Where do you Even Start?

I'm going to be blunt. This self publishing stuff is completely overwhelming to noobs. Where do you even begin? How do you create a plan? What is the basic of the basics?

 

Goals, I suppose. If you want to attempt a career it can be a little of a different experience compared to pure passion/hobby. Here's a simple blog though with the basics: https://blog.reedsy.com/how-to-self-publish-a-book/

This has a lot of resources too (wiki page for a self publishing subreddit): https://www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish/wiki/index

 

Successfully self-publishing requires a number of skills. Some will find the process easy. Many don't get it and will never have any success. Have a look for The Creative Penn on youtube. Joanna Penn has made a living from self-publishing and has useful advice for writers new to it. There is a load of information in every form. You can try the book Write Published Repeat, by Sean Platt and Johnny B Truant. I would say what you should aske your self first, is not how to do it, but can I do it? It's not for everyone.

 

Thank you both sooo much! You both gave me what I needed. This gives me an outline to begin researching and asking questions. Because I didn't even know what questions to even ask.

 

There are, as you point out, hundreds of resources, and others have already provided some that I would have put in my answer, but I can add another resource that I keep returning to, which is a checklist: https://selfpublishingchecklist.com

as @marshipan suggested, goalsetting is key, because it helps us narrow our project scope and starts us out with a reality check.

 

And this is all good and self publishing isn't for everyone. And when people don't know what to look for or what to ask, they can get themselves in trouble with the romantic idea that they can voyage out on their own.

Just answering the "where do I start?" question helps me make a better and smarter decision now that I'm ready to take myself to the next level in my writing.

 

That's where the 'reality check' comes in - I actually concluded that I didn't have the time to pursue a writing career until I leave my day job. My other priorities crowd it out.

So my situation right now is that I'm building an inventory of manuscripts that will be ready when my calendar frees up for a writing career, self-published or otherwise. Basically using this time for craft, business knowledge, networking, product development, and building the fundamentals for branding.

I literally have a countdown clock counting the days to when I leave my day job career.

And this is the result of going through the resources, using them to set goals, using them to estimate what resourcing (time and money and emotional capacity) would be required to achieve these goals, and comparing to what I have available.

Then I did a trial run (market foray) and sharpened up the estimates. I like to learn by doing.

Turns out I don't have the capacity for a 3rd career right now, on top of family obligations, and that's just the way it is.

(If it wasn't obvious, my day job is project management)

 

Me, I want a second job to fill in my time and realized it was time for me to look at writing as that second job. No, I'm not expecting to make money off of it, but I also don't want to deal with publishers who freak out the moment that I don't write a diverse enough cast, if you know what I mean.

 

If you want any success you have to cave to market demands, publisher or no publisher. I'd say as a self publisher you have to be more aware of crafting yourself to market because there is nobody else there to make those concerns for you. If a diverse cast is in demand, you should write a diverse cast. That's the difference between passion and career with self publishing though and that's why understanding your goals is important. I'm much more drawn to market success than full creative freedom. Then again, I don't find it all that limiting to work with market demands. I'd say it's actually helped me write better stories. Just something to keep in mind.

 

I'm drawn to the creative freedom. I could lose money on the project and still be happy. But it also doesn't mean I'm a dunce and think that the "starving artist" thing is the way to maintain perfect creative freedom. I think there's a balance to be had.

For the first time, I have started to set goals and deadlines. Whether I do the self publishing thing or do traditional publishing, the goals are what are really starting to get my motivation back.

 

Different people will and can have different approaches to being successful. Self-publishing is more about having some business acumen than creativity.
That's not to say creative people can't market their own work, but the skills are different.
Self-publishing doesn't give a writer greater freedom. In fact, the extra time needed to self-publish may mean you actually have less freedom. What most self-published writers, I know, are motivated by the fact it is something that they enjoy doing, they are good at doing it and you can earn more money. Unless you have the ability to become a number one author and would be better off using a conventional publisher.

 

If ending up in the minus column financially is not a problem, and you think the creativity would benefit from eschewing all the business overhead tasks... you may not be interested in self publishing so much as assisted publishing.

And 'assisted' in this context unfairly carries a loaded connotation (some people refer to it as a type of 'vanity' publishing), so I'm emphasizing that it's not suggested with any judgement, just that you may be interested in a different pathway to getting the book you want in print than going through all the hoops of becoming your own publisher.

Here's a link to a reference chart I used when considering my options:

https://www.janefriedman.com/key-book-publishing-path/



Edited to add:
It'd be irresponsible for me not to also include this timely internal site link:
https://www.writingforums.org/threads/experience-with-vanity-publishers-your-help-needed-by-society-of-authors.169204/

 

That's why I'm asking questions. Because I don't know what's best for me right now. So, if I sound a bit nieve like I don't know what I'm doing, that's because I am!

I do like the business side of things. I've worked in corporate America for a very long time. So, a business aspect isn't really all that overwhelming sounding to me.

 

Looking at that chart by Jane Friedman, I'm unclear where what I know of as "vanity press" falls. I'm pretty certain they still exist -- vanity press houses are (or were, in the decades before print-on-demand publishing) essentially short run printers. In the late 1980s I had a friend whose older brother had written a book but who died before the book was published. My friend knew a literary agent, who tried unsuccessfully to shop the book. After months with no takers, my friend and the widow decided they wanted to self-publish the book as a memorial to the guy.

At the time, I was editing and producing a quarterly newsletter for a non-profit on whose board my friend and I both served. Basically, I was Shanghaied -- "Hey, SapereAude has a computer, HE can do it!" And, like an idiot, I agreed to do it.

The manuscript had been typed on a manual typewriter, so the first step was to retype it into a word processor. I did that ... but it could have been subcontracted.

Next, the manuscript needed to be copy edited. It was an academic, non-fiction book so there was no need for a developmental edit, but the author (being a scientist) wrote entirely in the passive voice. The editing, too, could have been subcontracted. However, the two ladies didn't have a lot of money, and I was concerned that a professional editor would make so many changes that the book would no longer belong to the author. Since he wasn't there to negotiate or to mediate on editorial changes, I did it myself. My approach was to fix the strictly grammatical errors, but to otherwise leave the text as close to the way he had written it as possible -- including the passive voice.

There were a lot of diagrams showing how things interrelated. They were hand-drawn chicken scratches in the manuscript. Turning those into quality line art could have been subcontracted. Again, because money was an object (and because I'm an architect whose undergraduate major was art), I also handled that myself. I reproduced the diagrams on a computer and saved them in whatever file format the DTP program I was using back then could accept.

With all that behind me, I then set up a template in the DTP program for the book, imported the manuscript file, then went through it and inserted the graphics. There was no on-line submission of a PDF file back then -- this was pre-Internet, and probably pre-PDF. The entire book was printed out on a laser printer on 8-1/2 x 11 sheets with register marks on each page to assist the printer in getting each page properly aligned for the trim size.

And then we needed a cover. That's another thing that could have been subcontracted out. It was -- sort of. I came up with the concept. My girlfriend at the time was a graphic artist who worked in a small publishing house that specialized in legal books -- she turned my concept into a finished cover.

We solicited prices from several (four or five, if I remember correctly) "vanity press" printers. These were not "publishers," they were printers. They didn't provide any editorial assistance, design assistance, graphics assistance -- none of that. All they did was take a physical pile of camera-ready pages and print them into books. That's the part my friend and her sister-in-law finally had to pony up for. There was no such thing as print-on-demand, so they had to agree to buy a minimum number of books. I believe they had to buy 500 copies, and it cost them about $3,500. The books arrived in cardboard boxes, and they were completely on their own for distribution. I don't think they ever sold any. I think they gave copies away to members of the family and to close friends, and that was it. I have four copies, and I have verified that someone took care of submitting it to the Library of Congress to perfect the copyright.

So there's a lot that goes into just producing a book. Today, with various services such as Amazon KDP, Barnes & Noble Press, Ingram-Spark and others making it easy to upload a PDF and spit out an e-book and/or a print-on-demand book, it can be (or appear to be) easy. They even have the capability to generate a cover for you if you don't want to hire a cover designer. And yet, there are still companies out there who practice the traditional "vanity press" model that I went through so many decaades ago.

Lastly, neither the vanity press approach or the DIY self-publishing model provides any marketing. Kallisto, you said you enjoy the "business side of things," but that can include a lot of areas. Business management is very different from advertising/promotion/sales. Whether you go "vanity press" and wind up with a garage full of books in cardboard boxes or you go with one of the newer no-cost-up-front self-publishing models, in the end you and you alone are responsible for promoting your book(s). Depending on what side of "business" you work in and like, promotion and sales may come easy for you or it may be your Achilles heel.

Sorry this got so long.

 

Me neither, but it may have evolved into just how one uses a supplier in in the DIY columns. Maybe not Vanity Presses so much as a Vanity Publishing pathway.

Here's an interesting theory that was presented to me by the owner of a small publishing house, when we were chatting after her presentation to a local writer's group:

She felt that here in 2019, given that the Big Five Trads don't really offer much aside from questionable promises of distribution, their remaining appeal is mostly about self esteem and being able to boast about it to peers. She suggests that ironically, going with the Big Five is the real 'vanity' route now.

 

Actually, I think some do marketing support, and there are also marketing specialists unassociated with publishing firms that can be engaged for that role... at a cost. With different levels of support, different tiers or packages. As granular as just SEO or social media presence management, platform ad optimization... publicists... even brand consultants that specialize in authors.

And this was when I put a pause button on my market foray after three books. I was weighing the cost/benefits of DIY vs hired marketing, and it came down to my existing commitments are restricting my options too much to do justice to the kind of publishing model I want to pursue.

 

That's pretty much the bottom line, isn't it? Beyond coming up with the basic story line, just about every aspect and every task associated with publishing and selling books can be hired out to subcontractors--even the writing part. Conversely, every aspect and every task can be performed by the author him/herself. You just have to perform a cost-benefit analysis for each task.

• Is it something you know how to do, or can learn?
• Do you enjoy doing it?
• Would the time you would spend on it be better used doing something else?
• How much would it cost you to subcontract it?
• Can you realistically recoup the cost of subcontracting it?
• Even if you can do it and you might enjoy doing it--can you do it anywhere nearly as well as a professional subcontractor?

 

Exactly, and some of those are unknown until I take a stab at it. So that's what I was calling Phase IV, the Market Foray.

With Stage I being Exploration, Stage II being Goalsetting, and Stage III being Objectives. Everything is subject to iterative revision, especially after Market Foray when Reality punches Objectives in the face.

In my example, I concluded that I prefer DIY and can learn technical aspects relatively quickly. And I've done marketing in some of my previous roles, so can probably get a grip on those too.

The problem was time: If I allocated 50% of my writing time to the other aspects, my writing productivity had me finishing a manuscript in about 2 years. Which is about when I'd be able to leave my day job anyway, so why not use that same time to write two solid books instead, and then concentrate on the tech/marketing stuff at that point, with two ms in inventory.

Plus a lot more sanity, because I wouldn't be juggling multiple deadlines. When I was doing the self pub, my calendar was insane. 72 hours lockdown for presales. Sequence and delay timer for uploading to KDP before IngramSpark, in order to go wide and not conflict with KDP's duplication algorithm... reminders, reminders, reminders... all something I was trying to do on lunchbreaks or in the random snippets of time between family appointments. Wasn't working.

But I only learned this and got real estimates for time by getting my feet wet - I wouldn't recommend skipping this stage.

So, where I was going with this, and hopefully staying on topic for the thread, is that sometimes the way to start is to get a critical mass of ideas, make a tentative plan, and just start. You can always revise the plan as new information presents itself.

 

I guess the biggest reason I wish to self publish is to stay anonymous. It's easier just to write under an LLC. That way if what I say today suddenly becomes the target of the twitter mob, or god forbid some of the dumb things I've said before suddenly become inappropriate, it won't interfere with my personal life.

 

Can you elaborate a bit on why you think self is easier in terms of protecting your identity while publishing under a pseudonym?

They both seem to offer the same advantages and disadvantages.

Arguably, Trad offers an additional layer of abstraction (Agent as intermediary), although I'm not sure that would help much.

 

Well, I do traditional, my employment is at the mercy of publishers and they rarely, if ever, defend their writers. They will sooner get rid of you to appease a group of people who feel you're problematic and harmful. If you're self published, the people crying for your cancellation have to go through a layer of your fans.

 

Earons (golden state killer, east area rapist) was found because his relatives used 23andme (or a similar thing). 72 years old and finally connected with crimes decades ago. Never assume you're completely anonymous.

Although that involved dna. Amazon was doxxing pen names in 2020. They sent ad mail to pen names at the listed address. So if you were hiding it from family they could have seen. Generally though, a pen name is not connected with other information at the seller side.

 

https://ncac.org/news/amazon-book-removal

The marketplace will cancel what it cancels. I wouldn't worry about it too much. You have to be fairly 'hot topic' to get the wrong kind of attention.

Pen names make sense to me, even if they're not impervious to the dreaded dox. You have to put on a somewhat fake persona for audience appeal anyway, might as well be an assumed name too.