Self-publishing 101 - Part 1, print-on demand

Hello authors.

Well, it's finally That Time - after months or years, you've written, revised, gathered your alpha and beta readers' input together, revised a bit more, run a spellcheck, discovered just how awful MS Word spell check is, got a human editor to read it, found a cover designer ... and you're sitting in front of your computer with your heart pounding and your palms going sweaty, about to actually upload your work of genius for the worldwide audience.

How many copies will I sell? 

Will there be trolls? 

Will anyone pirate my stuff? 

When will I be able to live off the money my books make for me? 

Will the world know my name?

Before you can become an international bestseller of E L James-style fame (oh, God), you need to find a self-publishing platform. I'm going to provide a non-exclusive, non-endorsing list below of a few of the better-known options to give you an idea.

Self-publishing platforms come in two basic flavours: ebook only, or print-on-demand. In this post, I'm going to focus on the print-on-demand platforms - or this post will attain novella-length in short order. Catch up with me later for the ebook 101 post.

**ALWAYS read the terms and conditions / conditions of service / terms of use or whatever else they call it and make certain that there's a clause in there guaranteeing that you retain copyright to your work. Whatever other paragraphs your eye chooses to blur over, make sure you've read and understand what your rights are if you choose to publish with a given platform.**

Print on demand: 

CreateSpace (Amazon), and Lulu are two of the best-known self-pub options if you want to provide physical copies of your book as well as (or instead of) an ebook. They both allow you to set up print-on-demand for nothing and take a cut of the book price every time you sell a book as their payment.

I'm also going to touch on Bookbaby, which doesn't offer a completely free option, but does offer a lot more support options if you happen to have the funds to pay someone else to tear their hair out to get your book printed.

Other places you can look include IngramSpark and Blurb.

I also recommend that you check out Writehacked 'Where should you self-publish your book' from 2014 for a second opinion - I don't necessarily agree with that opinion, but there are photos provided of the results from several of the major POD companies.

CreateSpace 

Pros: They're flexible, efficient, have great customer service and, provided you use one of their formatted templates (really. This part is important unless you're a masochist) very easy to use. They provide a great quality of product. They're also an Amazon company, so your print offering shows up, hassle-free, on the majority of Amazon country sites almost as soon as you approve your proof. You can opt for expanded distribution, which makes your work available to bookstores, libraries, and academia as well as Amazon. You can also opt for a number of helpful extras if you have the need and money, such as professional formatting, cover design, editing, etc. For the record, I print with CreateSpace.

Cons: Getting paid. CreateSpace only offers Direct Deposit (as of today) to authors with bank accounts in the USA, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Belguim, or the Netherlands. If you happen to not have access to a bank account in one of those countries, CreateSpace will accumulate the royalties from the sales of your book in each region, and send you a cheque when the total for that region hits about $100 USD. To be clear, this doesn't mean you can sell $33.33 worth of product in Asia, Europe, and South America (or wherever else) and get a cheque: it means you have to sell $100 worth of product in Asia, or Europe, or South America to get a cheque, which you then have to convert into your local currency. So be prepared for the fact that for a lot of indie authors, this means you're going to be effectively providing your print books for free for the foreseeable future when it comes to money in hand. Another con: should you choose not to copy your text into one of their pre-formatted templates, be prepared for a lot of hell when you come to upload into their online proofing portal. Their main outlet is Amazon.

Lulu

Pros: They offer payment via PayPal, which basically means you can be paid anywhere you can have a PayPal account that you can receive payment from. This may, of course, incur PayPal fees, but you aren't left hunting a bank that will cash a USD cheque for you. They offer optional professional publishing services, but you can also go full-DIY if you choose. They will allow you to distribute your print on Lulu, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Ingram, and they offer a wide variety of sizes and binding options, including stitched if you happen to be a fan of the traditional.

Cons: You have to have the software to put the ISBN and bar code, wherever you choose to get that from, on your own print cover for a certain set of print formats. The up-front expertise needed to prep your files for printing from you, the author, is a bit higher than for CreateSpace.

Bookbaby

Pros: They give you a webpage space with the publishing package. They distribute to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell's, Baker & Taylor, and Ingram, among others, as well as several niche options. You can choose to be paid via PayPal (there is a $1.50 processing fee per PayPal payment). They offer promo services with their packages, and a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

Cons: You have to go with one of their publishing packages. There is no full-DIY option with Bookbaby. You can only opt for Direct deposit if you have a US bank account; if not you're stuck with cheque in the mail (or PayPal).

Conclusion:

So, you've now followed a bunch of links, checked out arcane FAQs that talk about metadata, ISBNs, ASINs, the non-transferability of your platform-assigned ISBNs, and tax-witholding, and your head's spinning.

Is it really worth all this effort and research, just to get a print copy of my book? I mean, I'm indie. Is anyone really going to buy the d*mn thing anyway?

For me, I wasn't going to bother. Not right away. Not after having figured out that I couldn't get paid for it in any reasonable amount of time, and given indie sales generally.

Then, I actually had people - family, friends, colleagues - start asking me if they could get a print copy, and I sat down and thought a bit more. After a bit of that, I actually did set up POD - and I'm really glad I did. Not because it's making me a fortune - hell no, far from it. But it's not costing me anything extra, as I'd opted to get a print and an e-cover from my cover designer anyway.

But the real pay-off, from my point of view, was the moment my actual book proof showed up on my doorstep, and I got my book, after all the blood and sweat and tears, in my hands looking like a real book.

The First and Second Format Wars

Armistice was declared today, 1st April.

Accepting my print proof of Through the Hostage on April Fools' Day would be a worrying omen if I were completely sane, but completely sane people, I'm convinced of it, never become writers. They certainly never, ever, become indie authors.

Star Trek captured my feelings perfectly on the topic of my final and accepted proof.

Captain Archer: I believe someone once defined a compromise as ... a solution that neither side is happy with.
Commander Shran: In that case, these talks have been extremely successful. 

OK, that's a bit melodramatic. Very melodramatic. I've seen much, much worse in bookstores. I've seen very much worse indie pubs. Given that I'm aiming for average, I'm happy. Actually, I'm ecstatic. I've got a print copy of my very own book sitting on my desk, at which I send periodic doting looks (think ape with first banana sort of looks).

Could it be better? Yes. Of course it could. The cover, which I haven't the expertise to tweak, has the edge of one letter of the title just slightly overlapping the spine. I didn't get a professional developmental edit, because really, at $0.03 per word at over 100,000 words ... well, if I had that kind of cash spare I'd by lying on a beach somewhere drinking something that comes in half-coconut shells (and there'd be a lot of empties lying around).

Could it be worse? Hell yeah, it could be very much worse. I've bought worse many times. I'll back my general editing against the big publishing houses because I keep growling over their errors in the books I buy. The story is as good as I can make it, and I enjoyed writing it. If someone else enjoys reading it, well, that's a bonus from my point of view.

I decided on CreateSpace for my paperback version, partly because they're affiliated with Amazon, meaning that paperback (if the gods smile) will simply be added, hassle-free, as a format in which you can buy my masterpiece, right alongside the e-book.

There are other major pros with CreateSpace. For example, their customer service is awesome. Send in an email, and you get a personal response, with some actual information in it, much faster than I was expecting (24 hours or less, I think, in my case). Also, I ordered two print proofs, both on Sunday evenings (that was coincidence) and they showed up on my doorstep Tuesday evening. Given that they predict two weeks for postage, I was duly impressed.

The First and Second Format Wars occurred when I tried to format my guttering and margins (no, this isn't a problem that can be solved by removing the leaves from the drain). There's an interesting wrinkle in the CreateSpace uploader, where it will tell you ten times in a row that you need to increase your gutter (inner margin), and regardless of how much you do so in Word, it will actually move the text on the page, in the previewer, the opposite way. Luckily my hair is too short to pull successfully.

Another interesting wrinkle I discovered: we all know that each section of your book should start on a right-hand page. The title page should always be a right-hand page, chapter 1 should  begin on a right-hand page, and so on. Easiest way to achieve this? Page break / page break, inserting a blank to make sure your content starts in the correct place. Easy, right? Wrong! Inserting a single blank in Word turns into two blanks in the CreateSpace previewer, meaning you have a weird double blank ... and your content is still on the wrong page.

Next time, I will probably simply download one of their Word templates and paste my content in, to see if the template has the same issue. At least then I'll have the immature satisfaction of pointing, mocking and making rude noises before embarking on the marathon.

CreateSpace does provide very handy guides, which, while they don't actually prevent the previewer from telling you that your margins are wrong, do explain in useful detail the steps that should avoid having the previewer send you annoying messages. They also host some helpful forums, where you can usually find someone else who has had this problem before you. There may not be a solution, but you can at least watch someone else getting to the multiple-exclamation-marks stage online.

Hence ... Armistice. I'm a perfectionist, and I'd like to have the cover absolutely perfect, and I'd like to have the pagination absolutely perfect, and like every other author who's ever set pen to paper, I'd like an international bestseller. As with books as with life, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I compromised, and I have a paperback copy of my very own book sitting on my desk. Sometimes sucking it up has its perks.