The Self-Publishing Road Map

Introduction

There are a multitude of books out there on self-publishing, and many of them claim to have methods to make you an overnight success or guarantee you earn thousands of dollars per month. This isn’t one of those books. People can and do earn money self-publishing. However, self-publishing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. As a former reporter for a publication called Solid Waste Report, I can assure you that anyone who tells you self-publishing is a way to get rich quick is selling you a load of crap.

So, what is self-publishing success and what does it take to achieve it? Different writers are going to define success differently, but the key components include putting out a professional product that sells and finds a readership. If you follow these steps, you’ll find that success. Will you become a millionaire? Well, how many people do you know who have become millionaires from writing books? How many people do you know who have become millionaires in general, regardless of their occupation? Given that the likelihood of becoming a millionaire in any field is on the slimmer side, let’s look at what you can realistically expect. In terms of money, you should expect a steady stream of royalties on a monthly basis, with the amount increasing the more books you publish. On the nonmonetary side, expect to put out a good book.

Before we get too deep into the book, I should tell you a little bit about myself. I’m a former journalist who is now a self-published (or indie) author. As a journalist, I’ve worked for The Wichita Eagle and Kansas City Star, as well as several smaller publications. I embraced self-publishing midway through 2013, since then publishing seven books (two under a pseudonym). I’m a monthly contributor for the blog Indies Unlimited, voted by Publishers Weekly as one of the six top blogs for indie publishers. There, we practice, write about, and see the entire spectrum of self-publishing success and failure, so I’ve learned a lot about the process. The key thing I’ve learned is that anyone can have self-publishing success if they put in the work and follow good practices that have been learned in the age of digital self-publishing.

Enough about me, as I’m sure you’re more interested in this book’s content than me. This book, as you might have guessed by the subtitle, is divided into seven easy-to-follow steps. If you follow the steps, you will become a successful self-publisher. This book will explain how to put out a good self-published product, one that can compete with the best traditionally-published book. For those who aren’t the most familiar with the traditional process, Step 1 will discuss the differences between the traditional publishing model and self-publishing. Each subsequent step will explain what you need to do to get the best book written and out into the world. When you’ve finished all the steps, you will have what it takes to be profitable as a self-publisher. If you’re looking for profitability, this isn’t a one-and-done proposition. Profitable self-publishers put out multiple titles, just like profitable traditional publishers. It’s a process that takes time, but it’s very doable, even by those who don’t fancy themselves publishers. So, sit back, relax and learn what you need to achieve your self-publishing success.

Step 1: Determine Your Goals

I’m not going to send you off to make a vision board or sit with candles and meditate on what you want out of life. You can do that if you want, but that’s not my style, so I’m certainly not going to suggest it for your style.

However, with self-publishing you’ve got to figure out what it is you want to achieve. People self-publish for all sorts of reasons. If your reason is to make money, you’re going to have a different approach to self-publishing than if your reason is to put your story out there. Those approaches are going to be slightly different than the self-publisher who wants to help people (maybe you’ve got some killer method for life success you think everyone should know).

Sit down and think about why you’re doing this. What do you hope to gain? That’s going to help guide you in how you use the steps in this book. If you simply want to put out a good quality self-published product, then you’ll want to focus on the first four steps. Those deal with product quality and the basics of the publishing process. If you want to promote that book (or multiple books) and have the book (or books) be profitable, you’re going to want to complete all the steps, with particular emphasis on the last one.

Step 7 deals with assessment and evaluation; it’s only through that evaluation process that you can figure out what works best and bring yourself to profitability. Writing success rarely comes overnight, so it’s the tinkering you do in Step 7 that will help you achieve profitability. In the last section of the book, I’ll provide some real-world examples of how long it has taken successful self-published authors to hit their stride.

Traditional Publishing vs. Self-Publishing

As you’re mulling over your goals, let’s take a minute to talk about how self-publishing compares to traditional publishing, and some of the benefits of self-publishing. If you’ve bought this book, you’re obviously interested in self-publishing. However, you may not be well-versed in all the intricacies of the different publishing models. Let’s go over them here.

Traditional Publishing.

With traditional publishing, you would normally go through a publisher (also called a publishing house). Generally publishing houses don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. To get your manuscript before a publisher, you need an agent. To get an agent, you have to write a query letter, which must tell a bit about your book and pique the agent’s interest. Agents reject 95 percent of the query letters they receive. If they don’t reject the query letter, agents will request either a partial or a full manuscript. Of those writers they request a manuscript from, they still reject most, taking on only a handful of new clients each year.

If you hit the jackpot and get an agent, you will generally sign a contract with the agent. Legitimate agents are paid via commission. They will not charge you a fee for any services they provide prior to them selling your book. Instead, they will take a commission, usually 15 percent of your earnings from contracts they negotiate. Legitimate agents only get paid if they sell your book. I mention legitimate because agents are not regulated and anyone can hang a shingle and call themselves an agent, including crooks. Given an agent’s pay incentive, the agent will work with you to get your manuscript into tiptop shape, then try to sell it to a publisher. If the agent sells it, yay! If not, the agent, who only gets paid after selling your book, has two choices: (1) to continue to believe you’re good and agree to try to sell your next project or (2) to drop you as a client. If your agent takes the second option, you are back to where you started, and you’ll have to query agents for your next book (you can’t re-query the same book, as most agents will not want to try to sell a manuscript that’s already been rejected by several publishers).

Let’s assume your book sold. At that point, in the traditional publishing process, you will sign a contract that will assign rights for your book (print and ebook, generally; possibly audio) to the publisher and spell out other publication terms. It used to be that contracts ended when a book went out of print. Because ebooks never really go out of print, if your publisher leaves them for sale on any retail site, it’s a contract that will potentially last the duration of the copyright for that book (copyright term is the life of the author + 70 years). The contract will stipulate an advance against royalties. This advance is what the publisher thinks it can, at a minimum, earn on your title. Before the publisher has to pay you any royalties from the book, your book has to earn enough to equal the amount of the advance. However, if your book does not earn the amount of the advance, you don’t have to repay the publisher.

The typical advance for a first-time author is $5,000. The publisher will pay this advance in three installments: (1) one-third at the time the contract is signed, (2) one-third at the acceptance of the manuscript and (3) one-third at the time of the book’s publication. From contract signing to publication, it typically takes one year to 18 months. So, it will be awhile before you get the entirety of your advance (minus your agent’s commission, of course).

You may be wondering about item two, acceptance of the manuscript. The publisher is in charge of editing and cover art and publicity. The publisher will ask you to work with its editor to get the book in shape. You will not be charged to work with the editor, but you will be expected to follow the editor’s advice and work with the editor on issues of concern. If you can’t get along with the editor and are unwilling to make changes the editor suggests, your contract could fall apart on that second point, because you are not turning in a manuscript acceptable to the publisher. Essentially, it is the editor who determines whether the manuscript is acceptable to the publisher. Rarely do contracts fall apart on this issue, as the agent wants a commission and will typically try to get the author and editor to come together. However, it can happen.

With traditional publishing, the publishing house is in charge of cover art. While publishers may ask for your input, they are not obliged to take it. You could end up with a cover you hate. The publisher could even change the name of the book, and, unless your contract stipulated they couldn’t, you would be stuck with it.

Publishers are in charge of distribution and marketing. They will distribute your book to some physical bookstores, but it probably won’t be a lot of copies. It is also unlikely that your book will receive the best placement. The center displays when you walk into stores are called co-op, and publishers pay bookstores money to put their titles there. Publishers tend to reserve co-op money for big names like Grisham, Piccoult, or King. The publisher will also distribute your book to ebook retailers. The royalty rate paid by publishers on ebooks is 12.5 percent of list price; for print books, it ranges from 6 to 10 percent of list price, depending on whether it’s a hardback or paperback. While publishers are in charge of marketing, the consensus is that most publishers don’t do much publicity for newbies. With big names, they know the book should do well based on the name and are willing to put money into marketing. With newbies, publishers don’t try to sink too much into what could be a failed investment. If you do well, they may do more for your next book. If you don’t do well, then you just didn’t do well. There are 300,000 titles published by traditional publishers each year, according to Bowker, a media company that tracks sales and issues book tracking numbers (we’ll talk more about Bowker in the ISBN section). Publishers can’t spend a big budget promoting 300,000 titles. They know that some books are going to fail, so they hedge their bets by promoting books they think have the best shot of succeeding with a promotional boost.

The last thing to know about traditional publishing is that you have about six months to make an impact. Unlike ebook stores, which have an almost unlimited amount of virtual shelf space, real book stores have very limited space. If your book does not sell well, the stores will take it off their shelves and return it to publishers. They’ll make decisions after a month or two. After six months, the publisher will know if your title is getting too many returns or too few reorders. If that’s the case, your book is done. It will still be on ebook shelves, as that costs the publisher nothing, but they’ll be done with your print book. You won’t be able to get your book back from the publisher to try to market and control as you want, because you’ll have signed that right away in your contract.

With a failed book under your wing, it will be harder for your agent to sell future books. Your agent might still try, but it’s hard because you’ve gone from being an unknown and unproven commodity to being a commodity with a track record of failure.

Self-Publishing.

Traditional publishing sounded a bit bleak if you didn’t have instant success. Well, that’s one of the main places where self-publishing has an advantage over traditional publishing. There is no bang-bam-boom timeline that says you have six months and then you’re a failure. With self-publishing, your book is on the market as long as it takes to do well. But, that’s one of the later advantages. Let’s start at the beginning and look at some of the primary advantages when it comes to self-publishing.

Control. Self-publishers have control over the entire process and retain all their publishing rights. With the traditional process, you have control over very little — just over the book you write. You don’t control whether you get picked by an agent or publisher, how much your advance is, how much marketing is done, or even which ebook stores the publisher chooses to sell your books at. However, with self-publishing, you decide (1) if your book is ready for publication and (2) when to publish it. With traditional publishing, the publisher is in charge of editing and covers and you have little say on the final decision. With self-publishing, you get to pick an editor you like and a cover you feel best expresses your book. You also get control over your rights. While we could write for hours about rights, the most important thing to note is that retaining control of all your rights is a big deal. You control rights over all categories in which your book can be produced: print, ebook, audio and film. You can sell the print rights to your work for paper books, the ebook rights for electronic books, movie rights if someone wants to make a movie based on your book, and even audio book rights. Rights tend to be assigned based on the region they’re to be sold in, so you can sell print rights in the United States, or print rights in Spain, and retain all other rights. In the traditional model, publishers tend to want all print and ebook rights for the entire world. With self-publishing, there’s no struggle with the publisher. Or you could say, as a self-publisher, you assign your rights to the publisher; only you’re the publisher, so any battles over rights always go your way. In the self-publishing process, you and your heirs get to benefit from your work for the entire term of the copyright. (For more on heirs, see the Appendix D article, When your Books Outlive You.)

Responsibility. While you have control over all those aspects, with self-publishing, you are responsible for doing all the things the publisher normally does. You have to find cover artists, editors, write blurbs, select marketing material, format your book for electronic and print, and distribute it to the retailers where you want it sold. If you don’t want to be responsible for these things, then self-publishing is not for you. However, if this represents a challenge you want, then self-publishing is great.

We’re at the end of Step 1. I hope you have your goal in mind. Write it down, as you’ll need to refer back to it later. In the remaining steps, we’ll discuss all the things you need to do to put out a great self-published product. At the end of each step, I’m inserting a checklist as a quick way to review the key points of the chapter.

Step 1 Checklist

____ Determine your goal (what you want from self-publishing)

____ Write down your goal

Step 2: Write Good Books

You’ve completed Step 1 and figured out your goal. This was really important, because it’s going to direct everything you do from here on out. The next step of the process is, oddly enough, even more important than that first step. In fact, it is the most important part of your process. You need to write good books. Bad books don’t sell. Now, don’t get snarky with me and tell me about that bestseller that you think is total crap in terms of writing. The readers who bought it would disagree with you, as would the author. But, we’re digressing. The essential thing to know — whether you are writing for profit or for other reasons — is that what says the most about your book is the product itself. It has to be good. It has to meet the needs of its buyers so they feel it is a quality product.

There are a few things that people think of when it comes to book quality: a compelling and coherent tale that is free of grammar and spelling errors. In this step, you will learn some strategies to help you produce a good book. Those include writing a lot, developing a writing habit, writing in genres that work for you, being accountable for your work, and getting beta readers. I also include notes on pseudonyms and when to release your books.

Write a Lot

You need to write a lot. Yes, I said that. Even if you feel you have a single magnum opus, the writing process improves dramatically the more you write.

I would recommend writing complete pieces, and, at a minimum, tens of thousands of words worth of them. If you truly think you have only one magnum opus and don’t want to write multiple books, then write short stories — or essays, if nonfiction is your thing. Whatever you write should be a complete piece, which is one that has a beginning, middle, and end. Writing never-ending stories or little bits of unfinished ideas don’t get you used to the process of finishing. So, write complete pieces. This will serve as great practice for people who want to write several books, as well as people who believe they only have one book to write.

If you plan to make money self-publishing or know you’d like to publish several books over the course of your lifetime, then I suggest writing multiple books. You can include some short stories or essays, too, but writing books will help improve your craft and understanding of the process. More specifically, writing a lot will help you figure out what works best for your process. For the people who want to self-publish for profit, writing several books will help them build their arsenal of books.

While there are people who write one book and decide to publish it, those people often find it works out better to write two full books before publishing one. You’ll be amazed at the personal growth you get as a writer, and how much better the final product looks. While I think you should write at least two full books before publishing, I don’t say you can’t publish that first one. You have to be the judge of your quality and experience. Whether you publish the first book or not, after you’ve written that second book, go back over the first one and see how it looks to you. See what things you can improve to make it better. Your goal is to have a good book.

Writing Habit

Every writer should develop a daily writing habit. This will help you achieve whatever goal you’ve chosen, whether it be to complete one self-published work or to write a slew of self-published books.

I recommend writing as the first thing you do when you sit down with free time. Don’t respond to emails. Don’t read your favorite blogs. Don’t check out the Facebook writing group or your Twitter feed. Sit down and write first. Writing is going to be the thing that improves your chances of success, so that is the thing you should do first.

For writers who are interested in simply putting out the best story they can, writing to your comfort level will help you. If you want to set a time limit and whatever you get done in that time is good, then go for it. If you think a word count target is good, then pick one and do that. It’s going to be about what you feel comfortable with. The more you write, the better at it you will become.

If your goal is monetary success, then you’ve got to have output, and you need to have a daily word count goal. I would recommend a minimum word count goal of 1,000 words per day, five days a week. That translates to a rough output of 260,000 words annually, or