Self-publishing School Part 1: Print Books

When I first started self-publishing, I created an account on Lulu.com and downloaded their Microsoft Word templates. It took time to understand how the templates worked and how to format them. The first challenge was understanding that odd pages are always on the right and even pages are always on the left. It seems like such a simple concept, but I wasted a lot of money purchasing books with pagination errors and throwing them away. There were other difficulties as well. Here are just a few of them:

Cover Art

Cover art is a pain. Lulu.com and CreateSpace both provide cover art tools that can help you customize your own cover using their generic versions as a base. CreateSpace even provides some basic stock photos that you can use. If you're just printing something for your own benefit, go ahead and use their default covers (CreateSpace offers better options than Lulu), but if you are looking to write a best seller or boost your income through book sales, I highly recommend a professionally designed cover. Expect to pay $150-200 for a front cover, spine and back cover.

Proof Book

When preparing a print book, always be sure to order a physical copy that you can actually hold in your hands. What you don't want to do is finish your book and order 10 copies, only to find that there is a serious error. I recently made my first book with CreateSpace, and they have some great tools for viewing your document as it will actually look in book form. I love these tools, but I still like to hold a book in my hands before releasing it for sale.

Distribution

You can always sell your book using direct links to Lulu.com or CreateSpace. If you want your book to appear on Amazon.com, you'll need to choose one of their standard formats (certain custom sizes and binding types can't be sold via Amazon). Expect to lose a large percentage of your profits in distribution fees, and pay attention to the minimum costs. Many of my books are less than 100 pages long, and on those books I was able to set a reasonable retails sales price and still make a decent profit via both Lulu.com and CreateSpace. But when I printed a 300 page novel, CreateSpace was half the cost of Lulu.

Marketing

It's one thing to create a book, and another thing to sell it. While there are a variety of marketing techniques and tools that will help you, I'll discuss two of them here. The first is the back cover text. Writing great back cover text that invites readers to purchase your book requires a different set of skills than writing the book itself. Read the back covers of popular books in your chosen genre to learn the language/voice to use, and share it with friends to get their input. The second marketing tool that can help you drive sales is the Amazon book description. Again, look at the examples for books in your genre. The best ones tend to make use of HTML formatting and are generally fairly long (Amazon allows up to 4000 characters).

Publishing a print book requires effort, but it's a great way to turn your ideas into a tangible product and share your work with others.

Why Self-publish?

Success in traditional publishing requires tenacity.
Success in self-publishing also requires tenacity.

Success in traditional publishing requires taking risks.
Success in self-publishing also requires taking risks.

Authors who use traditional publishers can make a lot of money.
Authors who self-publish can also make a lot of money.

There are reasons to do one over the other, but it's a very personal choice.

Full disclosure: I've never attempted to publish anything through a traditional publisher. I've only self-published, so I can't provide an objective point of view. But I can tell you what I've heard from other authors who have traveled both roads:

• The margins in traditional publishing are thin. Most authors never earn enough royalties to cover the advance they receive at contract signing. Self-published authors can make reasonable profits on print books, and even better profits on electronic books.
• Traditional publishers require you to give up your rights to print your book. As long as the publisher is making money, they'll keep your book in print. Once sales slow down, it will go out of print and you can't do a thing about it.
• Traditional publishers still rely on author marketing. Just because you have a publisher doesn't mean you can just sit back and collect royalty checks. And if you're going to be doing your own marketing anyway, why not self-publish and keep more of the profits?

One key advantage traditional publishing offers over self-publishing is uncompromising product quality. You'll generally have great cover & interior designers, editors and advisers. But with the right partners you can create a comparable product yourself, and you get to be in control from start to finish.

It's taken me several years to understand the ins and outs of self-publishing, but I've always dreamed of being an entrepreneur and self-publishing has given me that opportunity. Until recently, my focus has been on product creation. Now I'm investing the bulk of my time and effort in marketing.

The opportunities for self-publishers are greater than they've ever been before, and the risks are minimal. The question, "Why self-publish?" is best answered with another question: "Why not?"

The Beginning

About six years ago I published my first book through Lulu.com. It wasn't even my book -- it was written by my daughter and a friend when they were in 6th grade. But it was my first taste of self-publishing.

I liked it.

Maybe a little too much.

My next self-publishing experience was a few years later, when my then 16-year-old daughter brought me a novel she had written over the summer. The formatting, editing and cover art preparation were intense -- mostly because I had no idea what I was doing. But I was starting to make connections, and I had also started doing some writing of my own.

Now, after self-publishing more than a dozen books, I've decided to share what I've learned and encourage everyone who has ever considered writing a book to do it, and to start today. The opportunities are limitless.