Steps to Self-Publishing

So You Want to Write a Book?

You have an idea for a book. Maybe it's a novel. Maybe it's a non-fiction work bringing your unique ideas and solutions to the world. But you’re at the early stages and don’t have a full sense of the task ahead of you.

This is not "How to Self Publish a Book in a Month." You could probably do it in a month, but it wouldn't be a book anyone would want to read. In reality it'll take a year or two. I don't mean to discourage you, only prepare you for the task ahead.

That said, there are some things this post won't be covering. Here are some things you should be aware of that are outside the scope of this post. When thinking of your book you need to look at the bigger picture, and that includes marketing and promotion. You need to promote yourself as an author and have a platform that contains all your writing efforts where you can connect with your fans, letting them know of new books that are coming out, and how to stay connected with you. This platform is your website, which should be optimized for SEO, have a blog, and an email-gathering process.

I only mention these things up front because, as an author, this is one of the realities you must face. Are you up to the task? You don't have to have all the technical skills yourself; there are a lot of resources available. The important thing to remember is it isn’t just about this one book. You have to be prepared and committed for the long journey as an author. Otherwise you’ll be putting all the effort in producing your book for a limited audience—yourself and immediate friends and family.

Producing Your Book

Now let’s just focus on the production of this one book. It’s easy to get frustrated with how long it takes, because I can assure you, it will take longer than you think. But if you have an idea of the scope and process you can prepare yourself. Even with traditional publishers it can take two years to publish a book.

I’m outlining the steps a self-publishing author needs to be aware of to prepare a high-quality, physical printed book available for purchase on Amazon.

Why Not Just an Ebook?

What about just making it available as an ebook? Won’t that be faster—and cheaper? Not really. Most books are still purchased as physical books so that should be your focus. Also, creating the ebook version is just a final step in the overall process. All the layout work has to be done anyway, so there is no savings in bypassing the printed version. And more important, ebook sales and distribution is plateauing, and will dramatically limit your audience if that is the only route you take.

Steps in Book Production

As I said earlier, book production can take up to two years. Of course there are exceptions. If you are an experienced, fast writer, if the editing process doesn’t require much revision, and if you don’t need any illustrations, your book could be produced in less time. But all of the following steps still need to be addressed.

Inside of book

• Write the book. Learn the craft of writing or none of the rest of this matters.
• Editing (multiple rounds, not optional). Self-publishing authors frequently skip this step—because of the time and cost—and that's why there is a stigma around self-publishing. Again, if you skip this step your book will suck.
• Revisions
• Illustrations (optional). And potentially expensive—unless you are the artist.
• Dedication (optional)
• Acknowledgments (optional)
• Author bios. You need two of them: 1) a short paragraph for the back cover, 2) a long bio, around 350 words, for inside, at the end of the book.
• Author photo (optional)
• Design and layout. For best results use Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Word. KDP offers a downloadable template for Word with built-in style sheets. If you don't know how to use style sheets, learn. It will save you hours of headache later.
• Indexing (optional)
• Stay-in-touch page. A page directing readers to your website and how to follow you on social media.
• ISBN number for copyright page (see below).

Book cover—front, back and spine

• Cover design
• Layout the full cover (front, back, spine). This can only be completed after you’ve created an account with KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon’s self-publishing service; you, as the author, will have to set up the account since it asks for your personal banking info—Amazon needs to know where to send the royalty payments for books that sell).
• During the signup process you will be asked to enter the title, sub-title, author name, and other info. This is a very important step since you can’t correct any mistakes or misspellings once the ISBN number has been generated; The ISBN number is directly connected to this info so it must be entered carefully. Once the account is set up you will receive your book's ISBN number that needs to be put on the copyright page.
• You have to choose the paper stock it will be printed on (you need to order physical samples of two books printed on the different paper stocks—allow shipping time and costs). The choice of paper stock is needed to calculate the thickness of the book, which determines the spine artwork.
• Once you select the paper stock, KDP will generate the template needed to assemble all the cover artwork, which you'll use in Adobe Photoshop or other image editing program.
• Written summary for back cover of book. This is usually a paragraph or two, and is very important. It is the one piece of info that shows up on your Amazon book page description that lets people know if this is what they’re looking for.
• For best results the cover elements should be assembled using Adobe InDesign, because of its text handling capabilities. It will export the final PDF file needed for KDP.

Final steps

• Sign in to your account, upload all the files, and run it through KDP's approval-checking software. If there are errors, fix them, then re-upload and try again.
• When it passes the approval-checking software, order a printed physical copy to be shipped to you for final proofing.
• After you receive the proof copy, carefully read and check everything. This is your last chance to correct anything.
• Make your final changes. You can either order another proof copy or say “approved with changes.”
• Once you approve the printed proof, press submit and you’re finished, yay! It will be live on Amazon and you can copy and share the link on social media.

Summary

Is your head swimming? It’s a lot to take in. Your actual process may involve more or fewer steps, but the question you want to ask yourself is, “Am I willing to invest this kind of effort?” Remember, this is for one book. You get to rinse and repeat for every book.

This is where developing your author platform comes in. As a self-published author all the marketing and promotion is up to you. The commitment isn’t just for writing this one book. The commitment is to be an author and connect with your audience over the long term.

Writing and publishing a book has always been one of the more complicated endeavors a person can tackle. Robert Louis Stevenson said, "Anybody can write a short story—a bad one, I mean—who has industry and paper and time enough; but not every one may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills."

The good news is you don’t have to do it all alone. There are resources to help along the way.

Watch for upcoming posts outlining additional resources to help you on your writing journey.

Write That Book! Fiction-Writing Workshop

If you’re serious about finally writing that novel, don’t miss this opportunity!

Starting June 25, The Leaky Pen is sponsoring a 7 week-14 hour fiction-writing workshop, "Write That Book!". Instructors Lauren Ball and Jennifer Moss will teach you the must-have skills you need to know to learn the craft of writing. As a bonus, the workshop includes invaluable information on making your book ready for self publishing, having a successful book launch, and how to market yourself as an author.

The workshop is being held in Oakhurst, California, in the foothills near Yosemite National Park.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “ Anybody can write a short story—a bad one, I mean—who has industry and paper and time enough; but not every one may hope to write even a bad novel.  It is the length that kills.”

Willa Cather on "Creative Freedom"

I love this quote by Willa Cather on "creative freedom."

Edgar Allan Poe Gifts

Writers are Readers

The flip side to writing is reading. We don't write in a vacuum. Well, sometimes it feels that way. Reading the works of other writers whom we admire helps us get a feel for their genre and consider how they use the tools of language. It also helps refill our own creative reservoirs.

Some of you are probably not aware that I am an illustrator. This month to celebrate Edgar Allan Poe's birthday (it was on the 19th) I've put some new designs up on The Leaky Pen's Zazzle store. If you love Poe check 'em out.

Willa Cather on Writing

Willa Cather was born in 1873 and lived in Nebraska from the time she was nine years old until she left at twenty-three—fourteen very formative years. Three of her novels are set in Nebraska. The following quotes are from the 1949 book Willa Cather on Writing, except as noted.

Writing Style

Cather became discouraged later in life by critics saying her work was out of touch with current events and wished she used different writing techniques, like stream of consciousness. It's sad to wish a writer was more like other writers instead of celebrating her individual strengths.

William Curtin wrote:

She had formed and matured her ideas on art before she wrote a novel. She had no more reason to follow Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did to follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested.*

She Wrote What She Knew

Her writing is grounded in her own life experiences.

In writing what she knew she worked within the constraints life gave her. If you think your life is boring and there is nothing to write about, consider what she was able to do with the people and setting of the Nebraska prairies.

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as “freedom” in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free...

A contemporary writer, Sarah Orne Jewett, said in a letter to Cather:

I find this observation: “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper — whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

Elsewhere Cather wrote:

The artist spends a lifetime in loving the things that haunt him, in having his mind “teased” by them...

Don't Say It

It's a rare gift to create a mood and tell a story by what you leave out.

...to present their scene by suggestion rather than by enumeration. The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect. 

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole — so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

No poet can write of love, hate, jealousy. He can only touch these things as they affect the people in his drama and his story.

Write Using Scenes

Cather gives great advice on developing scenes in the story process:

The “scene” in fiction is not a mere matter of construction, any more than it is in life. When we have a vivid experience in social intercourse, pleasant or unpleasant, it records itself in our memory in the form of a scene; and when it flashes back to us, all sorts of apparently unimportant details are flashed back with it. When a writer has a strong or revelatory experience with his characters, he unconsciously creates a scene; gets a depth of picture, and writes, as it were, in three dimensions instead of two. The absence of these warm and satisfying moments in any work of fiction is final proof of the author’s poverty of emotion and lack of imagination.

Writing that Lingers in the Reader's Mind

I wasn't sure I would like My Ántonia. I wondered if there was enough in the bare Nebraska landscape to hold my attention for the length of a novel. But when I was a few pages from finishing I put it down for a few days. I didn't want it to end.

[Walter] Pater said that every truly great drama must, in the end, linger in the reader’s mind as a sort of ballad. Probably the same thing might be said of every great story. It must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer’s own, individual, unique. A quality that one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden. The magnitude of the subject-matter is not of primary importance, seemingly.

*Curtin, William M. "Willa Cather: Individualism and Style". Colby Library Quarterly. June 1968, No. 2, p. 52.

Margaret Atwood on Writing

I've been in love with Margaret Atwood's writing for years. The first book of hers I read was The Robber Bride and I still remember how real the characters felt. I'm currently reading The Blind Assassin and wish I could spend more time in that world.

Margaret Atwood's book Negotiating With the Dead is not about her own writing process. It's a higher view of writing—why we write, the relationship between the writer and reader, and where does it all come from anyway?

Contemplating what a writer with forty-plus years experience might say on such broad topics, she wrote:

Perhaps I wish to say: Look behind you. You are not alone. Don't permit yourself to be ambushed. Watch out for the snakes. Watch out for the Zeitgeist—it is not always your friend. Keats was not killed by a bad review. Get back on the horse that threw you. Advice for the innocent pilgrim, worthy enough, no doubt, but no doubt useless: dangers multiply by the hour, you never step into the same river twice, the vast empty spaces of the blank page appall, and everyone walks into the maze blindfolded.

Negotiating With the Dead is a compilation of the six Empson lectures she gave at the University of Cambridge in the year 2000. She says that any notions of literary theory and being a scholar that may have crept into the book got there in the usual writer's way: like the jackdaw, "we steal the shiny bits, and build them into the structures of our own disorderly nests."

Writing—A Blind Endeavor

Because I often can't figure out where I'm going with a story, I connected with her idea of writing as a journey into a labyrinth.

I just need to plunge in. I don't always see the plot and direction clearly. Some writers do and they make me feel inadequate. I feel them looking at me out of the corner of their eye and thinking, "Who gave you permission to be a writer? If you're a writer, then you're the creator of your story and characters, you decide what happens, you're in control." Then why don't I feel that way? Why do I feel like I spend most of my time groping around in the dark?

I was relieved when Margaret suggested that the writing process is often

an inability to see one's way forward, but a feeling that there is a way forward, and that the act of going forward would eventually bring about the conditions for vision...Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.

The website Brainpickings has a list of Margaret Atwood's 10 rules of writing. I'd like to close with one of them:

You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

Sylvia Plath on Writing

...writing makes me a small god: I re-create the flux and smash of the world through the small ordered word-patterns I make.

Sylvia Plath understood that secret inner pleasure all writers must feel as creators. I've always been amazed at those "small ordered word-patterns" she threw together.

She wrote a lot about writing—and not writing. Observation. Description. It's been a wonderful opportunity reading her journals. More than any other author I've focused on yet, it feels like lifting the lid and seeing how it all works. The following quotes are from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, and they provide a unique glimpse into the mind of a writer and poet.

Observation and Description

Some of her journals were devoted only to descriptions of her travels. Rooms where her and Ted Hughes stayed. Views of the towns and cities, word-paintings of people, fragments of conversations. Pieces of ideas and plot outlines of potential stories and poems. And such vulnerability and insecurity. She cracks my mind open.

One of the best things I've learned from her journals is to always keep a notebook with you. How else can you capture your observations?

It’s hopeless to “get life” if you don’t keep notebooks.

Of course, capturing details is only a part of the work. Recording descriptions is pointless unless you can use them as foundational material. Create plots, understand your characters' motives, and accurately capture dialog—these all have to work together in telling your story.

...if one has not the imagination to create characters, to knit plots, it does no good to jot down fragments of life and conversation, for alone they are disjointed and meaningless. It is only when these bits are woven into an artistic whole, with a frame of reference, that they become meaning-ful...

Writing From Experience

Again, as always, writers should draw from their own experience.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

Yeah, that's easy to say, write from your experience. It's likely to be a painful process, but you have to get it out of you and onto the paper. Don't worry about presentation or who might read it. You can clean it up and organize it later.

And now, aching, but surer and surer, I feel the wells of experience and thought spurting up, welling quietly, with little clear sounds of juiciness. How the phrases come to me... I am sitting in the heart of it, pouring it out, untidily, all right, but it comes, and the ordering and shaping of it will come.

Sylvia grew up in Massachusettes and attended Smith College and Cambridge on scholarships and traveled around Europe. Her journals are full of luscious descriptions of the picturesque places she visited. But just because your life isn't as exciting, don't let that discourage you from writing.

If I can’t dream up plots in my own room and backyard, I won’t be able to dream them up anywhere...

Self Doubt

You know how people with no talent seem to have all the confidence? And those with startling ability seem humble and unsure of themselves? That was never more true than with Sylvia Plath. Her journals are filled with crippling fear and self doubt. She could see it for what it was—“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”—but knowing it didn't make it go away. She battled her self doubt all her life.

And when I read, God, when I read the taut, spare, lucid prose of...poet after poet, I feel stifled, weak, pallid; mealy mouthed and utterly absurd. Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me.

Can I write? Will I write if I practice enough? How much should I sacrifice to writing anyway, before I find out if I’m any good? Above all, CAN A SELFISH EGOCENTRIC JEALOUS AND UNIMAGITIVE FEMALE WRITE A DAMN THING WORTH WHILE?

So much of her early journals were consumed with getting and losing boys, the yearning and impossibility of finding her other half. And once she found and married the poet, Ted Hughes, she seemed more grounded and focused. Of course she had also just graduated from Cambridge and her writing was devoted to her own creative ideas instead of papers. Well, then I kept reading her journals and saw it was always a struggle for her to find and make the time to write. There is no gift. You have to fucking work for it.

Every day, writing. No matter how bad. Something will come. I have been spoiled to think it will come too soon: without work & sweat.

Reading her journals has given me hope and a little perspective. I don't know where my writing will take me, but I share her awe of the writer's possibilities:

To be god: to be every life before we die: a dream to drive men mad. But to be one person, one woman—to live, suffer, bear children & learn others lives & make them into print worlds spinning like planets in the minds of other men.

Here is a poster of Sylvia Plath with an inspirational quote on writing.