How to Self-Publish Without Going Broke

HOW TO SELF-PUBLISH

WITHOUT GOING BROKE

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J.U. SCRIBE

Copyright © 2020 by Joseph Umeseaka

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying form without written permission of the publisher or author. The exception would be in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the author.

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Editors: Ellen Bitterman and Celestian Rince

Cover Design: Josh Ligenza

First edition

Table of Contents

Introduction

1: Have a Plan

2: Crafting Your Best Manuscript

3: Self-Editing

4: Beta Reader

5: Editing

6: Title

7: Description/Blurb

8: Cover Design

9: Copyright

10: Distribution

11: Formatting

12: Categories and Keywords

13: Marketing

14: Pricing

15: Publish

16: Post Publishing

Additional Resources

References

Acknowledgment

About the Author

Introduction

There’s a phenomenon happening, and you are part of it.

According to Forbes magazine, between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books are published every year (Forbes 2013)! Hypothetically if those figures are true for 2020 that means on average 91 books will have been published in the next hour just in the US alone! Since that figure was taken, we have seen even more growth. And of those new books, it is estimated that at least half of them are from self-published writers.

Perhaps you have a manuscript you’ve been working on for months or years and you want the world to know about this book. You want to take readers on your character’s journey, experience their triumphs and failures, and to pull at their heartstrings till they can’t get enough. Or maybe you have valuable information to share that will solve your readers’ problems and enrich their lives. You then took the traditional route. You queried for an agent only to be rejected again and again after each query letter. Or maybe you bristled at the idea that you would relinquish creative control over the final product. From the cover design to the royalty, you want full creative control. That drives many to self-publish. That’s why you’re reading this.

By choosing this route you are changing the publishing industry. The decision to self-publish gives you more creative license to publish the story the way you envision it vs. the traditional publishing model. And now it’s even easier for anyone to publish a book online. No longer are agents the guardians over what gets published. Nor does being self-published hinder your chance of producing a bestseller. What do The Martian or Fifty Shades of Grey have in common? Self-published writers wrote both. And both have enjoyed enormous success in the publishing world, even spawning Hollywood movie adaptations.

You could argue there are many advantages to self-publishing, with the freedom to carve your own path being high on the list. But with more freedom, comes more responsibility. As a self-publisher, you are now responsible for the editing, formatting, cover design, and marketing of your book. 

The landscape of publishing has changed even from the first time I self-published back in 2013. Back then it was easier to break into the market. After launching a free run promotion for my eBook, I rose to #1 in this category: Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children’s eBooks > Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths > Greek & Roman. I even racked up thousands of downloads in less than three days. Years later I admit it’s become harder to replicate that success now that the market for each genre and subgenre is more crowded.

You will be judged not only against a traditionally published book with a publishing press supporting the book but also hundreds of thousands of self-published books. Unless you are a celebrity, famous political figure, or popular author like Stephen King or JK Rowling with huge followings the question becomes: how are you going to compete in this ever-changing, competitive market? Without a clear vision of who your book is for, how to write and package your book in a way that your readers want to buy it, and how to position it in front of them, your book will get lost in the shuffle. For a writer, obscurity is almost as bad as if not worse than getting poor reviews. This is the grim reality for most writers breaking into this industry.

How can you ensure that your path to self-publishing is successful? The answer can vary depending on who you ask. There’s lots of advice scattered across the web and many how-to books written on this subject. Over the last seven years, I encountered the same issues many writers faced, including attracting readers and getting sales. So, I did my homework on the market and the publishing process. I learned the hard way about what worked and what didn’t and put together a comprehensive step-by-step guide that’s simple enough for anyone to follow. As you read this guide, you will learn the distinct steps involved in self-publishing from writing, editing, formatting, cover design, distribution, and more. You will learn not only the mechanics of self-publishing but also insider best practices and how to do it right so you can attract more readers and get more sales. By creating a plan, I will prepare you for your next book launch without going broke.

1: Have a Plan

With all things in life, we need to design and follow a plan if we want to accomplish anything. Without a plan, our wish just becomes a mere dream. But when we create a plan, our wish can become reality. The best time to draft a self-publishing plan is as early as possible.

A lot of variables go into how successful your book will be, and some of those variables are out of your control. For example, you can’t control someone’s preference for a certain writing style, topic, sensitivities, or given mood, all of which can affect their purchasing habits. By focusing on what you can plan, you’re able to provide the absolute best position for your book to succeed.

Most writers have already planned out how they will write the book, like setting up a timeline or storyboard. In the infancy of your story, you started with an idea before you wrote it. Then you built on that story idea by outlining the plot, the transitions between each scene, then the main and side characters, their story arcs, and then any world-building (if this is fiction). If your writing is nonfiction, you did your research on the topic from reliable sources, gathered the facts, and determined how you wanted to organize the information coherently and logically.

This is something I expect most writers would do in varying degrees of detail. If you planned out your story well, it will help you iron out most content and structural issues. However, the thrust of this chapter is on planning how you will sell your book. Let’s assume you already planned out the actual story and now you are thinking about taking that next step to self-publish. If you’re reading this book and are already writing or nearing completion of your story, now would be a critical time to formulate a plan for self-publishing. The planning stage is the first and the most important step in the publishing journey.

Unfortunately, this step is often glossed over or skipped altogether by new writers, including myself. This can be a very grave mistake for writers. Rushing through the process often results in many careless mistakes being made. The result is often a half-baked book that comes across as unprofessional, cheap, and poorly written to readers. This will cost you in lost revenue and poor reviews, not to mention untold frustration. After seven years of being in this industry, I know firsthand the struggle to make sales because I hadn’t planned out how I would execute each step in the publishing process.

As a writer, I challenge you to do two things. First, you need to back up for a minute and set goals for yourself. Is your goal to land on the New York Times best-seller list or support yourself full time from your writing? Or maybe your goals are more modest. Perhaps you see this as a side venture or a way to make extra cash on the side. Your goal for your book may differ from the next writer. After all, success is how you define it. If you have an ambitious goal, start with smaller goals. They can serve as benchmarks that make reaching a larger goal more attainable.

Whatever goal you decide on, you need to make a plan and put it in writing. Without a concrete plan about how you will reach your publishing goals, you may flounder in this ever-changing, competitive market. It then becomes critical to have a clear vision of who your book is for and how to get it in front of your readers.

During this early publishing stage, you should be able to answer the who, what, where, when, why, and how of your approach. Let’s look at some of the most important questions that you would want to answer before you get too far along in the process:

Why are you publishing?

What is the book for?

Who is the book for?

When will you publish it?

Where will you publish the book?

How will you publish?

These aren’t the only questions you need to ask yourself. Rather, this should form the basis for the other questions you will need to address in your plan. But if you can’t answer any of these basic questions, you need to stop where you are and go back to the drawing board before you hit publish because you’re not ready. I would recommend coming up with the plan before you even write your book. Why do I say that?

Consider the first question: Why are you publishing? Knowing why you are publishing will help you have a clear aim of not only what you hope to get out of this but what your readers will gain from reading your book. You want readers to get a sense of purpose or value in your work if you want to motivate them to buy your book. As a writer, knowing the why will shape your goals. As a writer, having a plan early on helps you stay focused on your goals and gives you a tangible path to reach them.

That ties into the second question: What is the book for? The answer to this question will help you determine the best way to describe your book so you can pitch it to anyone with confidence. Knowing the answer will also help you in figuring out the exact category/subcategory of your book and later in choosing a title. Being aware of this early on will shape the choices you will need to make in writing the book to appeal to a specific market.

That leads to the next question: Who is the book for? This question alone should prompt you to identify your target audience. Knowing your audience could help you determine whether there will be a demand for the type of book you write. Knowing the demand for your genre/subgenre and the size of that audience could be an indicator of the number of sales you can expect to make. When researching genres that make the most money, romance ranks #1 as the highest-selling genre on Amazon Kindle. This genre is a billion-dollar industry. Other genres that sell well are crime/mystery/thrillers, religious/inspirational, and fantasy.

Within each genre are smaller subgenres, which we often call a niche market or niche for short. This is a focused subcategory catered to a particular market need. For example, within mystery, you have a large audience. Within that wide umbrella, you have mystery lovers with varying tastes. Some mystery fans love heart-pounding, gritty thriller/mysteries like Gone Girl or Girl on A Train. Others prefer something light and cozy, hence a cozy mystery. For those not familiar with that niche, a cozy mystery is not as intense as the examples listed above but still contains enough elements of mystery to keep fans satisfied. An example of a cozy mystery is A Knead to Kill: Apple Orchard Cozy Mystery Book 1.5 by Chelsea Thomas. Even though the cozy mystery has a smaller share of the mystery market, there is still a growing market for it because there are enough people out there who want to read that subset of mystery.

Knowing there is a smaller market for a particular genre shouldn’t stop you from writing what you want. On the flip side, knowing early on can help you set realistic expectations for your book and even tailor your book to your target audience’s expectations.

Conversely, without knowing your target audience, you won’t know to whom or how to market your book. You will have a much harder time marketing your book without an audience to read it. These are two things that could happen if the intended audience or content is unclear to the reader: 1) it will go largely ignored 2) readers who have no appreciation for your genre/subgenre or your style of writing will rate it poorly because they thought it was one genre when they first purchased it only to discover it wasn’t what they expected.

As I’ll mention later on in this book, marketing can be pricey (depending on the methods you use), not to mention time-consuming! So, you want to make your marketing efforts count. To save you precious time, energy, and resources, it’s better to direct your efforts to the people that are more likely to read it.

Identifying your target audience involves narrowing down a specific audience. Think about who you are trying to appeal to. Is it young middle-class housewives, millennial male hipsters, or young preschool children? While there may be some overlap in certain