How Self-publishing Works

What does self-publishing really mean?

On the most basic level, it means that in addition to writing, you take care of all the things that a publishing house (Random House, Bantam, Wiley, etc.) would. That doesn't mean you literally do everything personally -- you don't see too many writers running a printing press, for example. It means you bring in all the necessary help to create a book, and you finance the entire project (either with your own money, or with borrowed money).

In other words, self-publishing means you run and finance a small business dedicated to producing and selling a single product: your book (or books, once you get going). In most cases, the business's goal is to make a profit over time -- to create a product that sells well enough to cover the expense of creating it, and then some.

This business venture breaks down into three broad stages:

Each one of these stages involves many individual steps and decisions, as we'll see.

Before we get into the business of creating a book, let's look at the details of becoming a publisher. As a self-publisher, you are operating a small business. Depending on where you live, starting a small business means jumping through a few easy hoops. In most U.S. states, you need to:

Additionally, you'll need basic business operation stuff, such as:

As a business owner, you'll most likely be qualified for various tax deductions. For example, if you write in a home office, part of your housing payment is a work expense, as is your computer equipment, book storage space, etc. To get the full rundown of what you can and can't deduct, you'll need to talk to a professional tax preparer.

Be sure to take a look at the Lots More Information page, where you'll find even more information on starting a business.

In most cases, the first step in self-publishing is developing an idea for your book. You can self-publish almost anything you want, but if you want to make a profit, it helps to consider your book not just as a piece of art but also as a sellable product. What audience is interested in the subject and how do you get their attention?

Everybody has an opinion on what sells, and we won't get into that too much here -- it's part of the individual creative process that self publishers go through. The important point is that as a self-publisher, you have to consider sales just as a large publisher would. Step 1 is arriving at an approach to the book that will make it valuable to an audience. Among other things, that means seeing what similar books are out there, and seeing how they've sold (checking Amazon rankings is a good place to start).

Money isn't everything, of course. Few books are going to be blockbusters, and many self-publishers aren't that concerned with making money at all. But even setting profit aside, it is essential that you have a business plan based on what you reasonably believe you can sell. To put it another way, there's no point in printing 10,000 books if books like yours typically take three years to sell 1,000 copies.

In addition to the subject matter and approach, a self-publisher needs to think about the book as an actual, physical product. Will it be a trade paperback or a hardback book? How many pages will it have? What will it cost? All these questions are interrelated, as we'll see in the next section.

You certainly don't need to know exactly how many pages your book is going to be before you even get started writing. But if you have a target, and you know what type of book you're creating, you can plan your budget accordingly.

The broad decision first: Do you want a hardback book or a trade paperback book? Hardback books are significantly more expensive to print, and because of the higher cover price, may sell less than a paperback book. But, for some books -- a mammoth textbook, say -- they're really the only way to go.

After you've made this decision, you can decide how many pages you'll want. Think about the scope of what you have to say and look at the page count in books with similar content. But also think about what you want the book to feel like. Simply pick out a book that is about the same size and format of what you have in mind.

When you find a good model to shoot for, count the number of words per page. Multiply that by the number of pages. Then subtract words for any "odd pages" -- the first and last pages of each chapter (these aren't usually filled), any blank numbered pages and any pages at the beginning and end of the book. This will give you a rough word count for the book. If you calculate how many words are on a page in your word processing program (or paper if you use a typewriter or if you write longhand), you can give yourself a target page count.

Why does this matter? For one thing, you need to think about the psychology of a book-buyer. If you're looking to create a gift book paperback, you don't want a massive 500-page volume, because it may feel too much like a reference encyclopedia. Its intended audience has more of a casual interest, so it should have a lighter feel. But if you're putting together a how-to guide, a 100-page book isn't going to seem like a good deal to your potential customer. They'll pick the thicker book on the shelf next to yours, because it seems more substantial.

Price also plays a role here. More pages costs more, and certain multiples of pages are cheaper than others. Printing presses print a set number of pages in one pass -- typically 32 pages, front and back. This means it's substantially cheaper to print a 320 page book than a 321 page book. This isn't something you have to figure out right away, but it should be a factor when you are laying out the finished book.

Once you nail down what kind of book you want to end up with, you can get busy writing. The obvious way to go about this is to shut the door to the world, write whatever you want and worry about editing down the line. Show your friends and family when you want to, but otherwise, do it however you like. You don't have a publisher to worry about, so you can really write however you want to.

To many self-publishers, this doesn't work very well -- it's too unstructured, and they get lost without somebody to bounce ideas off of. One solution is to hire a freelance developmental editor. A developmental editor serves the same basic function as the editor you would work with at a publishing house -- you can show them drafts and outlines, and they can make edits to improve the book. The difference of course is that what you say is the last word, rather than the other way around. Ideally, the main thing they bring is expertise in book publishing -- a developmental editor should be somebody who knows how to build a good book.

To find a developmental editor, check the Literary Marketplace

The price of a developmental editor goes in your total budget for the book. Depending on how you work, it may save you enough of your own time to make it a worthwhile expense.

You may also want to bring in additional professional help. In the next section, we'll look at the other people you might need on your payroll.

In addition to a developmental editor, you may need to hire more help during the content-creation process. You may need:

Copy-editing is an important concern. You can rely on your own editing, with some help from friends and families, but if you want to end up with solid, relatively error-free text, you'll probably need to bring in an editor with some experience. You would be surprised how hard it really is to catch all the mistakes in a 1,500 word article, let alone an entire book.

For the most part, the creation period is all about writing, editing and adding illustrations. But as you're working on your book content, you also need to do a few things to prepare to make your work a real book. In the next section, we'll look at these simple steps.

The basic components of a book are obvious -- you have pages of text and graphics, bound between two covers. But for your work to be a viable book that can sit on bookstore and library shelves, it needs a few additional things. Before printing, you need to:

Other things to consider:

Once you have your content ready to go, it's time to get all that content into book form. In the next section, we'll look at this process.

Up until this point, your "book" hasn't really been a book at all -- it has been a manuscript. The next step is to convert this manuscript into a printable form -- the baseline for what will actually become a physical book.

This is far easier today than it has ever been before. With a decent PC and the right desktop publishing software, you can create a printer-ready book in digital form. With this software, you can adjust margins and font size to get at your desired page count.

You can't simply send the printer a formatted Microsoft Word Document, because that type of word processing program isn't designed with the necessary print drivers to use a printing press. Instead, you need to format your book with one of two programs: Quark Xpress or Adobe Pagemaker. The software itself isn't cheap, and there's a steep learning curve, but a computer literate person can make a go at it with relative ease.

You also can't use one of the fonts that comes with your word processing program. For print-ready material, you need a Postscript font, coupled with Postscript print drivers.

To incorporate illustrations, you'll need a high quality computer scanner and a quality graphics program, like Adobe Photoshop, to get it ready for print.

With your desktop publishing program, you actually put together every single page of the book. Then you save all of this to a CD -- the desktop publishing file, the file for the font you used, and all the graphic files. This is your book, in digital form, ready for the printers.

Once you have your book in digital form, you need to find a printer. This means a little bit of shopping around. Do some research and find a few book manufacturers you might work with. Many printers normally handle only fliers -- make sure you're looking at book manufacturers, who have experience putting books together.

Ask for a quote -- a price for printing, that the manufacturer will honor for 30-90 days -- and request samples of similar work they've handled. Compare and contrast, and figure out who is offering the best results at the best price.

To ask for a quote, you'll need to decide how many books you actually want to print. Much of the cost of printing is in setting up the print run, so you'll get a lower price per book if you print more books at once. However, if you grossly over-estimate how many books you can sell, you'll end up shelling out a lot of money you can't make back in a reasonable amount of time. This is one of the most important business decisions you'll make, because it will directly affect your immediate profits.

Before the printer prints your book, they should print proofs -- essentially, printed test runs. When the proofs are ready, it's your job to check every page to make sure there are no mistakes. Anything that was not in your original file is a printer's error -- the printer must flip the bill to fix it. Any mistake that was in your original file is an author's adjustment (AA), which means you have to pay for it (though the printer may allow you a certain number of freebie fixes). After you've reviewed the proofs, you pass them on to the printer and they make the corrections.

At this point, or even earlier, the printer can print galleys (bound advance versions of the book). You can use these galleys to begin marketing the book.

Finally, the printer will actually create the entire run of your book, and ship the copies to your house, your storage facility, or wherever else you want them delivered (directly to a book wholesaler you have sold to, for example). It's time for the final step: actually marketing and selling the book.

Before your book's publish date, you'll need to bring the work to some prominent reviewers' attention. There are a few major marketing steps that are nearly essential:

Marketing will continue as long as you're selling books. Marketing breaks down into two different areas: promoting your book to re-sellers (bookstores, for example) and promoting your books to your actual audience, so they'll order your books and seek them out in stores. There are dozens and dozens of tricks and strategies for marketing in both veins. You can find tons of ideas in the books and links on the Lots More Information page at the end of this article.

When you finally reach your publish date, you have one basic job: Get people to buy your book. For individual book-buyers, this is pretty simple. They pay the cover price, you record the transaction and you ship or give them the book. But individual book-buyers are the smallest piece of your customer base. Your major customers are:

Two new factors enter the mix with these customers -- discounts and returns. To ensure a profit, booksellers always buy books well below the cover price, and most reserve the option to return books they cannot sell. If the books are undamaged, you must refund the buyer's money.

You'll need a terms and conditions sheet that outlines, in detail, how you'll operate your business -- what kind of discounts you offer, how you handle returns, how you handle billing, etc. Your terms and conditions are up to you, but you'll have to treat particular types of buyers a certain way in order to do business. For example:

In the United States, there are a handful of huge fish in the pond, and tons of little fish. The big fish are:

Selling is an ongoing process that can last for years (without taking up a ton of time). When you run through your first shipment, and there's still demand, you go to the printer for your next shipment. If your book really catches on, you may be able to land a good deal with a larger publisher who can push your sales to a higher level. Over the years, many successful authors have used this road to get on a publisher's radar.

The sweet spot of writing is generally at the beginning of the process -- when you're sitting at a keyboard putting your ideas into words. In contrast, the sweet spot to publishing generally comes after all the work is done -- when you've recouped your initial costs, and every book sold is money in your pocket. This is a self-publisher's ultimate reward.

For much more information about self-publishing, check out the links in the next section.