The Tedious Details of Self-Publishing

Self-publishing is a great option for authors who want to really focus on getting their book out quickly and retain complete control over the editing, publishing, and marketing processes of writing a book.

I like self-publishing a lot and have had the wonderful opportunity to be both self-published and traditionally published, so I can really understand both options and all of the advantages and disadvantages of each.

I enjoyed both!

But since how I publish each of my books really boils down to the goals of the book and what it is best suited for, my next book (coming out 11/26!) will be self-published.

There are tons of reasons to self-publish a book, and while the timeline, money, and control are the three main elements that often drive the decision between the two publishing options, it’s also about what you want the book to DO for you.

Anyway, I decided to self-publish Concept to Conclusion, and I am once again reminded of the more tedious details of self-publishing.

As you likely already know, self-publishing is self-funded, and you get to pick your own editor, cover designer, formatter, and any other service you use.

To actually self-publish an ebook on Amazon, all you need is your front cover image, your formatted manuscript as EPUB or MOBI format, and your book description/back cover copy.

You also need to know what two categories you want it in, the price you want to set, and whether or not you want it in KDP Select, but those details are during the upload process.

When I say tedious details, I am referring mostly to cover design and formatting.

With your cover, you need to come up with a concept for it, but then once you have a design direction, then it’s all about tweaking and playing with it until it’s perfect. In my case, it went from “I like the idea of 4 photos and a middle part with the title” to “I want to move the photos to this different order” to “I want to change out the first photo” to “The color needs correcting, two of the photos are too dark” to the tiny details, like “The coffee cup has a weird brown rim, can that be removed?” and “Change the word ‘conclusion’ to be a few shades darker” and so on.

It’s YOUR cover. You can have your designer change and move things until it’s exactly what you want, but you often don’t know exactly what you want until you see it and find things you don’t like about it.

As for interior book formatting, that covers EVERYTHING outside of the actual content you wrote. Fonts, page numbers, links, bold/italics, graphics, sidebars, drop lettering, and much more.

Everything.

And not only do you first need to identify what you want and then review the initial samples and make changes until it’s exactly what you want, THEN the tedious part comes in: going through the final samples in all formats page by page, line by line to make sure everything is right and nothing looks wonky.

I received the final versions of my ebook yesterday after the final sample of the entire book was approved.

There were issues. Page by page, line by line, I went through all 3 formats.

My email back to the formatter included gems like “ In chapter one, page 18, under ‘refining your concept’ the words look weird and stretched out” and “page 35, the top part of the sidebar lines are on the bottom of page 35 instead of with the words on page 36” and “ page 36, in that entire sidebar, there are 3 different font sizes. I want it all to be one size font throughout the sidebar.”

Yes, THAT level of tedious.

Writing a book is often not the most time-consuming or even necessarily the most difficult part of being a published author. Sometimes, it’s all about the details — and not just knowing I need a live hyperlink on page 99 — sometimes it can be the bigger details of knowing cover designers and formatters you trust and taking the time to go through everything line by line to make sure it’s exactly what you want.

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