Self-Publishing- My Step by step guide for authors

Self-Publishing- MY step by step guide

Good day, everyone! I hope you’re all ready for the weekend. I know I sure am. It’s not been a terribly productive week. I keep looking at the calendar and thinking I should be further along on this MS than I am in order to meet my own publishing deadline for “The Brat”, the book I’m working on right now.

As a self-publisher of over 40 books, I have found that the only way I get paid on a regular basis, is if I keep to a strict release schedule. This means writing one book after another and getting them edited, formatted, cover art(ed)… lol, and doing it all on a tight deadline without sacrificing quality. My readers demand that I do this so they will have something of mine to read.

Don’t get me wrong. I adore what I do for a living and I feel immensely blessed to be able to be able to do it. Writing was never a dream job for me as it is for so many authors, but once I began doing it, it became a passion and when I discovered others appreciated what I did and actually started giving me feedback about my stories, I was convinced that there wasn’t anything I’d rather put in the effort and time that writing takes to create. Being an author and being known for a quality product became my life.

Being a self-publisher is a little different than working with a publishing house. I’ve done both successfully but here I am self-publishing, so you can guess which I prefer.

I’ve always been decent at running my own business and most people in my life will tell you that my personality requires me to help run their business/life whether they like it or not. First of all, I started off working pretty young. My wonderful parents instilled in me the best work ethic on the planet… Work hard and make yourself satisfied with your work, or don’t work at all. Oh, yeah, that last part wasn’t an option.

My parents both worked and they made me proud when I saw how hard it was for them sometimes. My mom went back to work after my brother was born and would come home exhausted only to have to take care of the rest of us. I learned how to cook in my early teens to help out my mom but she still did a hell of a lot of work in the home. This was a good lesson for me to learn because I found myself doing this a mere ten years later when I started my own family and had to work full-time. Publishing is much like this.

Though I began writing books after I finished up working outside the house, I still had a family and a house to run. My husband and kids still appreciated food on the table when they got home from work and school no matter how much my characters were screaming at me to write their love scenes. Sometimes I had to leave them on the page mid-coitis just to cook dinner. I’m sure they didn’t appreciate that one little bit!

These days when I self-publish, I follow a pretty simple formula which has worked for me like clockwork so far:

1.      Plot out my book in my head- This is the stage which usually occurs in the shower or at the sink when my hands are wet and never in front of my computer when I can actually sit down and write my thoughts. (of course it does)

2.      Scratch out a synopsis- Preferably this has a beginning, middle, and an ending which will make me and my readers happy with it once I actually present the finished book to them. It also contains details (in an unorganized fashion) that may or may not ever make it into the finished book.

3.      Order my cover art- For me, this comes before the story is written. I have my concept down, I know who my main characters are and what they look like, and I have at least a major part of their story in my head. I like my covers before I write the story because if the models are good, I refer back to their images often while I write my book.

4.      Write my outline- I’m a plotter and a planner, not a panster. I definitely need the bones and structure a well-written outline provides. Because I write books with at least an element of mystery and always with bad guys, I need to know what’s going to happen before it does. I need to have some guideline to follow. I learned this running my own business. If you don’t have structure, the whole thing is going to crumble… plus, I’m just plain OCD to the max.

5.      Sit down and write my book- Obviously, this part takes the longest and for me, it requires that I set a strict writing schedule to complete it by a particular release date. I try to write a minimum of 2,000 words a day. If I don’t do this, meeting a deadline on time is very difficult because I give myself about two months in between releases, sometimes less. I have cranked out a book a month, but that takes extraordinary creative juices and let’s face it, we can’t all be “ON” all the time.

6.      Deliver it to my editor- I adore my editor but she does keep me on my toes. I give her about two days for every 10,000 words of my story for first round edits. This means, if I don’t give her two whole weeks with a novel-length book, she gets cranky. I get it. She explained it very well one time. She said, (paraphrasing) “Look, like you, if I read over the manuscript and try to find mistakes and rush… I’m going to miss some. Being an editor means that I have to NOT become comfortable with your style and flow… which I do when I read more than 10,000 words at a time. I need to take a fresh look after 10K the next day, or I will become “USED” to your style and miss stuff the same way you do when you proof your own MS.”

After the first round of edits, we do one more. She finds additional stuff she missed her first time around. Then… when I get back her final, I give it one more word-by-word proofing that takes two more days for a long book. Though I adore my editor, and she makes every conscious effort to catch all my boo boos, I admit, during this last stage, I usually find a few more typos. I’ve found as many as 8 on a very long book but I blame myself for those because (A) I made them and didn’t catch them to begin with and (B) I rushed her in this case… just like she told me not to. This part of my to-do list is the longest because in my opinion, editing is the most crucial part of the book. Let’s face it, any author worth their salt can write a book. It’s the editor who polishes the rock into a diamond (or the closest thing I have written to a diamond thus far J ).

7.      Send my completed baby to my formatter- I have to say, my formatter is a cranky guy. He’s gonna kill me for saying that but he has figuratively slapped my hand more than once. (Say in your most whiny voice) “Don’t double space between paragraphs.” “Don’t hit the space bar twice after a period in a sentence.” “Don’t add stupid little squigglys to your chapters. Smashwords hates that!”… I think you get my drift. He’s cranky but he’s taught me a lot about what he goes through to make my MS look pretty so I try to make him happy with me. Oh… he hates crushing deadlines too. (Hee Hee- apparently, I’m a failure at my own time table because I seem to demand “Rushes” from everyone.) I chalk that up to an attitude of “Okay, I’m done and now you should be… RIGHT NOW!” “Are you done yet? Are you done yet? Are you done yet?”

Inevitably someone, usually my conscience, yells… “Shut the eff up!”

8.      Finally, we publish- This takes even MORE patience, something I’m usually short on. I always put up my book on Amazon first. This bookseller is the worst when it comes to checking my MS for flaws, typos, etc. They also run software to detect unacceptable key words and phrases that will raise a red flag to whether they should publish my book or not. An example of this for a book in the “Romance” category would be the word Incest. In a self-help or psychology text, Incest is probably perfectly acceptable to Amazon and it wouldn’t be flagged but in the “Romance” or “Erotica” category, this is a big no-no and Amazon will (and has) refused to publish it. This is probably why they run a finished book through such a strict review process but they are most definitely worse than most. Smashwords, for example, takes anywhere from a minute to an hour to publish my book once it’s submitted and then it is later “checked” for inclusion to their extended distribution catalogue. See, Smashwords distributes to 8 or 10 major retailers such as Barnes and Noble and iBooks. Kobo, which is huge in Europe, takes about 72 hours to publish but I do my foreign language translations over there because a lot of my readers in Spain, Italy, and France read on the Kobo platform.

I suppose that’s about all I can say about self-publishing. I hope, if you are a new author and haven’t published before, some of what I do will be helpful to you. For my readers, I have just let you into the “business” side of being an author. I hope I’ve been able to give you a little bit of an appreciation for what it is I do and why. Until later, thank you so much for tuning in J