The Big Picture

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:

  1. Actually writing, editing and illustrating the book
  2. Prepping the book for printing, and getting it printed
  3. Selling the book

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

Self-Publishing Story
Like a growing number of writers, Walter Roark got involved in self-publishing partly out of frustration. He told us his story:

    Really it all started when my first baby, Meghan, came around, and I was an innocent, wide-eyed young father. I was sort of in awe of her. And I also had the responsibility of taking care of her, not all the time, but a portion of the time. I felt like I wanted to put my feelings down on paper...


    Photo courtesy Clearing Skies Press
    Author Walter Roark with his kids Meghan and Shannon

    I finished the first version of [the manuscript] within a year, and it sat for maybe another year or so. I went back to it and refurbished it at the request of an entrepreneur I knew, named Bob Cramer ... He had some contacts in the publishing business, and he urged me to send it out.

    So I did, and we went through the list of contacts. We got positive responses, but not acceptance in terms of publishing. So I let it sit. Every two or three years, I would send it out again, and I would always get rejections. I actually started wallpapering my office walls with rejections...

    I realized that if I didn't have a celebrity name, or very close contacts in the publishing business, then this was not going to happen for me, even though the title, which was "Keeping the Baby Alive Till Your Wife Gets Home," is a clever title, if I do say myself, and it's fairly unique...

    The criticism I always got about this manuscript was that they didn't see it as a father infant care book, as a bookstore book. They said, "Well, it's got humor, and it has facts, and it's kind of a hybrid, so we can't categorize that in a bookstore, so we're just not going to take a chance on that."

    I decided that maybe it would be worthwhile to try to publish it myself, since I knew I could put the book together in my computer and basically serve it up to a large printing press who could just run it off. And I found out that it was really fairly inexpensive to publish standard, paperback-size books -- probably much cheaper than most people realize.