It’s become obvious to me lately that many people do not understand how Self-Publishing works. Many of these people have loud opinions about it, as well. So, today I wanted to write about some of the major subjects with Self-Publishing and explain how it works to people who may be confused or just had never thought much about it before. There are many amazing, fun things about the self-publishing process and also a lot of things that are frustrating.
Who Can Self-Publish?
It’s not a lie to say that absolutely anyone can self-publish. There is no barrier to entry to put a book out there. You don’t need to have a corporation set up or get past any qualification bar. This makes the process fundamentally egalitarian, which is one of the best things about it. You can also use these services virtually anywhere in the world, though there are local laws that you have to consider that are beyond the scope of what I am talking about here. You basically just have to have a tax identification number and a bank account to register with the self-publishing services. There may be ways around this, however.
Now, that said, there are advantages to incorporation, business bank accounts, and/or other aspects of this. One writer I know said that her accountant advised her that if she were bringing in more than $15,000 every quarter, she needed to set up an LLC. Now, obviously, any advice like this will depend on your location and income, so always consult a licensed professional for things like this, not some rando (affectionate) on the internet.
But, just to upload a book, anyone can do that. Whether or not it is of professional quality and/or will be successful is another question. But the barrier to entry on this is very low. That is a very good thing, but also one of the things that can make it frustrating, because there are millions of self-published books out there and they tend to drown each other out.
What is the process, anyway?
Not going to get into super grainy detail here, but I will provide an overview. The first thing you need to do, obviously, is write a book. Ok, it’s also possible to self-publish a text that is in the public domain, but I don’t know a lot of people who do that. So, step one, write a book. Maybe in the future I will write a post called ‘How to Write a Book,’ but for now I’m going to assume that you know how to do that. Once you’ve written a book, you need to make sure it’s properly edited (not required by the process but a good idea) and then formatted for eBook and whatever format of print publication you’re going for. There are lots of apps that will help you do this, and also people who do it that aren’t too expensive. If you have somebody do the formatting for you it will probably be less than $100. So, cheap as a business expense. But you can absolutely use apps like Vellum, Atticus, Scriver, or even good old MS Word. So, the first thing you need is a properly formatted book.
You will also need a cover. This can be simple or complex. Just text, or something painting by a professional. A lot of writers have learned enough about digital tools and graphic design to design their own. My advice is only to do this is you’ve done a deep dive into what a cover should look like and what is appropriate for your genre. Your cover is your most important piece of marketing. If you hire a professional designer, rates vary widely. I usually pay around $300, but there are also people who cost thousands. To a certain extent, you do get what you pay for, but there are affordable services that do great work, such as miblart.com. You can also use a standard cover provided by whatever service you’re uploading to, but this is not advised.
Once you have your book and your cover (both print and eBook if you’re doing both) properly formatted, it is a simple process to upload to the service you’ve chosen to use. It will then be reviewed and might be live anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days. I’m going to do an entry on services below. When you upload your book, you will be given choices as to price and distribution.
So, that’s it. That’s the process. It seems easy, and it is, as long as you’ve set up your account properly and your work is formatted correctly.
So, what Services can you use anyway?
There are a handful of major ones I’m going to talk about. There are more that will let you post your work, such as Wattpad and Royal Road, but those are operating on a different model besides book sales that I’m not going to go into here. Those are viable options, however.
Amazon is the thousand pound gorilla in the room. They didn’t create self-publishing, but they made it a viable option for millions of us. You pretty much can’t reach a wide audience with your books if you are not on Amazon in some capacity. Their service is called Kindle Direct Publishing, KDP for short. In my experience, it’s the most user friendly of the bunch. You can publish eBooks, paperback, and hardcovers here. A couple of things, though. If you want your books in bookstores (more on that later) you can’t have your print books just on amazon. They offer something called ‘expanded distribution,’ but most physical bookstores do not want to deal with them. So, it’s a good idea to have your print books available on another site, such as Ingram Spark, as well as Amazon.
Where it gets confusing, and where people need to be clear in the terms they are using, is that Amazon, for eBooks, offers an option called Kindle Select. If you choose Kindle Select, your books are available for more marketing option and also will be included in a program called Kindle Unlimited, where subscribers download your book as part of their subscription and the authors are paid a variable rate per page read. This can be very good for authors who are just starting out and need to build an audience. However,
HOWEVER
Being enrolled in Kindle Select/KU means that you can offer that eBook only on Amazon. You can’t have it anywhere else, not even on your own website. This exclusivity is only required of kdp books. Traditional publishers can have their books in KU as well as elsewhere, depending on the deal they’ve made. KDP Authors don’t have this option. Yes, this is a little predatory and Amazon provides no transparency on how page rates are calculated and assigned. That said, a lot of self-published authors make a major percentage of their income from KU page reads. I did myself for a while, but my page reads have fallen off a cliff lately for some reason, so I am in the process of pulling my books out of KDP Select and putting them in other places, including …
Kobo/Kobo+ is a big one, especially in Canada. They work pretty much like Amazon, but their Kobo+ program does not require exclusivity and provides a more favorable page rate (or so I’ve heard). That said, their market share is a fraction of Amazon’s. Barnes and Noble is the same, but they don’t offer a subscription program equivalent to Kobo+/KU. If you have your print books published through them, it’s easier to get them into Barnes and Noble stores. iBooks is also an option for people who use the apple program.
In addition, there are services that will get you into most of these services as a one-stop-shot place. Smashwords/Draft2Digital is a big one, as is Ingram Spark. Both of these do print books as well as eBooks and you can upload something once and it will go to almost any available service, including Amazon.
Things to Watch Out For
Everybody would love to be in bookstores, but most bookstores order through Ingram, who has their ingram spark program. This can be a very effective way of making your books available to bookstores. Watch out, however, for the returnability factor. Bookstores will usually only stock your books if you make them returnable. Meaning they order them, you get the money, and then months later they may return some or all of them and you must pay them back more than you originally received. Most self-published authors can’t afford to take this risk. However, you can be in Ingram and not have your books returnable. They probably won’t be stocked by many bookstores, but it’s a good in-between option.
How do you actually sell books?
Sadly, the days of uploading a book and having it propagated through the system until it finds its readers with minimum effort on your part are over, if indeed they ever existed. Here’s the thing. A vast majority of self-published books do not sell even a hundred copies. Those are just the facts. There are a lot of books out there and it’s hard for yours to be discovered. It can happen, but you’re going to have to do some marketing.
There are many different types of marketing. The simplest and cheapest is talking about your books on social media. This can be somewhat effective, depending on how large your audience is. It’s hard for more than a tiny fraction to give your book a chance. There are also email marketing campaigns, such as BookBub or Written Word media. These can be hard to get into, and expensive, depending on the reach and the genre. There is also posting in reader groups, but this can be iffy because a lot of reader groups don’t like self-promo. Honestly, marketing is a huge subject that deserves its own post some time. By far the most effective, and most expensive, is running ads on Amazon, Facebook, or the service you are using. These can be effective if the ad is designed well, however, most of them are pay-per-click. This means that if someone clicks on your ad, whether or not they go on to buy your book, you are charged a fee. This can be a couple of cents or up to five or more dollars, depending on where you run the ads and what your keywords are. Most of us can’t afford that. It only makes sense if you have a lot of books in a series, so paying a lot for a sale on book one might get you sales on books 2-10 as well.
So, having a book for sale is practically free. Actually selling it can be expensive. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen authors post ‘I made $10,000 last month!’ and then, when pressed, you find out they paid $9800 in marketing costs.’ Nothing is wrong with that, but that is the situation.
It’s possible that a post about your book, whether from you or some sort of influencer, can make you a lot of sales. This is not something that can be counted upon. There are influencers who will talk up your book for a fee, and you must make sure the audience is worth it if you want to pay them for it.
There are other marketing strategies, like newsletters, which can be effective, but I’ll talk about newsletters in another post.
Basically, there are many strategies for building an audience, but it’s hard, no matter what you try. This is a long game that can be very lucrative, but success is not easy or automatic
There are a lot of other things I can talk about, and I might get into them in another post. However, there is one more subject I want to address:
Why Would Anyone Want to Self-Publish anyway?
Here’s the thing. Finding success in self-publishing is difficult and chancy. It makes you wonder why everyone just doesn’t go with a traditional publisher to do all this work for them. That is a viable strategy, but that’s also a ‘Pick-me!’ game. Whether or not you publish, as well as what you publish and how often, is fundamentally not up to you. You are waiting for some sort of corporation to believe they can make money from you. It doesn’t matter how strong your work is or how hard you’re trying; your fate is out of your own hands. Also, the timetables involved in traditional publishing are insane. You need an agent, which can take years, and then your agent shops your book around to publishers for years and even if it gets picked up it will probably be several more years before it ever comes out. As far as I’m concerned, AIN’T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR THAT! But if you are patient, and good at collaboration, you can be highly successful doing this. It’s a tradeoff. Personally, I choose the freedom to run my ow career, even though it’s much more work and I’ll probably make less money. The thing is, both ways are work, and there are many ways to fail at either. Pick what kind of work you want, what exactly you want to worry about. I’ll probably write another post on this later.
Ok, so those are the basics of self-publishing. There’s a lot more that I can talk about, and I might do a follow up or a FAQ if anyone would be interested in that.