EP23: Self-Publishing My Books - Or Eating Elephants - TRANSCRIPT

Hi! You're listening to Hyba is Writing, and I am your host, Hyba. So, on my social media, I have often mentioned that I seriously plan on self-publishing my books. The truth is, I really want to self-publish them, and as l'm working on my eerie suspense novella, Apartment, which is now being prepared for release on January 5, 2021, I have also considering self-publishing this novella and then traditionally publishing my fantasy series. These days, I've been honestly considering completely self-publishing all of my books.

Personally, I lean more towards self-publishing for various reasons. In fact, I actually wrote a blog post about why I'm self-publishing Apartment, which I'll link in the episode details. Most importantly, I get to keep total control of how my books are presented, advertised, marketed, where they're published, how much they cost, and so on and so forth. That's really important to me. Having that control will allow me much more flexibility as well, since there are a lot of decisions that aren't up to you if you go with a traditional publisher. For example, the book cover is probably in large part going to be a result of marketing research on what kinds of covers are most popular in a particular genre and for a particular audience. Where the book is sold - in which bookstores, for example - is also up to your traditional publisher, as well as how much it costs.

But self-publishing is a monumental task, and over the years I've realized that it's a full-time job, no doubt about it. You're in charge or everything with self-publishing, and the tasks really seem to add up into this mountain of things that need doing, and it is intimidating. These days, I won't lie - I have really been feeling that colossal amount of work! But we'll keep this episode more theoretical, because I'm planning on making another episode in the future, after the launch of Apartment, discussing my experience in more detail and lessons learned.

So, let's just talk about self-publishing in general and what it takes. Here are just some of the steps that I've learned about, and I'm going to list them all but I'm sure it's not an exhaustive list, and I'm also sure that depending on the choices an author makes, some of these things could potentially be ignored.

Of course, you have to write the story. Then you'll need to edit it - and it's up to you whether you'll be hiring a professional editor to do that or if you'd rather self-edit. If you'd like to give it a test run with beta readers to get feedback, then that's an entire process that you have to put in place - a process that can include non-disclosure agreements and forms and meeting with beta readers to discuss their thoughts and a variety of other things. But so far, it sounds pretty manageable, right?

When you're set with your book and the writing part is done and you've got yourself something you can publish, there are even more things to consider. First and foremost, you've got to made a decision: are you going to be selling via established marketplaces like Amazon and use its KDP publishing, or are you going to lone wolf it - as in, sell your books directly on your website? This will come with its own set of requirements, like a website and a purchasing system on that website and so on - and then you have to make the decision of either making the website yourself or paying someone else to do it, or using a website builder that makes it easy for you and that you are probably going to have to pay for as well. Apart from that, you have to decide: are you going to offer your book in only ebook formats, or only print, or both?

You'll have to figure out how you're going to deal with the cover and interior design of the book, if you'll do that yourself or if you'll hire someone else to take care of that for you. You have to find out how you're going to go about printing and making your book available to readers, so you have to decide if you'll use a print-on-demand service and marketplace like Amazon's KDP, or if you'll contact a printing press yourself and ask them to print you a run of a certain number of copies of your book, which you pay for up-front and then have to sell. You have to create marketing and advertising material yourself and probably pay a lot of money to get that promotional material out there in places where your target audience is going to be - and figuring that out requires market research. Or, you can decide to let someone else deal with the marketing of your book for you, and in that case, you're going to have to put in a lot of money. To be clear, you'll put in money, anyway, but at least marketing experts might know how to better utilize that money so that every dollar is effective.

Another thing is that you have to find a way to take care of all of the legal stuff and copyright stuff and so on and so forth. The list really goes on.

In short, you are a one-person show when it comes to self-publishing, and if you're like me and like to do everything yourself, that can feel like a bit of an overwhelming task. You have to make decisions based on how much time you have, where you want to put your effort, how much money you have to spend on self-publishing, and if you don't have any, how you'll go about all the aforementioned steps. You'll also have to take into consideration your skills, though. It's not enough to say, "Well, I can make a cover myself since I have the time to put into that" if your graphic design skills are still quite in their early stages. Anyway, all of this is important to consider, and I've been working through a lot of this with my book launch coming up, which is why I've been thinking about self-publishing a lot lately.

The thing is, though, I also have some reservations about how the - shall we call it mainstream? - way of self-publishing is done as well. I hesitate to sell my books on Amazon and via KDP, because I don't like how much of a monopoly they have and quite frankly dislike their terms - and this goes for other services I've checked out, like for example Kobo. So, I'm giving myself more work here because the ideal would be to have my own website where I can directly sell my own books - and of course that's difficult because people need to know to go there in the first place in order to buy my books, and that takes its own level of marketing and advertising. I'm not much of a salesperson, so that also makes me reconsider my desire to self-publish, but I also just want to go ahead and have the experience. I figure the lessons I'll learn from this entire self-publishing experience will definitely be worth it.

I know that self-publishing is such a risky move for a lot of writers, and I know that self-publishing is such a difficult route to take. But I'm also a firm believer that you'll never know if you never try, so I'm gonna give this a shot with my first book or couple of books and really try hard to make it work, but if in the end it does not work, I'm open to trying some of the other avenues available since obviously at the end the day, I do want to get my books out there.

That isn't to say that traditional publishing is not difficult, by the way. There's a lot of gatekeeping in traditional publishing, and I understand that it's there for good reason, but it can also be extremely disheartening for many writers. For example, many big publishing houses require that you already have a literary agent, so you have to first find one that likes your book and believes in it enough to take it on. But even then, as a writer, you can get dozens of rejections before you finally get an acceptance, and that does take a psychological toll on you, so I certainly thing traditional publishing has its own set of difficulties. That's one of the pluses of self-publishing, in the sense that there's no gatekeeping - no editor or publisher or agent telling you they don't want your book, since you're the one publishing it!

But then I also understand that self-publishing gets a bad reputation in the book publishing industry because the quality of the books that are published is not always good, and I completely understand that, I've been on the reading end of some self-published books like that, and I totally get it. But I also think that the concept of self-publishing should still be very valid and that readers should still take self-published books into account.

I think all I can do is do my best with my books and my writing, and hopefully publish books that aren't contributing to that negative perception and reputation of self-publishing - but that will be for the readers to decide, in the end, right?

What are your thoughts on self-publishing and traditional publishing? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter, whether you're an author or not. You can leave me your comments, thoughts, and suggestions via my Tumblr or Twitter, and I'm also on Instagram now, if you weren't already aware! You'll find all the links in the episode description, along with a link to my article on why I'm choosing to self-publishing Apartment specifically.

Thanks so much for tuning in today, and I hope that you enjoyed this episode where I basically explore the elephant I'm about to eat! I hope to hear from you soon! Until next time!