Self Publishing

MYTH: “Self-published books are always bad quality”

Self-published books are like any other manufactured product. Take knitting, for example. You get people who only knit as a hobby, (often for family), and sometimes you get people (like my mom) who knit things to sell in shops. You also get huge industrial machines that churn out books – I mean knitted sweaters. A home-made sweater can look as good or better than a machine-made one. 

Similarly, a good self-published book can be indistinguishable from a traditionally published book. How? 

Work with a good team 

A savvy author hires a team of people to make sure the product is well crafted. These people perform the exact same roles as they would in publishing houses: editors, proofreaders, cover designers, layout designers and distributors. 

These authors may even register their business as a press, imprint or publisher. You may have read many such books and never even known. Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens is one famous historical example, who started his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Co. to publish some of his own books, and to help other writers get published (Dierking 2018).  LJ Ross and her partner set up Dark Skies Publishing to release her first book, Holy Island, the first of her successful DCI Ryan mysteries (Nomoto 2025). These self-published authors often call themselves “indie” because of the negative connotations of the term “self-published”.

Traditional publishers can seldom  afford to take risks. If you’ve got a big industrial machine making sweaters, you have to sell a lot more sweaters than my mom at a craft market to cover your costs. Traditional publishers want titles and authors that they can easily market and often that means whatever is trending right now. This is why even traditionally published authors are now going “hybrid” and self-publishing some of their niche titles themselves. Brandon Sanderson, a traditionally published writer who helped finish The Wheel of Time series, famously crowdfunded on Kickstarter to publish four novels he wrote during lockdown, despite already working with a traditional publisher. The dual approach allows authors to explore different genres, approaches to publishing, marketing strategies etc. (Barnett 2022). Sanderson offers his insights into the process of publishing in the form of several recorded lectures here. 

Is self-publishing free? Yes. No. Maybe? 

Beware of Vanity Presses.

If anyone ever wants to charge you for publishing your book, run. The internet is full of these people. They’re called vanity presses and what they offer is something like, “We’ll publish your book for you – everything from editing to cover design. You just pay one fee.” This seems great if you don’t know how to do this stuff yourself. It is not so great when you realise that once you’ve paid them they have zero incentive to do a good job. 

Essentially, vanity presses make their money from charging writers an upfront fee to publish the book, not from sales to readers. They’re making their money off you, whereas traditional publishers make their money off actually selling your book as a marketable high-quality product. Vanity presses can also make rights and distribution issues unnecessarily complicated.

Uploading your (already designed) book is free

Uploading your book to an online book store is one hundred percent free. You can do it directly at several stores (Amazon’s KDP is the top one by market share). There are also third-party sites like Draft2Digital that have handy templates and other tools and distribute to lots of stores. 

If you’re looking to get your memoir in print and only intend to give it to family and friends, go ahead and do it! There’s nothing stopping you! There are no rules to say that the grammar has to be perfect or the cover has to be right for the genre.

However, if your aim is to turn your writing into a professional career, you have to think of your publishing as a business that means you need to spend money to make money. Budget for spending money on these two things, even if you have to save up:

• An editor
• A cover designer / book layout person

Friends who are willing to read your book and give you honest feedback will help part of the way with editing. However, a professional editor will know about genre conventions and will be able to offer advice that the average person can’t. 

Even if you’re an artist or designer, or have a friend who is one, bear in mind that most people judge a book by its cover. You need your book to signal its genre and in a matter of seconds. That’s hard to pull off unless you’ve done a ton of research. I started designing book covers because I felt sorry for authors who wrote brilliant books that never sold because they couldn’t afford a decent cover and made something themselves instead.

Marketing your book 

Marketing is the third most important expense, Gaughran and Dawson have tons of useful advice. 

Marketing is something that puts many writers off the idea of self-publishing. But here’s the bad news. You’re going to have to do it  anyway.

Publishers have huge overheads so they’re going to bet on a winning horse. They’re far more likely to concentrate on the established authors and big names. If your self-published title does well, a publisher may offer you a deal on your next book or to spend a bit more on you the next time. If it doesn’t… well then you may be back to querying again.

It’s worthwhile learning to market your books either way. There are loads of resources out there that can even make it fun. I recommend David Gaughran because he has tons of free resources. There are additional sources available on the My Writing Matters resource page. 

If you don’t have tons of money for marketing, or you’re just starting out with your first book, you can do a lot of community building for free if you’re patient. EL James’ runaway success 50 Shades of Grey started as fanfiction on a Twilight fanfiction website, and relied heavily on book blogs and social media driven by the author to create awareness of the books (Spatz 2018). Most of the overnight successes we think came out of nowhere had followings elsewhere already (for example, a huge fanfiction community). 

If you’re serious about making money from self-publishing, find the communities online that can support you, but be careful of get-rich-quick schemes. Have a look for the list of curated forums under “Groups and Forums” on the My Writing Matters resource page. 

Insights from a self-published author on self-publishing as an option for your book 

Almost anyone who’s toyed with the idea of writing a book has asked themselves at one time or another: is self-publishing my book a good idea? This concern is often based on the attitudes of other people to self-published books (you might even share this attitude). It is difficult to find information that isn’t biased in one way or another. I went through the whole to-and-fro about which method I should choose for my own work, Keyflame. 

So here are some of the facts about self-publishing that I’ve learned along the way.

Why self-publishing is bad (sometimes)

Most criticism regarding self-publishing stems from a lack of gatekeepers like editors or agents. There are many aspirant writers who believe that the first draft they have ever written is definitely, absolutely, good enough. Since self-publishing is so easy, there are a lot of these lazy/egotistical books out there. 

As a result, discoverability becomes an issue. Good books are buried under piles of bad books and AI slop. It also means that some readers become skeptical of self-published books after reading a few stinkers. 

The second problem with self-publishing is that while pressing “publish” is super easy, getting people to find your book (let alone buy it and read it) is incredibly hard.  

Getting your (self-published) book out there and noticed 

The evolution of Amazon’s self-publishing services to authors over the past two decades means that there’s competition in the market, and you need to consider effective advertising strategies to get your book out there and seen by potential readers. 

In some cases, you will find that book stores, reviewers and even friends turn up their noses at self-publishing. The reason for this is understandable: because anyone can upload anything to Amazon (or any other self-published book platform), that doesn’t make it a Good Read. 

Thankfully, this attitude is changing as independent book publishing becomes a more refined and acceptable type of business, and the quality of self-published works rises. 

There is a viable network of individuals, platforms, organizations  and companies to support the journey of a self-published author in getting their book out there and noticed: 

• You can hire a distributor to get your books into bookstores.
• There are online self-publishing companies that cater directly to libraries, and bookstores can also order books from them. Have a look at the My Writing Matters list of Publishing and Distribution platforms on the resources page.  
• Schools and libraries don’t tend to care how you’re published, they just want to be able to say that they managed to get an author to come speak to readers and students.
• Bookstores will let you do a signing as long as they think you can draw a crowd.
• Traditional media can be a viable (free) advertising option: South African self-published authors covered in the media include Dudu Busani-Dube (The Hlomu Series) and Lebohang Masango (Mpumi’s magic beads).

Once you have enough positive reviews, books and sales, people stop caring about your self-publishing journey and just acknowledge that you are a successful author. And in your way you help to build up the positive image of the self-publishing industry, one good book at a time. 

Can you make money from self-publishing? 

Here’s the deal: traditional publishers will pay you an advance up front and then you’ll get some royalties from sales. With self-publishing, you get much bigger royalties from sales, but you don’t get anything up front. If you don’t sell, you make nothing. If you don’t sell when you’re traditionally published you still have your advance (but possibly not another one as they might see you as a bad investment).

Is it possible to make a living from self-publishing?

Yes, but it depends on genre and, again, working hard. You have to write a lot of books that audiences want to read to earn enough to support a family. It can be done: there are people doing it. But the truth is that most authors (traditional and indie alike) have multiple streams of income. If you want to write for a living, think of other skills you can do from home that can give you writing time and work towards making those things happen sooner rather than later. This will also take the pressure off writing to earn.

ISBNs for the self-published writer

Does every book you publish need an ISBN? Let’s put the answer right here, in the first paragraph. If you plan to sell the book in brick-and-mortar bookshops and have it available in libraries, then yes, it must have an ISBN. If not, it’s a “nice to have” and not essential. That’s it! That’s the whole story.

But what about the legal implications? Does using a free ISBN from a platform like IngramSpark have an impact on your copyright, or can you get into trouble with the International SBN Agency if you don’t follow its guidelines?

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