Publishing,  Writing Advice

How to Self-Publish a Book

July 9, 2019 /

Recently I spoke at the CCA Writers Conference about the process of self-publishing a book. In the interest of not letting this information disappear into the ether, I thought I’d record what I said in blog form.

To start with, this is not a comprehensive walk through. This is merely a guide where I explained to the attendees the various options one has when self-publishing. I will point out which options I used and how well they worked for me. At the end, I’ll provide a list of resources that I’ve used or found that will shed more light on how to self-publish.

Self-Publishing House

First, authors who self publish need to decide which company works best for their needs, they need a place to self publish. A self publishing house lets you pick everything for your book (size, paper type, glossy vs. matte cover, and much more). It also helps you distribute your book. There are two “big ones” that provide this service – Amazon (formerly comprised of Createspace and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), but now combined into just KDP) and Ingramspark. They have pros and cons.

Amazon allows paperback and e-book (Kindle), and is a free option. Amazon makes money by taking a portion of your revenue whenever you sell a book. However, potential buyers can only pre-order the e-book copy. For a physical copy, they’ll need to wait until it’s properly released. Despite this, I used Amazon as it has a great user experience and walked me through how to publish a book. And did I mention it was free? Amazon may take a portion of your revenue for each book you sell, but you can put your book out there for nothing.

Ingramspark requires an upfront cost to publish a book ($25 for e-book set-up and $49 for physical book set-up – source). However, they allow hardback, paperback and e-book, as well as providing an option for pre-ordering physical books. If you want a highly anticipated release that you can advertise and get pre-orders for, you might want to use Ingramspark.

Creating the Interior

The next step is working on the book itself – the manuscript, the interior of the published book. For this, you first need to write the book. I’m going to assume you’ve already completed this step, and if you haven’t, I invite you to check out more of the advice on this blog. After you’ve written your book, you’re going to need to get it edited. Here, you have plenty of options.

There are several types of edits one can get on a manuscript:

  • The first is structural; does this plot make sense? Are elements well foreshadowed? Are characters well established? A structural editor asks themselves these questions and tells you, the author, what you should change.
  • The next is line editing; this is a check for grammar, typos, and sentence structure.
  • The third is a sensitivity edit. If your book deals with any topics that need to be handled sensitively, such as issues that members of the LGTBQ+ community deal with, you will want to have an editor who specializes in handling those elements with respect read and edit your work.

You have options for who have edit your book.

The first is not have anyone edit it, and just edit it yourself. This isn’t the best option, as getting other people’s fresh eyes on a book can really help add perspective to a story and make it better.

The second is to ask friends, family, or even a teacher to edit your book. While this isn’t a professional edit, it’s better than not having anyone read your book.

The third is to hire a professional to edit your book. There are both freelance options and services to consider. While price is going to vary, a decent price range is to assume 1¢ to 3¢ per word. For a 50,000 word book, this would come out to $500 to $1500 per edit. Given the high price point, you’ll want to make sure to get a great editor who comes highly recommended and will do the best job on your book that they can.

After you edit your interior, you need to format it. This means adding chapter headings, picking the font, sizing it, and all the other things that turn a manuscript into an interior.

There are several options for how to format your book:

  • Firstly, you can do this yourself
    • Createspace offers a free web tool where you input your book and it allows you to format it.
    • You can use Word, a program most people already have, to compile your manuscript into a PDF. Mandi Lynn offers a tutorial for this here.
    • You can purchase Scrivener for $45 ($40 with an educational discount!), which does a lot of the book-specific formatting (i.e. page numbers in alternating corners, starting every chapter on the right side, etc.) for you. The tutorial I used for Scrivener can be found here. The screenshots are a bit outdated because it was before the Createspace/KDP merge, but it is all still applicable.
    • Another recommended program is Vellum. Vellum does most of the hard work for you, with several templates and nice selectors to choose what you want your book to look like. While this is free to download, to actual compile an E-book it costs $200 and print + E-book is $250.
  • If you don’t want to format your book yourself, which is very understandable, there are professional services that will do it for you. The average price I found was $300, depending on the level of detail required for the formatting.

Creating a Cover

Once you have compiled your interior and know how many pages your book will  be, you can download a template to create your cover. (Side note: you need to know how many pages your book is when compiled to the right page size so you know how thick the spine needs to be!)

You can create your cover yourself. You can do this either by drawing one, utilizing Photoshop, or using the cover creator on Createspace. Yes, another wonderful free tool.

You can also ask a friend or family member, but keep in mind that other people might have unexpected things come up that keeps them from being able to make you a cover.

You can also hire an artist to draw a cover for you. This is the option I went with. I found an artist I liked on Twitter who had commissions open and reached out, asking if they had time in their schedule for and an interest in drawing a cover for my book. Once they said yes, we discussed a price. This is very important; if an artist quotes the price as something out of your budget, you do not ghost on them, and you do not try to haggle them down. Instead, you politely explain that you don’t have room in your budget to hire them at this time, but that you hope to work with them someday in the future.

Once you agree on a price, the artist will draw a cover and you’ll be able to go back and forth on the design and any changes you want as the cover comes together.

Once again, there are professional services that will create a cover for you. As with all of these services, make sure they are legitimate and have good reviews. The average price for a service I found was $300, but sometimes they can be bundled with the above interior formatting, in which case it might be discounted.

Regardless of who’s doing your cover, keep in mind that there will be a barcode on the back of the book on the lower right side and you don’t want the barcode to be covering any important art up. Additionally, leave room on your back cover for whatever blurb or text you want there without anything cluttering the space underneath it; you don’t want that to be hard to read.

ISBNs

ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number, which I definitely had to look up. Every book has a unique ISBN that identifies it. Additionally, every format (hardback, paperback, e-book) needs a different ISBN.

Createspace offers free ISBNs, but I didn’t like that their free ISBNs are registered to them, so there might be an issue with Intellectual Property (I’m not a lawyer; if this is something you’re concerned with, do research ahead of time).

Ingramspark offers discounted ISBNs for $85 each. If you only need one, this is a cheaper option than buying one from your country’s ISBN source directly.

I live in the US, so I bought my ISBNs from Bowker’s (myidentifiers.com).

  • 1 ISBN is $125
  • 10 ISBNs are $295, which comes out to ~$30 per ISBN
  • 100 ISBNs are $574, which comes out to ~$6 per ISBN

Clearly, the more that you buy, the cheaper each individual ISBN costs. I knew I’d be self-publishing more than one book, so I bought the ten bundle.

One thing to keep in mind when buying your own ISBN is that you’ll need to provide a physical address. While you could provide the address you live at, it’s possible that this address could be connected to your work later on. Another option is to purchase a PO Box or utilize another service that provides you a physical address to use to register.

Before You Publish

Now that you’ve input everything you need to make a book, you might think you’re ready to publish. However, you have no idea how your book is going to look! To do so, you need a proof.

A proof is like a rough draft of your published book. To get a physical one, you pay the cost of publishing (the paper, ink, machinery, etc.) and your self-publishing house sends you a copy of your book. Here, you can see if you like a glossy cover, or if you might want a matte one. You can feel the paper, and see how your formatting looks.

If you don’t want to go through the process of getting a physical book, or don’t want to wait for it to get shipped, Createspace offers a preview tool that lets you see how your book would look. You can “flip” through the pages and check out the margins and formatting, but it doesn’t help with physical aspects of the book like the cover finish.

The last thing you need to do before publishing is go through the process of Copyrighting your book. You can do this at eco.copyright.gov. The standard filing costs $35, and any special cases (more than one author, more than one work, etc.) cost $55. Again, I am not a lawyer, and you should do your own research when it comes to copyright laws, but copyrighting your work affords it many protections against plagiarism. If there’s one thing you pay for in this process, let it be protecting your intellectual property.

Marketing

Once you hit that “publish” button, you book is out there in the world! But you need people to know about your book. I could write an entire blog post – many blog posts – about marketing, so here’s a list of ideas to explore.

  • An author website – your home base, where all your work, blogs, social media live (hey! like this one!)
  • Social media
  • Ads – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon, and Google all let you buy ad space on their platform
  • Blog tours
  • Merchandise
  • Conferences – you can network, do talks, and sell books at conferences

And you’re done! You can sell books, write more, and then self-publish again!

If you have any questions, feel free to comment here or go to my website, shainakrevat.com!

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