[Cue sonorous voiceover] Previously on “So You Want to Write a Book?”: Part 1, How I got started; Part 2, Other Ways of Writing a Book; Part 3, WRITE THAT THING; Part 4: What next? How I wrote my first book by just starting to write; how to plan a book step by step; how to actually write that book; and how to edit it once it’s finished.
Part 5: Getting it out there – Self-publishing
So you finished your book (Congratulations once again!) and you’ve edited it to the best of your abilities into a lovely, shiny manuscript that you’re not ashamed to have seen by other people (even ones who are not your mother). Way to go!
Now you have a number of options:
A) Put it back in the drawer and keep it there forever. (No, don’t! You’ve spent too much effort on it for that.)
B) Shop it around to publishers and/or agents to get it traditionally published. I don’t have much experience with that process myself, so can’t tell you much about it, but there’s plenty of information on it on the interwebs. It’s a very good option indeed, but extremely difficult to be successful at (there are many, many more writers writing manuscripts than publishers are publishing on a yearly basis).
Up until the early 2000s, those two options were pretty much the only ones available (barring so-called “vanity publishers” who said they would “publish your book” for a fee, but really only charged you large sums of money for printing your book with not much other services and left you with boxes full of hardcover copies sitting in your garage). But then the landscape changed. Now, you have a third and very viable option for turning your manuscript into a real book:
C) Self-publish it through an online bookstore.
Again, the internet is stuffed full of very good information about that process; go look it up, there are many people who have far better things to say about it than I do. But I’ll give you a brief overview of what it takes to self-publish your book and get it out there—or at least, how I do it; again, there are other options, and possibly even better ones. Ask Google, he knows.
How to Self-Publish Your Book
1.) Write the best manuscript you can. Spellcheck it. Spellcheck it again. (See Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series.)
2.) Get it professionally edited. This is optional, but if you want to sell your book to strangers you can’t really do without it. It will cost you money, and probably more than you expect, but it’s worth it.
3.) Write a back cover blurb (a short description of the book that goes on the back of the print copy and on the ebook vendors’ sales page).
4.) Get a book cover. It optional to get it done by a professional graphic artist, but again, if you want to sell, it’s highly recommended. However, there are cheaper options available such as ready-made covers, and Amazon has a free cover creator built into their self-publishing platform. With all of this, you get what you pay for: a professional designer can make your book look good, but a free, cheap, or homemade cover could do the job quite adequately if you just want the book for yourself and your friends.
5.) Make an account with the online self-publishing platform(s) of your choice. KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) is for Kindle books and print books that are sold on Amazon. Smashwords is for all other ebook formats, and they distribute to other ebook vendors like iBooks, Kobo, Nook etc. (Those are the two I’ve dealt with, and they’re free to upload your book.) IngramSpark also does print-on-demand books (I think there might be a fee involved for setting up, and they’re based in the US, so not that useful for other countries including Canada); Draft2Digital is another ebook publisher that has recently merged with Smashwords. Those are just some options.
6.) Format your manuscript for ebook and print (the self-publishing platforms will tell you how). You’ll need to create a .pdf or .docx for the print version and a .doc or .epub for the ebook.
7.) Upload your manuscript.
8.) Enter all the relevant information the publishing platform asks for (tags, keywords, blurbs, pricing etc.). Again, they’ll tell you how.
9.) Hit “Publish”.
10.) YOU HAVE PUBLISHED A BOOK!!!
And that, technically, concludes our series “So You Want to Write a Book?”—because now, YOU HAVE ACTUALLY WRITTEN A BOOK! That’s fantastic, and I’m immensely proud of you. Next time we meet, let’s trade: I give you one of mine, you give me one of yours. And we’ll sign them for each other, because that’s what authors do!
But, actually, that brings me to one more chapter. Now that you’ve written this book… or actually, maybe you haven’t written the book quite yet, after all. Maybe you’re not quite there yet. Maybe you want to start being a writer, but writing a full-fledged novel isn’t quite in your wheelhouse, or it’s too overwhelming at this point. But you want to be a writer.
So what else could you be doing on the writing front? How can you live the writer’s life?
Stay tuned…
…TO BE CONTINUED…