Self-publishing is a journey with a whole lot of twists and turns, bumps and roadblocks. Here is a list of things I completely screwed up when I embarked on said journey for the first time...
So, you've written a book! Now what?
Well, you could do what I did, and self-publish on Amazon KDP! Sounds exciting, right? No agent. No publisher. Just you and your readers, going it alone. How romantic!
Except... there is a heck of a lot to know about the process before you jump in, and I made soooo many mistakes. Now, I'm going to share them with you, one by one, so you don't make them, too.
1. Burning Bridges
So my first fatal screw-up was not carefully considering which route I really wanted to go long-term: trad or self-pub. Sure, I queried the first book I ever wrote (God, that's a story for another blog post!) but I didn't really consider how I'd handle rejection. Like, catastrophic rejection. So, in my frustrated, disillusioned mind, self-pubbing my next book, Silver Fangs & Broken Wings, seemed like a road that would save me from heartache.
I could not have been more wrong.
Self-pubbing is a huge learning curve and every aspect is on you, from editing, to formatting, to cover design. You can outsource these, and most self-pubbed authors do, but it's also expensive. It came with a lot of pressure. And, more importantly, no one told me how hard it would be to switch back to trad.
If you self-publish your debut, switching back to the trad route with any project is infinitely harder.
That's right. If you self-publish your debut, switching back to the trad route with any project is an uphill battle if you don't have colossal sales numbers under your belt. Which I do not. And that brings me to my next point.
2. Marketing Madness
So you wrote a book, and you published it. Bam! You already messed up and I'm gonna tell you why.
Marketing is where you gather your readership. Think social media, a website, advertising... All this needs to happen before you launch your book. Like, way before. I started my marketing campaign for Silver Fangs & Broken Wings on TikTok and Instagram about two months before the book launched. It should have been six months at the absolute bare minimum. My readership when the book released was bupkis. Nada. Nonexistent.
I think I sold maybe ten copies in the first month after release, and almost all of those were friends and family.
If you intend to self-publish, whether it's your first book or your fiftieth, marketing is the golden key that opens the gates to literary Valhalla. If readers don't know your book is out there, if they don't know what it's about, if they don't know they need it on their kindle, like, right this second, then your book sits in a quiet corner of Amazon gathering digital dust.
If readers don't know your book exists, it withers away, like the magic rose in Beauty and the Beast, wating for Belle to communicate her feelings.
So, jump on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and/or Reddit early. Show your process, snippets of your work in progress, run polls so your readers feel part of your journey, showcase your characters... All those awesome things about your story that live in your head rent free? Share them. Well before release day.
And, finally, quite possibly my worst mistake of all...
3. Gotta Go Fast
Just like the effable Sonic, I felt the terrible, insistent need to just do it. To publish. To get my story out into the world, however imperfect, however unlikely to succeeed simply becausse I had not taken the time to prepare properly.
No, Shia LaBeouf. Don't "just do it!"
Don't get me wrong, I love Silver Fangs & Broken Wings. I worked hard on it. I drafted and redrafted the thing. Put it through beta readers. Edited carefully. Studied story structure until I could recite the beats of Save the Cat! in my sleep. Even that took months. But I rushed formatting. I rushed the cover. I rushed the blurb. I rushed my author branding. And it shows. And a lot of that I'm kinda stuck with now.
So Don't Be Me, Kids
Do your homework. Figure out which path is best for you; what you truly want. Trad is possible. It just has a different learning curve to self-pubbing. Instead of formatting, cover design, and marketing, you have to learn to query and pitch. If you doubt, even for a moment, that self-pubbing is truly the path for you, just wait. Take a breath. Shelve a project and try querying a different one. Try not to be me, and use self-pubbing as a fallback. It kinda bit me in the ass.
If self-pubbing is truly the route for you, jump on marketing early. Learn the ropes, work on interpreting trends, build a community of indie writers and readers who want to support you and believe in your stories... BEFORE YOU LAUNCH! Well before. Then throw everything you've learned into launch day. Use adverts, post reels, post stories, make your book pop! It'll show up in your sales figures in a big way.
Finally, take your dang time. Learn everything you need to know. Yeah, it's a lot. And, yeah, it takes a long time. But if you do it right, if you do it as slowly as you need to in order to build something perfect, with no regrets looking back, it will be so so worth it.