CHAPTER 2
Self-Publishing Essentials: The Dos and Don’ts of
Publishing Your Book
Book publishing has a lot of moving parts. The longer I’m in the business, the more I understand how complicated it can be for a first-timer. The goal of this chapter (and of the whole book, really) is to educate you enough about the big-picture parts of the process so that you (a) know what to look out for, (b) realize how important it is to work with individuals or companies that know their stuff, and (c) have the tools you need to find the right individuals and companies and avoid those eager to take advantage of you.
I am an expert in viewing book publishing in a healthy, realistic way. I am also an expert in giving people honest advice and feedback about the process. I am not an expert in editing, cover design, formatting, or the other technical aspects of the publishing process. I am, however, an expert in finding people who are experts in these areas and hiring them. Unless you have a wealth of experience with each step of the publishing process, listen to people who do. I promise you, it’s the smartest thing you will do as you publish your book.
If an experienced cover designer tells you why the cover you want won’t work, or your editor tells you to cut out the parts of your novel that come across like a fifth-grade history lesson, take the advice. You might think, “Well, everyone I’ve shown this to says it’s great.” Unless “everyone” is in the book publishing industry, listen to the experts. Your family, friends, and acquaintances will always tell you what you want to hear.
The “essentials” in this chapter need to be injected deep into your brain. Until you commit these to memory, no other part of the process matters. If you ever speak with me on the phone, you are going to hear what I’m writing now. This is my gospel. It’s important. Really.
Your Credit Card Company Called—It Wants Its Limit Back
The most important component of the entire self-publishing process is one that you have complete knowledge of and control over: your budget. You’ve already read the statistics about book publishing success. Will your book be one of the 96 percent that sell less than 1,000 copies, or one of the 4 percent that sell more? Your book’s quality needs to compete with that top 4 percent, but your budget needs to be set based on the chances that you’ll be in the other 96 percent.
This is the point in the process where you need to have a heart-to— heart with yourself, dig deep, and decide whether you’re really going to go for it, merely dip your toe into the publishing pool, or something in between. There’s no right or wrong approach, so long as your expectations are in line with your expenditure. Despite the widely held belief that if you put your book on Amazon, readers will come, the publishing business doesn’t work that way. You need time and money to market your book. Yes, there are the authors who sold a million copies out of their car trunk or became an overnight sensation. When you’re setting a budget, assume you won’t be one of them.
Your budget for the entire publishing process (including editing, printing, and marketing) should be a dollar amount that will not cause you to lose sleep at night. If you’re lucky, you might make it back over a few years. There’s a better chance that you may never see any of it again. And yes, you must budget in something for editing (see the next section).
If you can spend $15,000 to $20,000 on your book, you will have a much better chance of getting noticed than if you spend $2,000. But never spend more than you can comfortably afford. Don’t sell anything to publish your book. Don’t dip into your child’s college fund. Don’t mortgage your house. Don’t take a cash advance on your credit card. Think with your wallet.
Money spent on self-publishing is like going-to-Vegas money (at least for me). I like to play blackjack. When I go to Vegas, I take a specific amount of money that I’ve saved up just for gambling. If I blow it on the first day, I’m not standing in line at the ATM when the clock strikes midnight so I can take out more cash. If I go home with the money I brought or more, I consider it a success. If I lose all the money I brought, it doesn’t affect my day-to-day life because I planned and budgeted around it. I don’t want to lose, but I acknowledge and accept the possibility that I will.
No matter how good you think your book is, don’t spend a penny more than you can afford to lose. If anyone tries to tell you something different, you’re getting played.
It’s the Editing, Stupid
Just like Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign had one basic message—“It’s the economy, stupid”—so should the self-publishing industry: it’s the editing, stupid.
A poorly edited book is a waste of time and money. Every dollar you spend promoting a sloppy book might as well be thrown out a window to be enjoyed by lucky passersby. If you intend your book to be read by anyone other than your family and friends, you need to pay for the most extensive editing that you can afford. Depending on the budget you’ve set, all or most of it could (and maybe should) be consumed by editing. Don’t skimp on editing just so you can publish your book now. The world has waited this long for your book; it can wait until it’s edited. If you can only afford one or the other, have your book edited now, then save up money to have it published later.
Every time I speak with a new author, the first thing I ask is whether his or her book has been professionally edited. For some reason, many authors tell me what they think I want to hear and try to rationalize how certain individuals are just as good as a professional editor. Just to be clear, the following individuals are not professional book editors:
All books need editing. Even if you’ve had a professional editor edit your book before you started the publication process, you’ll still want fresh eyes on your manuscript prior to publication, because between the time you submit the edited manuscript and the time that the final proof is sent to you, changes will likely have been made. These changes might occur when you apply a copyeditor’s suggestion or during the formatting process. If no one is reviewing those changes, all of the money you spent on the initial rounds of editing will have been wasted.
Books put out by major publishers go through many rounds of editing before publication. In self-publishing, that is unrealistic, unless you have a huge budget, but you should still shoot for at least two rounds. (An additional proofread of the typeset manuscript is even better.) If you have just one round of editing, who is going to review the changes you make based on the editor’s suggestions or comments?
Editing is the part of the publishing process that we authors hate the most. You have to pay someone to point out all of your errors, and then have to spend more time working on what you thought was a nearly finished book. But if you want to be taken seriously as an author, you have to suck it up, get out the checkbook, and pay for professional editing.
Finding a reliable, reputable editor can be tough. An association of editors is a great place to start. Go to www.bookpublisherscompared.com/book-editors and you’ll find links to book editing associations and other reputable book editors and editing services. Quality self-publishing companies will also have solid pools of editors. Many publishing and writers’ associations have lists of editors, too. Remember, you want to find an editor whose main editing focus is on books. Editing for a magazine and editing a book, while related in some ways, aren’t the same. It’s like tennis and racquetball: both games use a racquet, but everything else is different.
My book, the one you’re reading right now, went through four rounds of editing by three different editors. I only tell you this to stress the importance of good editing. Without it, your book is DOA.
Publishing is a tough business, and you won’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Don’t blow it.
Your Book Is Not for “Everybody”
If you’ve ever said or thought, “My book is for everybody,” erase that notion from your mind. No book is for “everybody.” And, just narrowing “everybody” from literally everybody to groups like all parents, all Hispanic-Americans, or all people suffering from a specific disease doesn’t mean your book will appeal to everyone in that more concise, but still broad, demographic.
Knowing who your most likely reader will be is such a critical aspect of the publishing process. The earlier in the writing process you can target your book to the people most likely to buy it, the better. If you haven’t figured out just who your core audience is before you have the book edited, a good editor should be able to help you more clearly define your intended audience and shape your manuscript accordingly.
Inexperienced authors tend to assume the potential audience for their book is much larger than it actually is. One woman writing an autobiography told me that her book was for “all women, ages fourteen to ninety.” Unless the fourteen-year-old and the ninety-year-old are both closely related to the author, they probably do not share the same interest in books.
A few years ago, I worked with a sixty-five-year-old male author who wrote a book about the perils of dating. As I started discussing marketing approaches and how we could target people within ten years of his age, he stopped me abruptly and said, “My book is for anyone who has had bad dating experiences.” I asked, “So, a twenty-eight-year-old woman could identify with a book chronicling the recent dating experiences of a sixty-five-year-old man?” His answer? “Yes.”
His approach made his book difficult to market. Retailers asked the same question that I did and didn’t order the book. By naively believing that anyone who’d ever been on a date would be part of his core audience, this author cast the marketing net too wide and ended up with minuscule results.
Every part of the book publishing process depends on who the core audience is. When designing your book cover, you need to keep in mind who the likely reader will be. One test I use is to imagine my ideal reader reading my book on an airplane. If he or she would hide the cover because they were embarrassed by the title or cover art, that’s a problem.
Since so many new authors write self-help books and memoirs, there are a few things you need to know about the audience for those genres. These kinds of books are purchased by people who find the book’s message relevant to their lives. One example of a book that may seem relevant to a large audience, but ultimately has limited commercial potential, is a book on how to keep your children safe from predators. You’d think that every parent would want a copy of that book, right? Few will buy it, however, because it’s not something parents want to think about unless they have to. As a consumer, if your family hasn’t experienced a situation similar to that of a particular self-help book or memoir, you aren’t as likely to buy the book.
Even when a book does have a targeted audience of readers who have gone through the same experience as the author, these buyers may not want to be reminded of the shared experience. We worked with an author who wrote about his child’s life and subsequent death from cystic fibrosis. It is a beautifully written book, but the audience for it is limited. The author assumed that parents with children struggling with the disease would buy the book. They didn’t, because no parent wants to think about the potential death of their child.
With fiction, your book may straddle more than one genre. For example, a Western with an alien invasion subplot may also appeal to traditional science fiction fans. Adding a new twist to an old genre can help get people interested. But, when it comes time to market your book, you’ll need to decide which genre (and subgenre) your book either fits in or is closest to. Plenty of blogs and websites focus on various genres, and those can be great places to concentrate marketing efforts and seek out potential new fans.
Regardless of your promotional budget, you’ll need to know who your core reader is so you can start marketing the book to them. As more and more people from your core audience read the book and spread the word, your audience will become broader.
Always keep your core audience in mind. Write for them, and market to them first. If they don’t love your book, why would the casual reader?
Just Because Your Friends and Family Coo Over Your Book Doesn’t Mean It’s Good
Chances are, you’ve already shown your manuscript to friends and family, who probably all love and care about you. That doesn’t mean they love your book, despite what they tell you.
The first rule in determining whether your book is marketable is to disregard everything your friends and family say about it. I’ve read work written by my friends and even I can’t tell them the brutal truth like I can when I don’t know the writer personally.
A few years ago, a friend of mine told me she had a book idea about a recent girls’ trip to Mexico, where she and her friends wore a lot of matching T-shirts and drank like college kids on spring break. They wanted to write a book about their “crazy” exploits with the title It’s Called Mexi-Can, Not Mexi-Can’t. I’m not even sure what that meant. All I knew was that the whole idea was terrible. There is no market for a book about a week-long trip to Mexico where the most interesting thing that happened is that the main characters stayed up until two in the morning and drank too much—and if there were, that title would kill it. The publishing-minded version of me would say, “This is a terrible idea. Don’t spend a dime to publish this.” But the friends-and-family version of me said, “Sounds like a fun story. I’d try it as a blog first and see if you get any traction.”
The moral of this story is that while friends and family can be encouraging, you should not use their encouragement to calculate the commercial potential of your book.
He Who Designs His Own Cover or Interior Has a Fool for a Designer
As the saying goes, we all judge books by their covers, and this is especially true for actual books. A bad cover will kill your book. The book might be brilliant, but a cover that looks cheap and cheesy tells the world, “Hey, the rest of this thing is as crappy as the outside.”
What you see in your head is not necessarily what the book-buying public wants to see. If you are creating the book just for your immediate circle of friends and family, do whatever you want. But if you want someone who has never met you to buy the book, get professional help in designing your cover.
So many bad covers popped into my head while writing this section. One of my favorite “before and after” cover stories involves a dating advice book for alpha males. There are only a few potential audiences for this book: women who are in relationships with alpha males; women who plan to give this book to the alpha male in their lives; and the occasional alpha male who thinks the book may help him find love (or at least make him appear sensitive). The author was extremely credentialed and the book was well written. She insisted that her front cover depict six males from different walks of life (a shirtless construction worker, a doctor, a businessman, etc.), each with a scantily clad woman hanging off his arm. The only thing preventing it from looking like a Village People album cover was the lack of a uniformed cop and an Indian chief.
No straight man would be caught reading a book with that cover. Not in a million years. I like to think of myself as the target audience for this book: I’m an alpha male who hasn’t had a lot of relationship success. In my most desperate dating hour, however, I wouldn’t be caught dead reading a book with a cover like that. It fails the “airplane test.” As an author, you don’t want to produce a book that people will only read while hiding.
For this particular book, we designed a clean, modern cover with a silhouette of a man wearing a suit. Thanks to its updated Mad Men vibe, the book looked like one that a guy like me would want to be seen reading. The title, subtitle, and cover art announced, “Behind this book is an alpha male looking for love.” If I were reading that book on a plane and an attractive woman sat beside me, I’d make sure she caught a glimpse of the cover we’d designed.
I made the author a bet that if she emailed both cover designs (ours and the Village People one) to everyone she knew, and more than 30 percent of her friends liked hers better, I’d fly to her hometown across the country and take her out for dinner.
I never had to book the flight.
The interior design of a book is just as crucial as the cover. There is a lot more to interior formatting than just slapping the text together and bolding a few things. If you want your book to be taken seriously by the industry, it needs to be formatted in the standard ways that book retailers and wholesalers expect.
Many important items need to be considered when formatting, like font choice. Most books use a serif font for ease of reading, while a sans-serif font is used for things like charts, graphs, and headings. Other design elements to consider are leading (the space between the lines of text) and kerning (the space between the letters).
Outside of the text itself, a number of style settings need to be addressed in order to create a professional and clean interior. For example, the margins for a book with one hundred pages should be different from those of a book with four hundred pages to accommodate the gutter (the white space between the facing pages when the book is opened). Page numbers throughout different sections of the book are treated differently, as well. For example, the front matter/introductory sections may use lowercase Roman numerals, and the actual content Arabic numerals. Section and chapter headings are also an important part of the formatting process, as are page headers and footers. Widows and orphans (partial or single words that dangle at the beginning of a page or the end of a paragraph) are sometimes overlooked by those who aren’t professional formatters, but like everything else mentioned above, these details can’t be ignored.
Many authors attempt to format their books themselves. But formatting is an art; while the public might not notice that you extended the margins to lower the page count and save on printing, the buyers for retailers and wholesalers will know the second they crack open your book. Unless you are an actual book designer, leave this to the pros.
Your Book Is Not the Only Project Your Self-Publishing Company Is Working On
Many authors think, “My book is the most important thing your company is publishing and I can be as rude as I want to be.”
No, you can’t.
Most individuals and companies that provide self-publishing services are really trying hard to give you the best products and services they can. Because many authors who choose to self-publish are unfamiliar with the publishing process, frustration can set in early and often. The good companies attempt to lay all of this out on their websites and in their publishing contracts, but most authors never take the time to read the contracts they sign.
Let’s assume, for instance, that a publishing contract says that if an author has approved the final interior proof of the book, but wants to make more textual changes after approval, there is a fee of $50 per hour to implement these changes. The author has signed this contract, has approved his final interior proof, and then decides he wants to make some changes to his text. The author emails the publisher and says, “Oh, I noticed these few things. Please change them.” The publisher responds, “Sure, but we’ll need to charge you $50 per hour to do this. We anticipate it will be about an hour’s worth of work.” The author then writes, “I am so sick of being nickel-and-dimed by you people. If someone would have told me about these extra fees, I would have reviewed the book more carefully!”
I’ve seen hundreds of variations of this. Whose fault is it? The author’s—especially if everything is spelled out in the contract.
Read your contract. Understand the fees before you sign. Don’t go ballistic when you realize you legitimately owe a fee for additional work.
Authors often forget that publishing companies and service providers are working with many authors, all at various stages of production, so something that you think “should take two seconds” may take a few days to schedule in.
If you’re the kind of person who easily flies off the handle, your publishing experience will not be a good one. Editors, formatters, designers—everyone makes mistakes. If you open your proof and your interior is in a different font than the one you expected, it can be fixed. The world is not ending.
We had an author whose book was nationally distributed and sold to retailers with a firm release date of August 2. This author decided in mid-July that he wanted to make tweaks to his final interior. We kept telling him that he needed to let go or the book would never be on the shelves for the August 2 release date—a printer will only move so fast. The author didn’t listen. We ended up rushing the print job, and by July 30, his books were on their way to the retailers. But Amazon.com didn’t have the book in stock by August 2, because they had just received inventory and probably hadn’t had a chance to enter the book into their system yet. The author called and emailed nonstop, screaming about how his book wasn’t available. He had a lawyer write an email claiming that we were in breach of contract and that his client had suffered emotional damage knowing that his book wasn’t listed as available on Amazon by August 2.
Guess what happened the next day when his book appeared as in stock on Amazon? He felt like an idiot for having a temper tantrum. Please don’t behave like this. It’s unbecoming and unprofessional.
Books Do Not Have to Be Hardcovers to Be Taken Seriously
The only people telling you that your book must be a hardcover to be taken seriously are the ones trying to convince you to print a hardcover version so they can make more money off you. You have to print some serious volume in hardcover to get the cost per unit low enough to result in a reasonable retail price. When printed on demand in small runs, a hardcover can add almost $8.00 per unit on top of the other print costs. So, in many cases, your book will have to retail near $30.00 for you to make a few dollars.
What a self-published hardcover does ensure is that a bookstore will not even think about taking a chance on it. Why not? The price. Who is going to buy a $25+ hardcover book from an unknown author? No one, assuming we aren’t including your friends and family. Think about it from the bookstore’s position: an unknown author with an expensive book equals wasted shelf space. Back in the day, a hardcover was seen as an opportunity to get coverage and reviews in anticipation of the paperback release. But as publishing strategies change (like forgoing hardcovers for paperback originals to make the price point more appealing, and publishing simultaneous print and e-book releases), and as those review sources continue to disappear, producing a hardcover is rarely worth the expense. Even if you can afford to print large quantities in hardcover, save the money and use it on marketing, instead.
If you think that the general reading public is less price-conscious than bookstores, think again. The public has lots of reading options today and few people are risking $25 or more on an unknown commodity. Don’t take my word for it. Ask your friends and colleagues to name the last hardcover book they purchased from a self-published author.
I have a real-life example of hardcover hell. In 2011, an author of ours was publishing a brilliant first novel. It was one of the best books we’d ever worked on, and we hired an outside sales rep team to work directly with the buyers at major retailers in hopes of getting the book instores. Barnes & Noble was interested. This guy was about to beat the odds. Then, during a conference call, much to the surprise of our PR team and outside sales reps, the author announced that, on his own, he had printed up 1,500 hardcover copies of his book. There was dead silence. Barnes & Noble had agreed to take the book with the understanding that it would be a paperback edition with a much lower price point. The chain knew it could not move the higher-priced edition. In order to keep the Barnes & Noble order alive, the author had to print paperback copies as we had originally instructed him to do. My guess is that most of those 1,500 hardcovers are only seen today by critters that scurry about his suburban garage.
Do Not Rush Your Book Just to Have It Out by a Certain Date
Rushing a book almost always results in errors that could have been avoided. The world has been waiting all this time for your book to come out. Trust me, it can wait another few months for you to do it right.
By the time your book is ready to be released, you will have spent a lot of time and money. You’ll be eager to see it in lights (well, at least on Amazon), and sometimes that excitement can override common sense. Review the final proof carefully. Yes, you will have looked at the contents a million times by then. Please, review your work carefully one more time. Make sure your marketing plan is solidly in place, and take a deep breath. Another few days or weeks in the grand scheme of things will not make a difference.
Another bad idea is rushing to get the book out because its topic is related to an event or holiday (e.g., releasing a relationship book on Valentine’s Day). Traditional publishers release certain types of books during specific times of year. For example, commercial fiction is often released in the summer to take advantage of beach reads and summer travel, or in the fall in anticipation of the holidays. Weight-loss books are often released in January, to make the most of New Year’s resolutions. You get the point. Traditional publishers rarely release books from unknown authors during these big release periods as they don’t want these authors to get lost in the crowd. Guess what happens when you release your book at the same time all the big boys are releasing theirs?
So, yeah, I get that you have a relationship book and that Valentine’s Day seems like the perfect time for a launch. Unless that launch is backed by a big marketing budget, rushing to get it out around a specific date likely will not amount to many extra sales for you.
Of course, there are always those cases where the bulk of sales will be tied to a very specific promotional opportunity, in which case it may be necessary to set a very specific publication date. Major publishers frequently rush books—but they also have the resources to ensure that a rushed schedule doesn’t negatively affect the quality of the finished product. In the self-publishing world, you are responsible for making sure your desired publication date will be feasible based on the self-publisher’s timelines and on your own availability, as you will need to factor in time to attend to the various approval and revision steps along the way.
When you publish a book, you are throwing a pebble into the ocean. Aiming for a specific date is a good goal in terms of motivating yourself to get through the process, but a given date won’t make a big-enough ripple in sales to sacrifice the quality checks needed to make your book viable in the long term.
Final Thoughts on the Dos and Don’ts of Publishing Your Book
What I’ve said in this chapter is the stuff that matters most—the self-publishing essentials. Most of it I learned the hard way. Some of it I learned by watching authors learn the hard way. If you skimmed this chapter, read it more thoroughly. If you read it thoroughly, read it again.