Self-publishing experiences and advice?

[Chanel]

I've been passionate about writing my entire life. Recently, I began the process of self-publishing my first young adult novel. So far, the only thing I've spent money on is hiring an editor, which will run me about $400 based on my page count. I've done estimates, and in total i'm looking at around $900-1000 for this entire project. (editing services, printing copies, copyright, ISBN, label printer for shipping from home)

The one thing I think I have going for me is my attitude toward the whole thing. I'm not going into this looking to make a bunch of money. I'm simply following my dream, and if I make some decent money selling my work or even breaking even within a year, then I'm fine with that. I'm also big on using social media, which I think has paved the way for self-publishing and entrepreneurs in general over the past decade.

How was the self-publishing experience for you? Did you make good profits? If not, were you still satisfied? How did you advertise your work?

 

[Amelia Faulkner]

I don't see "cover designer" on your list of costs, and you can hire a damn good one for around $150. Do it. It will dramatically improve your chances of making a sale.

 

[Nick B]

you dont needto pay for copyright. ever.
And yeah, get a proffesional cover artist. A great many of us here sp, success and happiness vary. Certainly I have been happy self publishing so far.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

You shouldn't need a label printer - if you go POD most shipping will happen without you. Ditto copyright.

And yay! Your cover is paid for

Good luck with it! Hang around and ask any questions you need to

 

[Chanel]

You shouldn't need a label printer - if you go POD most shipping will happen without you. Ditto copyright.

And yay! Your cover is paid for

Good luck with it! Hang around and ask any questions you need to

I designed my cover myself, the one thing I wanted to do alone. I uploaded a sample and so far most of my supporters love the cover. I was going to get a label printer so I could ship using stamps.com media mail

 

[Chanel]

you dont needto pay for copyright. ever.
And yeah, get a proffesional cover artist. A great many of us here sp, success and happiness vary. Certainly I have been happy self publishing so far.

Don't need to pay for copyright? how so? I saw a fee of $35

 

[Chanel]

I don't see "cover designer" on your list of costs, and you can hire a damn good one for around $150. Do it. It will dramatically improve your chances of making a sale.

If I decide not to go with my design, the printing company I'm using has templates available to help with your design at an extra cost. about $100

 

[The Judge]

This old thread may be of help in answering your question re copyright Editor and Copyright Issue

Basically, copyright is yours as soon as you write, and you don't need to do anything else. However, if you are in the US, then it may be advantageous to register your copyright, and my post here explains that in greater detail. Copyrights/Trademarks

Don't pay any other organisation in the US or UK for copyright protection, though -- it's simply not needed and is a waste of money.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Don't need to pay for copyright? how so? I saw a fee of $35

Copyright is attributed from the point of you putting pen to paper - there is absolutely no need to pay to do it although I know a lot of information about the US laws indicates you need to. But it's already yours with no fee

Darn it. The Judge beat me to it!

If I may ask - why do you want to do your own distribution?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

If I decide not to go with my design, the printing company I'm using has templates available to help with your design at an extra cost. about $100

These are never anywhere near as professional as a cover designer and often use stock images. A well designed cover is your single best sales tool. Why cut corners?

 

[Amelia Faulkner]

I designed my cover myself, the one thing I wanted to do alone. I uploaded a sample and so far most of my supporters love the cover.

We'd better have a look at it then

 

[The Judge]

Perhaps not quite yet. We wouldn't want Chanel to fall foul of the no-self-promotion rule which might happen if the novel is very close to being published.

Chanel, I'm not clear from your opening post just how close you are to finalising things. It occurs to me, though, that if the editor hasn't yet started to look at the novel, one way to save yourself some money in the short term would be to use our Critiques board to give you feedback on your opening. You'd need to get 30 counted posts before you can put anything up there, and the limit is 1500 words, though we'd suggest only about 800 words in the first instance. If we pick up anything that needs work, then you can make revisions before sending to the editor. We'd also then be happier about seeing and giving advice on the potential cover image.

 

[Brian G Turner]

What I get from this is that you're doing some things right, and others with good intentions in trying to retain control of everything - but I don't get any sense of a sales plan. Without a sales plan you are in danger of burning money and making no sales. If you're looking to print and distribute your books yourself, you are also increasing your costs at the start, while also reducing your chances of making sales.

Amazon is the biggest platform for selling books, and they allow you to publish a paperback directly through them. It probably works out more expensive if you can sell tens of thousands of books - if you don't, then it's easily the cheaper option, and you can move on from it if you want.

You also need to reduce your expectations of selling - firstly, the market is so crowded you need to give people a real incentive to buy your book in the first place, against a background of other people providing the same incentives. Secondly, despite the hype about self-publishing, general success still appears to depend on publishing a lot of books to build up your name and reputation with. There is no magic rush of people buying every self-published book - in fact, there are so many flooding the market that without a sales strategy it's extremely difficult for any specific title to be found.

Hope that helps.

 

[tinkerdan]

I self published my two novels.
My two published novels were done through (a POD); there were a number of considerations for doing them this way. The first was that I was so new at this that I needed as much help as I could get. I had no intention of doing everything and I wasn't really interested in having full control over everything.
The POD plans I use for my work were listed as around 3,000 dollars US and I managed discounts and probably spent altogether 3,000 dollars US for both when they were all finished. So half price.

A primary reason for going this way was that people close to me seem to be of two varieties. Both want a hard copy to hold in their hand, somehow the electronic copy just doesn't say that you are an author and the paper copy seems to scream that you're an author. One of the varieties in this group insists on hardbound copies. This is one reason that this POD publisher got the bid.

The first thing I kissed goodbye to is the notion of letting someone else control things. Though the plan calls for their people to do the interior design and the cover design there were so many indications that there was either a lack of professionalism or that their design staff were focused on some narrow path that wasn't necessarily suitable to Science Fiction and Fantasy. So I ended up learning a lot more about the whole process than I expected, which has worked out well for me at this point.

Money-wise: I could afford this back then and I wasn't hurting to make the money back in a rush, which was good because I haven't made it back.

For the third book I'm researching other options and it has been while doing so that I have arrived at a place where I can see the advantage in marketing and selling your own product. However it is mostly because I'm interested in giving my readers the best value and that won't happen in most cases with using the distribution avenues of the PODs; except for using CreateSpace and Amazon. So if all you necessarily want to deliver is trade-paper editions to your readers you might consider doing it through Amazon first and then also do your own marketing and sales, through which you will still be able to give your readers the best price while making a fair profit because CreateSpace sells the author books at cost and shipping.

That plan allows you to still plug into Amazon at the very least with a fair profit though it boosts the customers cost: however if you try to make use of the expanded distribution inf CreateSpace that will dramatically increase the cost to the customer while reducing your profits. The largest expense that comes that increases the books price in the stores is most likely caused by the cost of the distribution channel and the basic notion that you are using that and the final booksellers distribution channel to get your book out there to a wider audience. However as I mention this causes the price to be boosted and usually it ends up above and beyond the market price of similar sized books in traditional publishing. And in most cases this locks you into the 6x9 inch book format because the number of pages determines the final wholesale price and somehow traditional publishing manages to sidestep this problem.

In the case of my pod in order to obtain 10% royalty my books had to be priced at 23.99 US for the Trade Paperback and 34.99 US for the HardBound volume.(Yes I have an ungodly number of pages. ) I could purchase them at cost and shipping and sell them at 14.99 for the TP and 19.99 for he HB and make a healthy profit.

I've sold more personally than I appear to have royalties for from the world wide distribution channel they have; although my latest glance at the number of used like new being offered at Amazon would indicate that some may have slipped through the cracks.

Anyway I could go on but I'm still researching CreateSpace for the Trade Paper editions, and possibly Ingram Sparks for the Hard Editions. If I do CreateSpace I'll likely price them to have them distribute through Amazon although I might try pricing it such that I make a few cents off the expanded distribution just to get more exposure(that might take some thought) it would depend on how much that increases the wholesale.

If I need HardBound editions for friends I'll try Ingram Sparks though I might not use their distribution channel at all and just buy my own copies to sell: mostly because the final wholesale price would be almost twice that of normal hardbound offerings if I choose to make no profit at all. The way they distribute the profit it would be like trying to chase my tail to try to make a 5 percent author profit.

I've given you this information because I have taken it that you are interested in distributing paper copies.

Maybe after I do more research I'll revisit what I find.

I've just received a proof copy from CreateSpace and I so far like what I see.(This is just for Book One which I've recently edited to correct some minor problems.)

 

[Cosmic Geoff]

You also need to reduce your expectations of selling - firstly, the market is so crowded you need to give people a real incentive to buy your book in the first place, against a background of other people providing the same incentives. Secondly, despite the hype about self-publishing, general success still appears to depend on publishing a lot of books to build up your name and reputation with. There is no magic rush of people buying every self-published book - in fact, there are so many flooding the market that without a sales strategy it's extremely difficult for any specific title to be found.

It's worse than that. Amazon has around four million titles on its system, and a bit of research into publicly available data reveals that the sales of these are distributed very unequally. A few titles sell very well, while the rest occupy a very long 'tail' of the graph in which three quarters of the titles are, for all practical purposes, not selling at all. On Amazon, each seller has a displayed Rank, and the lower the number, the better the sales. At a level of #130,000 one is looking at sales of several a day (rather than several days or weeks per sale), which will in the course of time clock up total sales in four figures and pay back expenses such as covers and professional editing. Note that we are now talking about the top 3% on Amazon and it is really hard to do as well as this.
Most titles however get caught in a vicious cycle of no sales > low page rank > no exposure >no sales > lower page rank > no exposure > no sales.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

It's worse than that. Amazon has around four million titles on its system, and a bit of research into publicly available data reveals that the sales of these are distributed very unequally. A few titles sell very well, while the rest occupy a very long 'tail' of the graph in which three quarters of the titles are, for all practical purposes, not selling at all. On Amazon, each seller has a displayed Rank, and the lower the number, the better the sales. At a level of #130,000 one is looking at sales of several a day (rather than several days or weeks per sale), which will in the course of time clock up total sales in four figures and pay back expenses such as covers and professional editing. Note that we are now talking about the top 3% on Amazon and it is really hard to do as well as this.
Most titles however get caught in a vicious cycle of no sales > low page rank > no exposure >no sales > lower page rank > no exposure > no sales.

Don't put too much store by author ranking. I see I'm currently in the Top 40000 authors. That's made up of a combo of novels, anthos and what not. Like everything - it's all a game really. Amazon rankings aren't the only way to succeed and get noticed.

 

[Andrew Lambert]

I agree with Tinkerdan.
I've bought 50 paperback copies of my first novel through Createspace and handed half of them out to friends and family. When they receive a copy in hand with my superb Tom Edwards cover, the look on their face is 'you're a proper author!' Happily, about twelve have come back so far saying they really liked it.
Luckily, this isn't my day job - which I love doing and make a reasonable living at - because as an engineer, I've already worked out the maths of being self-published on Amazon, and the difficulty of getting exposure. Those that have it have worked hard at it. My book appears well hidden.
A few on here will know I wrote a book during a severe illness (which I'm over!) and now I'm back to full-time work and training for my beloved triathlon, time on the second book is limited.
But, everyone I know thinks I'm a proper author, so that's good enough for me!
-If you know me and you haven't had a free copy...guess what you're having for Xmas

 

[Chanel]

UPDATE: My book has been published, and I decided to go with KDP for my ebook, and createspace for my paperback. I chose to distribute through Amazon. A friend of mine went the route of selling/shipping from home (my original plan) but this being my first novel, I couldn't justify the costs of basically running a business from home. Although I only receive a certain percentage in royalties, I've sold 20 copies my first week! I also believe that people like whats familiar, and that's selling through a known retailer v.s. a personal website and using paypal. Not to mention with Amazon my customers have been using prime which is also a plus. Maybe sometime down the road I can sell from home when I have more of a loyal following, but for now I'll stick with this.

 

[Danny Creasy]

UPDATE: My book has been published, and I decided to go with KDP for my ebook, and createspace for my paperback. I chose to distribute through Amazon. A friend of mine went the route of selling/shipping from home (my original plan) but this being my first novel, I couldn't justify the costs of basically running a business from home. Although I only receive a certain percentage in royalties, I've sold 20 copies my first week! I also believe that people like whats familiar, and that's selling through a known retailer v.s. a personal website and using paypal. Not to mention with Amazon my customers have been using prime which is also a plus. Maybe sometime down the road I can sell from home when I have more of a loyal following, but for now I'll stick with this.

Congratulations!