You’ve spent countless hours writing, editing and getting your book as perfect as it can possibly be so that you can publish it. If you’re like most writers, your first thought is to hire a well-known editor, find an agent or market your book directly to publishers. The truth is that these options can be expensive and/or time-consuming. If you want to publish your book ASAP, your best bet it to switch gears and publish it yourself. Let’s take a look at why it’s a good idea to rely on yourself for all your publishing needs and not someone else.
The Human Lifespan Is not Infinite
Do you really have six months to wait, a year, two years, five years or even ten years to wait for your book to hit the market? In some instances, it may take you half your lifetime to never to get someone to get off their asses and help you publish your book. If you already waited until after you finished your career or after the kids are grown or whatever your reason was for delaying the writing of your book, you’re already behind, and you don’t need other people to delay you even further. If anything, if you’re in this position, you need to get to it. You need to slam your book out, edit it and get it published ASAP. The average human lifespan is only 77.5 years. The truth is that you don’t have time to wait for these people.
No One Cares About Your Manuscript But You
The hard truth is that you are the only person who really, truly cares about your manuscript and your story. Your family will probably pay you lip-service and tell you it’s great, but if you were to ask them to read it or do anything that occupies their time, they’ll tell you they’ll do it and won’t. In other words, you could waste months on waiting for your great aunt Edna to read it and tell you if she liked it, and even if she does tell you she likes it, she’ll just say, “It was excellent. I loved every word.” And that’ll be the end of it. She won’t tell you where it was slow. She won’t tell you what she didn’t like, and if you take her words at face value, you’re going to be the next Great American author. You can insert your own country or origin into that statement.
Now, if Great Aunt Edna can’t tell you anything valuable about your book, do you really think an agent or publisher is going to tell you anything valuable after you take the time to research and put together your submission packet? That, by itself, can take weeks or months, just to get your agent or publisher list together and then get all your submissions materials together. Then, you’ll have to wait anywhere from 2 weeks to four months before these guys time-out without sending anything back to you. If you’re lucky, you’ll get some kind of form letter that says – Thanks, but no thanks – after a few weeks so that you can cross them off your list.
You’ll Get Paid Peanuts, Even if They Do Accept Your Manuscript
Let’s say that an agent or publisher does get off their asses and publish your manuscript. They even offer you an advance. The average advance ranges between $5,000 and $10,000. A few very lucky random authors might get $50,000, and if you happen to be a celebrity or have a million-plus followers who are guaranteed to buy your book, you might get more. How long is $50,000 going to last you, especially in today’s overinflated market?
Keep in mind that the money they pay you is an advance. That means that your book has to earn more than that before they send you another check. Traditionally published authors typically earn 5 to 10 cents per book. That means that if they hand you a whopping $50,000, you’ll need to sell a half a million books to earn that money back and start receiving more royalty checks. By contrast, if you listed your ebook for .99 cents on Amazon, you’d make .35 cents a book. At that rate, you’d only need to sell 142,858 to earn $50,000. If you listed your ebook at 2.99, you’d receive $2.06 per book and only need to sell about 25,000 books to earn $50,000. If you listed your ebooks for $4.99, you’d earn $3.48 per book and only need to sell 14,368.
If You Do Manage to Get Traditionally Published, You’ll Still Have to Advertise Your Book
The days of book publishers going all out for every title they take on is over. They won’t take out any TV commercials, radio commercials, billboards or Internet advertisements. They’ll list it on their website, and tell you to do all the advertising. They might write a press release, but even that’s not guaranteed. At this point, you might be wondering what they’re doing with the other $6.18 cents they're earning off your books while you earn a measly .10 cents per book or your $8.99 listed ebook. I don’t actually have all the answers to that question, but I’m guessing it’s to pay the professionals they hired to edit your book, format it and create your cover, and no, you didn’t get a say in how much they charged for each of those services, so if they overpaid, you’re just SOL (Shit Outta Luck). So, the question here is – Are you willing to take your measly advance and pay for the advertising that your book publisher isn’t doing? Ten-thousand dollars doesn’t go very far in advertising. You might get two to three months of steady paid ads out of that. Not to mention, if you do that, you’ve earned $0. Now what? You’ve just done your book publisher's job, and instead of getting paid to do it, you PAID to do it. Yikes!
You Can Actually Publish Your Book Yourself, Spend Less Time on It and Less Money
The truth is that you can go trad pub and spend a lot of time on it and potentially a lot of money, or you can take control of your own author career path and do it yourself.
- You can edit.
- You can format.
- You can design your cover.
- You can publish on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble and whatever other site you feel like publishing on.
- You can take control of your advertising (You’d have to do it anyway.)
- You’ll keep 100 percent control of your book.
- You choose where you want to spend extra money and where you don’t want to spend it.
How Do You Self-Publish?
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you’re weighing your publishing options while you try to decide the best method for you. It also means that you don’t know much, if anything, about self-publishing. In fact, if you’ve heard anything about self-publishing, it’s probably information related to vanity presses. Vanity presses are just as bad today as they were thirty or forty years ago. They will publish anything, and I do mean anything. They also won’t edit your book to the highest quality possible. They won’t check it for plot holes. They won’t check it for consistency, and they will literally publish anything because you’re paying them to do it. To add insult to injury, once you pay them, they won’t give a rat’s ass about your book. The cover has a typo. They don’t care. You bought it and found typos. They don’t care. You can’t gain any traction to earn the money you just paid to them. They don’t care. They got their $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $10,000 dollars, and you have 5,000 copies of your book sitting in a back room or being used as impromptu furniture covered in blankets and tablecloths. They don’t care. But but but, every book is a bestseller! Yeah. Of course, it is. Every author buys 5,000 copies of their own book! You could also buy 5,000 copies of your paperbacks on Amazon and do the same thing, if you really wanted to! I don’t recommend it. The whole reason you’re publishing your book is so that someone else will buy it.
What Is Self-Publishing?
Self-publishing is the act of publishing your book on your own or with help from people who specifically hire. In other words, you are becoming the publisher of your book, and you can do it under your own name. You don’t need to create a company. Although, some authors do.
How Do You Self-Publish?
The first step is to get your book as good as you can get it. Keep in mind that “as good as you can get it” doesn't mean perfect. It means do the best you can do to make the story make sense, eliminate unnecessary slow spots and make sure it’s as typo and spelling-error-free as it can be. Keep in mind that the best way to find typos is to publish something. It is what it is, so just do as good as you can do. Your next book will be better. If you’re going through this process and worrying about over-editing, you can buy The First Five Drafts: Prevent Over-Editing and Get Your Novel Done Faster with the Five Draft Method. It’s $2.99. That means that if you buy that book, you only need to sell two of yours at $2.99 to cover the cost and make a profit.
Once you get your book completed to your satisfaction, you’ll need to edit it. Now, I could write a book on editing, but there are plenty of editing books out there that are fine. My favorite happens to be Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print. This book is currently listed for $7.99, and I do recommend getting the paperback, not the ebook. To pay for this one, you’d need to sell four of yours if you listed them for sale at $2.99. If you buy this book, and the other one, you’re only up to 6 books to make a profit. Alternatively, you should check out this free article entitled Common Editorial Problems and How You Can Fix Them or 8 Tips on How to Quickly Self-Edit a Novel. Those articles don’t tell you as much as the self-editing book, but they’re a good place to start if you can’t afford anything.
Next, you’ll need to pick a platform and publish your book. I’m familiar with Amazon KDP, Barnes and Noble and Kobo. There are others. Amazon is probably the easiest to use and offers the best chance of selling a book to someone you don’t actually know. Kobo is also very easy to use, but I’ve never sold a single book on that platform. It doesn't seem to have a good audience, even though those books do show up on the Walmart website. Barnes and Noble is the most difficult place to publish a book because you have to apply to be a vendor before your books will be published and live on the site. Also, Amazon’s expanded publishing will put you on Barnes and Noble and Books a Million and a few other places so that you don’t have to do it.
If you want a step-by-step guide, you can purchase How to Self-Publish Your Book: An Indie-Author’s Guide for $2.99, and that will give you a good idea of what’s involved when you self-publish your book so that you can do it. Now, if you were to purchase all three of these books, you’d spend a whopping $13,97. If you were to list your ebook for sale for $2.99, you’d earn $2.06 per book sold. This means that you don’t need to sell 10 or 20,000 books to earn a profit. You’d need to sell 7. Doesn't that sound a lot better than spending thousands and having to sell thousands of books to earn your first dime?
Don’t start your author career off at a loss, and don’t wait years to have someone tell you that they’ll publish your book. You can do it much faster and for much cheaper than everyone else is offering.
