The Self-Publishing Checklist

Self-publishing is a process that, at first, seems pretty straight forward. You write a book, and then you print the book. Boom. You’re an author. Can’t be much more complicated than that, right?

…right?

Like anything, the self-publishing process might appear easy at first glance, but the further in you get, the more decisions you’ll need to make and the more complex the situation will become. However, hundreds of other aspiring authors have gone through the pain of learning the process for us, so instead of suffering needlessly on our own, how’s about we let THEIR suffering guide us, hmm?

This article attempts to lay out some general guidelines and expectations for the self-publishing process, but won’t go into each step in great depth. Those steps will eventually become the subject of future posts. Instead, the goal will be to set fledgling authors up with a basic checklist of steps and the knowledge of what’s to come so they do things in the right order, at the right time, and don’t miss out on anything important until it becomes inconvenient to solve.

Note: I’m still working my way though this process myself, so this article will be an evolving work. I have, however, gone out of way to listen to some very experienced people and am fairly confident in what lies below.

A Step-by-Step Guide

Step 1: Write Your Rough Draft

None of the rest of the steps matter if you can’t get to the end of your rough draft! You’ve got to HAVE a book to PUBLISH a book. GET. IT. DONE. It doesn’t matter what state it’s in, as long as you’ve made it to the end.

Need a helpful push to move you along on this step? Check out the article, For First Drafts, Roughness is the Goal, also on my blog.

Step 2: Build Your Following

A lot of would-be authors think they shouldn’t start reaching out to the world and building or finding a community until they have a successful book. After all, if you don’t have a product, what will you have to talk about? Without a published novel, won’t people think you’re a poser? Full of hot air? All talk, no action?

Well, maybe, but that’s not the point. You see, if people don’t know you and what you’re about, the chances of them coming across your works are exceedingly low, and the chances of them buying them once they do are even lower. Without an established reputation as a wordsmith of renown, people can’t decide to buy your book based on what you’ve already done, so they have to judge whether to buy your book based on who you present yourself to be. And without some online presence and some diplomatic work on your part, you’re just some nobody screaming into the void.

Once you’ve finished that rough draft, it’s time to start reaching out to people. Hell, maybe even before you finish, as long as building your following doesn’t distract from finishing that rough draft. Build a Facebook page. Create a Twitter or Instagram account. Develop a webpage. Interact with indie book or genre-specific communities.

Put yourself out there. Communicate. Interact. Support. LOVE ON PEOPLE. Make yourself useful, and making talking about your upcoming book secondary to just getting to know people and making friends. This will help get eyes on your release when the time comes.

Step 3: Get Some Feedback

Look. Let’s get real. Everyone has ideas, but only a small percentage of ideas are actually any good. I once had the idea to make chocolate eggs. Eggs, scrambled, with chocolate powder. It was terrible. My friends regularly remind me of just how awful they really were. I was a bachelor, and I was hungry and broke. I MAKE NO APOLOGIES.

Oh, yeah. Ideas. Some are just downright terrible, and often times, the only way to figure that out is to pitch it to a few other people and measure their reactions.

Your rough draft might – in many ways – be terrible. Maybe you don’t actually have a story. Maybe your characters are boring or unlikable. Maybe your plot is just silly. MAYBE it’s just Star Wars but with talking wombats in a world filled with carnivorous bananas. I don’t know, maybe that last one would make an AWESOME story, but it’s quite possible I won’t know until I lay it out and someone else reads it.

If you have access to some intelligent, altruistic, trustworthy individuals, now is the time to have them weigh in on the gist of your manuscript. Does your idea work, or does it need work, or should you start a different project? Before you get too far in, too invested, this is something you need to know. Hey, maybe you can find someone or two in that community you’ve been building to help you out here.

You HAVE been building a community…right?

Step 4: Write Your Second Draft/Third Draft/Ect.

With the knowledge that your idea is sound and your story is interesting and your characters don’t immediately put your readers to sleep, now you can really go to work on your novel. Sharpen up that plot. Put in logical section breaks. Gussy up that prose. Develop relationships. MAKE SMALLER PARAGRAPHS.

Ahem.

Now you’re doing the hard work. By the time you’re done here, you’ve got a product worth being proud of.

Step 5: Get It To Some Editors

You are going to make mistakes, and it’s highly likely you won’t even see them when you’re looking for them. This is why editors are SO important. Their jobs are to pour through your manuscript, one line at a time, in search of grammar, spelling, tone, and readability mistakes.

This is an INTEGRAL step to the process. Self-published works have a reputation for being poor quality because many aspiring authors do not spend the time and/or money necessary to ensure their work is presentable and largely error-free. There are many different types of editors available, but at the very least, find yourself a good proofreader. This type of editor will look for grammar and spelling errors, as these mistakes can really destroy any credibility you have with readers. Many people will just put a book down and never pick it back up if they find too many spelling and grammar errors.

This is a good time to put your novel aside and let your mind forget about it a bit before you start working on your final draft.

Step 6: Find An Artist

Despite the cliche, people will indeed judge your book by its cover. Finding an artist is a complicated topic best reserved for an article all it’s own, but there are three main points you’re going to want to cover when decorating your book.

First, you’re going to want to find someone to add graphics and art to your cover. For my first book, Sparking the Inferno, this consists of the coloring, the giant flaming O, and the wire border. The cover art will need to be designed in such a way as to wrap from front to side to back.

Second, and this can be the same person, but you are going to need a layout artist to handle words and their fonts. This means your title and author name, the side matter, the story blurb, the author bio, and any editorial reviews you might eventually obtain.

Third, you might want someone to help you with interior formatting and custom graphics. Section breaks, chapter headings, illustrations, and whatnot all help to grant a unique feel to your novel.

Now, this step will continue to evolve long into the development process and even right up to just prior to your release date. The goal here is to shop around, find the right artist that fits your vision, and tweak tweak tweak until you’ve got it right.

Step 7: Go Over Your Edits

No matter the type of edits you paid for, you’re going to need to check over each one to ensure it really makes sense to change. Sometimes editors will make stylistic suggestions that don’t necessarily fit what you are trying to accomplish. In those cases, it might make sense to either leave it as you initially wrote it, or find a healthy middle ground. Either way, don’t blindly trust your editor. After all, this is YOUR baby.

Step 8: Final Draft?

Go over your novel with a fine-toothed comb. Read it. Does the plot work? Do you need to tweak the dialogue? Does your theme shine through? Is the opening exciting and engaging?

Remember, at some point you HAVE TO PUT THE PEN DOWN. You can tweak forever. Don’t. If you let it, it will never be finished. Choose to be happy with what you have, and move on to the next step.

Step 9 : Get Some Beta Readers

Beta readers are a very important semi-final step to the writing process. These are people to whom you send advanced copies of your book with the hopes of receiving some high-level feedback. Beta readers will often find errors both you and even your editor missed. More so, they can comment on the feel of the novel. They can tell when a scene doesn’t work, when dialogue feels wrong, when characters don’t behave according to their personalities, when the beginning or ending just doesn’t hit right. And…you will need to find people that can and will tell you these things.

Beta readers can be people in your life you trust, or they can be people in the community you’ve built. They can even be part of a service you pay for. Either way, it will take time for them to read and review your book, so you can move on to the next step while you wait.

Last thing: If you know someone that has published a book, someone you respect, someone that people out in the world MIGHT recognize, it might be a good idea to see if you can get them to do an editorial review for you. Basically, an editorial review is a short bit of praise from a trusted source that you can put on the book cover to help convince new readers that your book is worth buying. An endorsement, if you will.

Once you get some good feedback, now you can get to writing your final final draft. You know. Fix things that need fixing, based on feedback. If it makes sense.

Step 10: Write Your Back Matter

By now, you should have a pretty good understanding of what your book is about, so it’s time to write the blurb. What’s a blurb? Well, think about it like an elevator pitch, or the answer to the question, “What’s your book about?” that makes your cringe and panic every time someone asks. A blurb is a short advertisement that is designed to entice prospective readers to buy what you’re selling. A short snippet that poses a question that readers will have to read the book to answer.

In addition to a blub, you should include a little bit about yourself here to tell readers why you are someone they should listen to. Writing accolades, other books you’ve written, or just a general history about what brought you to write a book. Don’t have anything worth talking about? Be creative and memorable. Sometimes that is all it takes.

And finally, if you’ve managed to get some editorial reviews, you’ll want to get those together too. Once all your back matter is written, its time to send it off to your layout artist and have them apply it to your back cover.

Step 11: Choose Your Publishing Service

Hoo-boy. This is a doozy, and will be the subject of MANY articles in the future. Suffice it to say, you are going to have to decide how to get your book out into the world. Some publishers are standalone, meaning if you send your book to them, they will ONLY list it on their service. Others are aggregators, meaning if you publish through them, they will make sure to list it with a large number of other services…for a fee, of course.

It’s very important to do your research here. Luckily, if you start looking early, you’ll be very knowledgeable once you reach this step.

Publishers to look at – Amazon, IngramSpark, Barnes and Noble, Google Publishing, Rakuten Kobo, Apple Books, Blurb, BookBaby.

Aggregators to look at – Smashwords, Draft2Digital, PublishDrive.

Step 12: Get ISBNs/Barcodes

If you are only planning to publish through one service like Amazon or Barnes and IngramSpark, you can basically skip this step. However, if you want to list your book wide and reach as many people as possible, you will need to buy your own ISBNs and barcodes. For MANY reasons that are beyond this brief article. If you want an in-depth breakdown, check out this article, ISBNs – What They Are and Why You Need Them, also on my blog.

Briefly though, an ISBN is a number designed specifically to identify your book. If you don’t buy an ISBN from a service like Bowker, you will have to rely on the ISBN that is provided you through whatever publishing service you choose. The downside in that case is, if you decide to publish through multiple services, you will have to get a brand new ISBN from each new publisher, and that can cause some serious headaches in the long run.

Barcodes are also required for any physical product to so retailers can scan and retrieve the price. Luckily, there are a few places you can find barcodes generators for free…

Step 13: Establish Your Price

The cost of your book is dependent on an NUMBER of factors. Royalty percentage, cost to print (in the case of physical copies), size of the book both in height and width and in number of pages, and how much books of comparable size and genre are charging.

You don’t want to price too high that your royalty percentage drops and no one wants to buy it because it’s too expensive, but you also don’t want to charge too little and devalue your work and eliminate the chance for special deals and sales.

Step 14: Get Your Formatting Right and Submit

Taking the time to organize your book properly can be one of the biggest headaches you deal with as an indie author, but it is INTEGRAL that you get a handle on this process. Once you’ve decided on a publisher, you’ll need to research their individual formatting guidelines and work on setting your book up to match.

Easy, right? Not necessarily. Hardback, paperback, and even eBook requirements are often different, meaning you will need multiple different files and layouts in order to offer your book in different formats. SIGH.

Also? You’ll need to pick from few aesthetic options, as well. Do you want a matte finish on your cover, or will you choose violence and opt for a high gloss cover? What color paper do you want? How tall and wide will your physical print books be? And so on…

Finally, as the last step of the submission process, you’ll need to choose a publication date. DO NOT PICK TOMORROW. Give yourself some time to go through the final steps and do some quality assurance. Four weeks should be good, but its all up to you.

Step 15: Get Some Author Copies and PAY ATTENTION

Order a couple of author copies, at least two, and compare them against one another. Everything look good? Colors right? Formatting bueno? You know what? Just read the book. Read it all. Cover to cover. Make sure you didn’t miss anything.

Step 16: Fix Errors

There might be some. Fix them. Resubmit. Go back to Step 15. Yep, it sucks. Do it anyway.

Step 17: Promote Your Release Date

Remember that community you’ve been building? Now’s the time to talk about your book. Promote that release date like your hair is on fire. Be funny. Be witty. Be PERSISTENT. Talk about it like crazy. THE WORLD MUST KNOW OF YOUR GRAND ACCOMPLISHMENT.

You’ve earned the right by now.

Step 18: Give Away Your Author Copies

Give them away in exchange for some early reviews, and to reward the people who have been there for you along the way. MOMMA, THIS MEANS YOU.

Step 19: ??????

Step 20: PROFIT!

Your book released! Have a party! Celebrate! You made it! You’ve done what many people dream and few people accomplish! Don’t discount your efforts. You’re awesome!

Keep an eye out for future articles which will focus in on each of these steps to make sure you have all the ammo necessary to have the best release day EVER. Thank you for reading, and happy writing!