Special Smashwords Edition
THE QUICK STUDY GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING
Gregory Wood
Special Smashwords Edition
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Cover Art Design: Christopher Wood
Copyright ©2011
Published by: Gregory Wood
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1 - What is Self-Publishing
Chapter 2 - Why Do You Want to Self-Publish
Chapter 7 - Some Housekeeping Issues
INTRODUCTION
If there is just one result that I want you to have after reading this eBook, it is a plan -- your plan to self-publish your book. After you read this book, I want you to make the decisions about self-publishing that you need to make, and later revise, to see your book in print or online. Then, I want you to commit those decisions in writing in the form of your self-publishing plan.
This book is for the beginner. It is for the person thinking about self-publishing or the person who has just decided to self-published. People who want to publish fiction, non-fiction, poetry, cookbooks or any book genre can use this book.
You can use this book if you want to publish in hardback, softback or an eBook. It intends to live up to its title, a quick study guide. It does not presume to teach you every detail on how to self-publish but guide you to each self-publishing step, if not through each one in detail. There are people who have used a hundred different books, guides, videos, and read countless blogs to learn how to self-publish. You will need more information than that contained in this introductory work to self-publish successfully.
Self-publishing is not easy, although technology makes it easier every year. It is still hard work. The good news is that you can do almost all of that work on your own or outsource most of it. You have that choice and controlling your choices is one of the advantages of self-publishing.
Use this guide to learn the process and the steps within that process. Use it as a guide to planning your publishing venture and to determine just what you want out of self-publishing. Use it to plan where you need more help and where you can move from one step to the next with little additional effort.
Use it to understand that while self-publishing is not easy, it is enjoyable and perhaps entertaining. You also will relish your name on the end product and even more so when you make a sale or get a positive comment.
One caveat, however, is that self-publishing is a gamble, and you must be prepared in the same way you might going to the horse race track -- have fun but be prepared to go home with less that you went with. Do your research and follow the advice in this book, and you will still go home with more than the next guy over.
Chapter 1 - What is Self-Publishing?
Self-publishing today means that the author is paying the costs to publish the book -- from researching the book to printing and marketing it. Note, the author pays and not necessarily the writer. Even writing can be outsourced to a ghostwriter. In this case, authors may term themselves editors rather than authors but paying the bills stays the same.
Today, self-published books include print works that look like traditionally published commercial books printed on paper in ink, bound in hardback or softback, and using traditional channels of distribution. Many self-published books, however, are eBooks, reproduced digitally and delivered by some sort of download to a computer or eBook reader.
While eBooks may be new, self-publishing is not. It has a long and often profitable history. Since the first use of movable type to reproduce a manuscript, self-publishing was more the norm than the exception.
Some History
You might credit the beginning of publishing with the invention and use of movable type, but you also might say publishing started when scribes began to reproduce manuscripts by hand for the wealthy and the literate. The author likely did not pay for such reproduction; likely it was at the expense of the state or a patron. Great libraries like the one at Alexandria, Egypt held hundreds of hand reproduced books. Wood block printing was known as early as the year 200.
Let’s say that publishing did begin with movable type, which first appeared about 1040 in China. If the author did not pay for printing his works, he may have been the printer too, or a patron assumed the costs. No doubt that works reproduced with the first movable type were often self-published.
William Caxton is recorded as the first printer in England after the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1454. He printed the first book in English in 1473: Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. This book was a translation of a French romance, Recueil des Histoires de Troye. The original author probably did not pay for the printing or publishing. More likely Caxton’s partner, Colard Mansion paid for the printing. Mansion was a bookseller, and in the history of publishing, booksellers often sponsored printing of titles so they could sell them. This is how book publishing started.
Caxton was also a translator and he probably bore the cost of printing some of his translations, so you might classify him as a self-publisher. Printers often provided themselves with work and sold copies as a source of income.
Caxton’s printing began to create standard written English, based on the written English of the court, just as the Guttenberg Bible began the creation of standard German.
Booksellers in early America, the 18th century, were the first publishers. They paid for the printing of authors’ work to create products to sell. Benjamin Franklin was typical of the printer-merchant. He printed works for others but he also printed his own work and sold it. Although Poor Richard’s Almanac might best be described as a pamphlet, it was a successful and profitable self-publishing venture for Franklin, printing up to 10,000 copies a years, a remarkable number in the mid-18th century.
So, printers often were self-publishers and the partners of bookseller-publishers. The distinction of commercial publishers working as they do today did not occur until the 18th and 19th centuries, though Cambridge University Press has been around since the mid-16th century. For much of the 19th century books often first appeared in serial form in newspapers and were reprinted as books upon their success and demand. Did Charles Dickens write his books chapter by chapter or did he write the whole book and release it chapter by chapter?
The publishing of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick illustrates how commercial publishing developed. His American publisher, Harper and Brothers, was founded by John Harper and his brother James, in 1817. They were printers by trade. They first began publishing a few books, expanded into magazines, and published Moby Dick in 1851 during a period of significant productivity in American literature.
Book Publishing Today
If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would marvel at the publishing world. He also might find it difficult to get that first novel published by one of the major publishers in America. If Melville were alive today, he would find that Harper and Brothers was long ago gobbled up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and he too might find it difficult to get that large conglomerate to look at his work.
In 2002, there were about two million different titles in print in the United States. One estimate in 2002 was that about 200,000 new titles were released that year by US publishers. In 2010, Bowker reported that over three million books were published that year alone, but only about 300,000 were released by US publishers. The remaining 2.7 million were non-traditional, including self-published books, reprints of public domain works and other types of print-on-demand titles. Hundreds of thousands of English language books are also published each year outside the USA.
The book publishing world in America has changed considerably in the last decade. For a recap of the current situation in book publishing, see Steve Piersanti’s The 10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing. Steve is the President of Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
No wonder Dickens and Melville might languish today seeking a publisher.
Self-Publishing Success
No matter how competitive the market may be today, the story of self-publishing is full of great and surprising success stories. That will not change with more competition. Have you heard of Amanda Hocking? She is a self-published Kindle author. In January, 2011 alone, she sold about 450,000 units, priced at about $3 each. She receives a 70% royalty. Amanda is 26 years old and was turned down by traditional commercial publishers.
John Locke is another Kindle phenomenon. He is a mystery writer who reportedly sold over a million units in one three month period at 99 cents per copy.
Bestselling Kindle titles sell between 2500 and 100,000 copies per month. Most are priced from 99 cents to $2.99, most are self-published and the royalty is 70%. Do the math. Of course, many Kindle books sell 100 copies or less each month, and many Kindle bestsellers are crossovers from paperback or hardback books on Amazon’s list of titles.
If you have looked for a job in the past 20 or so years, you’ve probably used or heard of What Color Is Your Parachute. Written by Richard Nelson Bolles, this book sold millions and like many successful self-published books, it is now published traditionally.
If you studied business, you probably know Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence. Need a great meal, how about The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer, once self-published. There’s Spartacus by Howard Fast, and Elfquest by Wendy and Richard Pini and even Oscar Wilde’s Poems in Prose.
The list of self-published best sellers goes on to include:
- The Celestine Prophecy
- A Choice, Not An Echo
- No Time for Work
- Chicken Soup for the Soul
- The Christmas Box
- Invisible Life
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
- Lady Chatterly’s Lover
- Tarzan
- Bartlett’s Famous Quotations
- The Elements of Style
- Who Moved My Cheese
One interesting note about this list, and many, many more self-published titles, is the wide variety. There is a rich and remarkable range of fiction and non-fiction titles, and many of the authors were later picked up by commercial publishing houses for both their self-published titles and follow-up works. Some self-publishers make the transition to publisher themselves.
John Milton
John Milton philosophized about publishing. He believed that self-publishing was defensible as a contributor to freedom and defended the right to publish.
On self-publishing as a counterweight to business monopoly, he wrote, “publicans that have the tunaging and the poundaging (i.e., taxing) of all free spoken truth”. Self-publishing helps redistribute profits back to the author.
And he believed that self-publishing worked as a social equalizer, “What need they torture their heads with that which others have taken so strictly, and so unalterably into their own purveying”?
The Pros and Cons
Like anything in life, there are advantages and disadvantages in self-publishing.
Some of the Pros in self-publishing include:
- You keep all of the money or most of it. Some schemes require you to split proceeds.
- You find your own audience and voice.
- You control everything and success or failure relies on you.
Some of the Cons in self-publishing include:
- There may not be that much money to keep.
- It might be very hard to find your audience.
- Controlling everything might not lead to success.
Some of the Pros in using a traditional publisher:
- They do most of the work other than writing.
- They have been doing what they do for a while and have systems in place to produce and distribute the book.
- They absorb most of the costs and pay you quickly when there is money to be paid.
Some of the Cons in using a traditional publisher:
- They take most of the money.
- They keep the rights to your book for a long time if not forever.
- The fate of your book is in their hands. They manage it via profit and losses, the amount of the print run, and your advance.
- You’ll likely still have to do most of the marketing.
Today only about six major publishers control publishing for consumers. If you want to use one, the odds are against your books being accepted. Those odds improve dramatically if you have a major self-publishing success.
A Person for All Seasons
If you do decide to plunge into self-publishing, you’ll find that you will become a person with a number of job titles. You might be:
- Writer
- Editor
- Designer and Artist
- Typesetter and Compositor
- Printer
- Financier and Accountant
- Marketer
- Shipper and Warehouse Manager
- Legal Advisor
- Business Manager