ISBN is resold.) In effect, most of the issues that have made vanity publishing unsafe for writers also exist in author services business practices. See? A blurry line — and one that inspires heated debate in self-publishing circles.
Education is the key to going the self-publishing route to publication. Ask for recommendations from your writers’ group, research the companies, and explore other writers’ experiences through online self-publishing forums. Understand the fees involved from the beginning, know who you’re dealing with, and set realistic goals for the final product and sales.
Publisher services companies
Publisher services companies use print-on-demand technology to print and distribute small runs of books for traditional publishers. Think of these companies as small-scale printers. They don’t edit, design, or in any way prep the product for printing; they just print the book and ship it out. Because small-batch POD printing is not as economical as printing large batches of books, publishers still rely on traditional offset-press printing companies to print most of their books. Interestingly, many author services companies (see the preceding section) use publisher services companies for their printing and distribution needs, as do some major wholesalers.
Although publisher services companies don’t work with individual self-publishers, some self-publishers form their own publishing companies so that they can work directly with publisher services companies, bypassing author services companies altogether (and thus extra fees). The largest publisher services company is Lightning Source, which is owned by the same parent company as Ingram Book Company, the largest U.S. book wholesaler.
Distributors
A distributor is a company that buys books from publishers and then sells them to stores and wholesalers. Distributors warehouse your books, fulfill orders, issue invoices, and collect money. If there are returns, the distributor processes them (charging them back to the publisher). Some distributors have sale reps who visit bookstores. Distributers don’t market the books, though — that’s up to the publishers.
Most distributors are exclusive, meaning you sign agreements to use them and only them. Because you have to pay distributors for their services, they add to the cost of your book. If you want to get your self-published book into physical stores, you need a distributor. When you use an author services company, it’ll work with distributors on your behalf.
Wholesalers
Retailers aren’t interested in buying their books from a gaggle of individual authors. The logistics would be a nightmare. They do buy from established sources: wholesalers. Wholesalers don’t have sales reps; they merely stock your book and fill orders. The largest wholesalers are Ingram (www.ingrambook.com) and Baker & Taylor (www.btol.com).
Booksellers
Booksellers are broken down into categories such as online and brick-and-mortar stores (physical buildings such as the bookstore in your local mall). Here are a few types of booksellers you can access directly or through distributers (see the earlier “Distributers” section):
Independent bookstores with on-the-spot owners ordering the books; such owners may be open to self-published authors’ approaching them
Specialized booksellers such as book clubs, private organizations, and museums
Corporate chain stores (such as Barnes & Noble) with specialized buyers at the national headquarters who deal only with distributors and traditional publishers
Retail stores with a big interest in books (such as warehouse stores and Walmart), again buying through national headquarters and dealing with distributors and traditional publishers
Libraries and schools are book buyers, too, although they aren’t big buyers of self-published books. Knowing where you want your books sold helps you decide which self-publishing option, if any, is for you.
Weighing Self-Publishing for Your YA Fiction
Self-publishing is a serious business endeavor, with your reputation, your finances, and perhaps even your sanity at stake. Every author should consider the pros and cons, the challenges, and the potential based on his own situation and project. This section offers some scenarios in which self-publishing may be a viable path to publication.
Self-publishing works best for nonfiction, for established fiction authors who enjoy name recognition and an established reader base, and for genre fiction (such as romance or crime thrillers) for which authors can easily target readers through genre-related publications, organizations, social media subcultures, and events.
YA self-publishing success stories
The odds of a self-published young adult novel breaking out may not be great, but it does happen. Here are four success stories where authors had a vision, did the work, caught the eye of the traditional publishing world, and inked a book deal.
Kara Kingsley, author of Erec Rex: The Dragon’s Eye, middle grade fantasy series, ages 9–12, illustrated by Melvyn Grant: Kara Kingsley’s original plan wasn’t to use self-publishing as a stepping stone to traditional publishing, but that’s how it worked out, and she’s plenty happy with the outcome. When she decided she wanted to publish the first two books in her fantasy series, she set about learning everything she could about self-publishing. Books, online articles — she studied it all. Realizing that time would be a primary challenge for her, she was careful to prioritize her efforts. And then she went for it, using bookstore connections and appearances to sell 30,000 copies of The Dragon’s Eye on her own. The book even earned a turn as a Borders Original Voices pick. Kingsley came to believe that her books could go further with a large publisher, so she contacted an agent and soon signed an eight-book deal with Simon & Schuster. The key to her standout success? According to her S&S editor, her sales record helped, but her solid characters and a well-written story sealed the deal.
Tim Kehoe, author of The Unusual Mind of Vincent Shadow, middle grade fiction, ages 9–12, illustrated by Mike Wohnoutka: Tim Kehoe took eight months to write the story of 11-year-old aspiring toy inventor Vincent Shadow, a character inspired by Kehoe’s own successful toy inventing. Then Kehoe decided to go the self-publishing route. He hired illustrator Mike Wohnoutka, whose fantastic artwork helped the novel stand out of the self-publishing pack, laid out the book using Adobe’s InDesign software, and printed a few hundred copies. Local bookstores rallied around the book in a big way. Author Vincent Flynn took notice and opened the door of the traditional publishing world to Kehoe. A few weeks after meeting Flynn’s agent, Kehoe had two offers from publishers. Little, Brown and Company now publishes Kehoe’s Vincent Shadow books.
Colleen Houck, author of Tiger’s Curse, YA fiction, ages 12 and up: Colleen Houck was frustrated. She’d just finished reading Twilight: Eclipse but would have to wait months for the next book in the saga. How could she stand waiting? She’d write her own fantasy to fill the time, she decided. And she did. Only, the manuscript didn’t fare so well when she started submitting it to agents. After writing the full trilogy but getting only rejections, she decided to self-publish rather than let her story of 18-year-old Kelsey and a 300-year-old Indian curse gather dust. She published the first two books through Amazon, as bound books and as e-books for Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. She called bookstores, arranged a signing, got her book into local libraries, put up a website, and took out an ad in a local paper. She priced the first e-book at 99 cents, appealing to Kindle bargain hunters, and ended up on several lists for cheap but good reads. Soon Houck was selling 300 books a month and then 300 a day. Customer requests at Costco led the warehouse store to stock her book; China, Thailand, and Korea contacted her about translation rights; a film producer called. Then an agent called, and within weeks Houck had a high-profile book deal with Sterling Publishing.
Amanda Hocking, author of the Trylle Trilogy, YA paranormal fiction: Amanda Hocking was tired of hearing no. She’d submitted her novels about angels, vampires, and zombies to publishers but hadn’t landed a book contract. So she took matters into her own hands and self-published two of her novels as e-books in April 2010. Within ten months, she had eight novels and one novella on the market and had sold 900,000 copies. Sales rose from there, reaching into the millions before she signed a high-profile, multi-book contract with St. Martin’s Press. Hocking credits her self-pub success to low e-book price points ($2.99 and $.99), aggressive self-marketing through online social media and her own blog, and the enthusiastic support of book bloggers. She also talks plainly about her frustration with the amount of time she had to put into production and marketing tasks when she’d rather be writing, which she cites as the main factor in her decision to sign with a traditional publisher.
Notice something missing from my list? Yep, young adult fiction. YA self-pubbers are hampered by the difficulty of connecting directly with the general teen population. Doing so is difficult even with a traditional children’s book publisher behind you. Even if your publisher doesn’t send you out on tour, your publisher does give you access to larger promotional efforts and established media outlets, and it can piggyback your title on promotional materials for brand-name authors and create high-quality, high teen-appeal packaging for your book. In self-publishing, these responsibilities fall on the individual author, who must be nimble, market-savvy, information-hungry, and more accepting of smaller sales numbers than a big house is. The average self-pubbed book in any category sells only a few hundred copies; a self-pubbed young adult novel that sells in significant numbers is the exception rather than the rule.
Of course, you didn’t choose to write young adult fiction because you thought it’d be an easy get-rich-quick scheme. Self-publishing may be a valid choice for your novel if you’re realistic with your goals, wise about your strategy, dedicated in your work ethic, committed to quality, and fanatically obsessed with becoming a self-marketing machine.
The biggest challenge in self-publishing a young adult novel is letting the world know your book exists. Commit to finding out everything you can about self-marketing. Chapter 15 is dedicated to that very task.
Common scenarios for self-publishers
If self-publishing is so darned risky and the breakouts are so rare, why do writers still choose to self-publish their young adult fiction? Here are six scenarios in which you may make the same call — or at least be tempted:
Publishers haven’t snapped up your manuscript. Your manuscript keeps getting rejected, and you no longer believe that a traditional publishing house will publish the project, so you decide to give it a go yourself. You intend to get behind your book in a big way and sell enough copies to make money on the venture. This is the riskiest self-publishing scenario, with the highest investment of your money, time, and effort and thus the most at stake.
You’re taking a nontraditional path to traditional publishing. You want to sell enough copies yourself and create buzz about your book so that a traditional house will pick it up. This isn’t a common outcome, but it does happen. You must have sales well into the thousands and/or significant bookseller chatter to attract a publisher’s eye, and your book packaging must look professional rather than “self-pubbed.” You assume all the costs and promotional duties until the pickup happens, and there’s no guarantee it will happen. If this is your strategy, don’t wait for publishers to find you. Gather your high sales numbers and bookseller testimonials and seek out an agent or approach publishers directly.
You’d rather do it your way. You want to retain total creative and financial control and publish without a middleman, and you believe you can sell enough copies to make a profit or at least break even.
You don’t want to wait. It can take a year or longer for a young adult novel to reach bookstore shelves after contract, depending on how long it takes to edit the book with your editor and where your book is placed in the publisher’s release schedule. And that’s on top of the time the submission phase takes. Self-publishing lets you put the book out on your schedule.
This isn’t your main gig. Your goal may be to have a self-published novel that supplements your traditionally published books, or you may want to hand-sell your novel as a back-of-the-room (BOTR) offering at your speaking engagements. If you want to hand-sell and don’t mind smaller sales numbers, then self-publishing may be for you.
You just want a book; sales don’t matter. The New York Times bestseller list isn’t everyone’s be-all, end-all. If your dream is to see your name on a book cover and your goal is to give copies to family, friends, and others in your social circle, then self-publishing is a great choice. It’s easy and low-cost because you’re not concerned with marketing and promotion.
Balancing your goals, your guts, and your wallet
With so much at stake and so much work involved, self-publishing entails more than just printing your book at the local printer. Here are points you should consider as you decide whether self-publishing is your path to publication:
Your work ethic: Are you self-motivated? Are you willing to work hard? Are you organized? Are you a multitasker? Do you have the time for this? Are you willing to sacrifice writing time? Do you like being a jack-of-all-trades? Would you go DIY all the way, or would you hire freelancers and consultants?
Your market savvy: Do you know your audience and the market? Can you design a cover that will appeal to that audience? Can you target and promote to your audience? Are you a salesperson? Can you get out there and talk up yourself and your book?
Your financial willingness: What’s your comfort level with risk? How much money are you willing to invest? How much can you stand losing?
Your motivation: What’s your definition of “successful self-publishing” — a few hundred sales? A few thousand? Bestseller lists? What’s your goal? What will it take in terms of money and effort to reach your goal? Are the money and effort realistic for your abilities, life situation, and fiscal responsibilities?
Budget and calculate before you commit to any self-publishing plan. Determine how much you’re willing to invest and then shop around to see which services you can buy with that amount. Remember to account for marketing expenses in your budget. Then calculate the number of books you need to sell to break even with your investment. Are you confident you can promote and market aggressively and effectively enough to reach those numbers? If in doubt, adjust your budget, services, or self-publishing plans.
You don’t have to go this alone. You can collaborate with a coauthor, doubling your resources. Or you can team up with other self-published authors to form a marketing group, stretching your marketing dollars and multiplying your connections. See the information about author promotional groups in Chapter 15.