The Grasshopper Sunday Money Edition 2/19/23: Self-publishing

When you should, when you shouldn’t

Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash

In this issue: Some history, my early self-publishing experience, what I did wrong, a vetting process for deciding to publish, readership research, building a base to work from, and closing thoughts.

Self-publish? What did I have to lose?

My experience with self-publishing started with my first novel, The Rememberers, about ten years ago. I had finished it, done rewrites and editing (I edited it. I could not afford a freelance editor at the time), and decided to hold off on trying to get a traditional publishing deal.

The agent I had prior to that only handled non-fiction, so this would require finding an agent before anything else happened, as most publishers will only accept agented manuscripts. I wasn’t ready to do that. The book was done and I wanted a way to get it to friends and family.

So, I went on Amazon’s self-publishing page and began the laborious process of navigating their system, setting up an account, getting an ISBN number, and laying out the book design, including the cover. I’m not a graphic designer, so this took me a while, but I finally got the ebook files up on the site.

Setting it up for on-demand printing would be my next step, but I held off on that. Back then doing the prep often meant working in multiple applications, each with its own learning curve. If I was to do it today it would be much easier with applications like Vellum, which do all the prep work in whatever format you need for the platform you’ve chosen.

These days that usually means PDF, but configuring the files is tricky without an application designed to do it. 

So, going back, the ebook was published and the usual happened. No one bought it, because why would they? I ended up making it free for my friends, then I took it down, having heard that self-publishing would hurt my chances if I went for a deal. 

Back then there were a few breakout stories of ebooks selling hundreds of thousands of copies but they were the huge exception. On Amazon your book baby is just another drop in the ocean of products. 

Ten years later and the beginning of a base of readers