(Updated July 13, 2017)
Even as a fifth-grader, I knew becoming a best-selling author was a long shot. While I loved to write and was sure I had a Great American Novel lurking somewhere inside, I couldn’t quite overcome the mental image of the artist starving in a garret somewhere. Not my style, then or now.
So Practical Jackie decided that a steady income in writing beat the authorial crap shoot, and picked a career in journalism instead. That turned out well, although within a few years of starting out as reporter, I was promoted up the ranks and spent more time editing other people’s copy and nourishing their talents and dreams than writing my own stuff.
Not long ago – exactly when is lost in the mists of time – I decided that I could, in fact, still be an author, but nonfiction would be my genre. I just didn’t know what topic, exactly, until I looked at all the articles I’d published (in print as well as online) on coaching topics. And with the growing popularity and acceptance of self-publishing, I could avoid all that agent/publishing house stuff and go directly to an adoring public.
Perfect! I’d just pull together a bunch of content, throw on some chapter numbers and titles and boom. Done!
Yeah…about that.
How to publish your own book
Turns out the content part was the easiest. My problem was too much content, which needed to be winnowed down. But there were other issues that cropped up along the way. For those of you who are thinking of publishing your own book, I offer the following tips for self-publishers.
- Title: I needed to call the book something and came up with a working title that – praise be! – turned out to be a great choice for the real one. DIY Coaching Manual for Women: How to Transform Your Life in 12 months is simple, direct and contains the important keywords I need for search, including “coaching,” “women” and “life.”
- Tip: Do some quick brainstorming on your title and pay attention to the first one you come up with.
- Organization: My book is broken down into 3 broad categories – life, career and health. Fitting the right information under the right heading took a lot of thought. Your book needs to logically flow from one chapter to the next.
- Tip: Spend a lot of time organizing up front, and save yourself a lot of cutting ‘n’ pasting later on.
- Numbering chapters: This is going to sound silly, but I can’t tell you how much time I wasted numbering and renumbering chapters. Part of my issue was that I wanted to simulate, as best I could in print, the coaching experience. So I wanted exactly 52 chapters, one for each week of coaching. Using the right heading style in Word allows them to show up in the search/navigation pane. That way you can see what chapters you’re missing or what’s out of order.
- Tip: Using Heading 2, which also allows you to easily move chapters within your book.
- Formatting: Other than the Heading 2 mentioned above, don’t worry about how it looks. It pains me to say that, because design is one of my favorite things to play with.
- Tip: Tamp down your inner artist and hire a designer. And yes, you can afford it.
- Version numbers: I have 13 versions saved on my hard drive. I started out dating them in the file name, but that didn’t help worth a damn as you can always organize your Word files by date.
- Tip: Use version numbers: “XYZ book v10,” and so on.
- Editing: I was a newspaper editor for nearly 30 years. I hired an editor anyway. After dinking around with 13 versions of my book, I pretty much had it memorized and my eyes just filled in the blanks of missing words, skipped over syntax and spelling errors and more.
- Tip: Spell check thoroughly before sending your manuscript off to your editor, which will save time and money. If you are without an editor or publisher, then you will want to do the same with your query letter accompanying your manuscript.
- Design: I found a designer on Fiverr and could not be happier with him. As with hiring an editor, it is well worth the investment in your book.
- Tip: Find one who speaks your language fluently and lives within 5 time zones so you can communicate clearly and on the same day. And you want one who has experience with self-publishing.
- Images: During the review process, we had to go back and tweak virtually of the images at the last minute because of the quality of the images. Don’t let that happen to you.
- Tip: Make sure your images are at least 300 dpi. I cannot stress this enough.
- Publishing: I went with Amazon’s CreateSpace self-publishing platform. It has relatively easy-to-follow instructions and, best of all, you can talk to a real person at the moment you have an issue.
- ISBN: That stands for “International Standard Book Number” and it identifies the publisher.
- Tip: Get a custom ISBN through CreateSpace, so you can list yourself (or your company) as the publisher. It costs $10.
- Bar code: I thought that the ISBN and the bar code were one in the same, and when I got my ISBN, the bar code would automatically generate. Not. Buy your custom ISBN number, then have your designer leave space on the back cover for the bar code, which CreateSpace will add.
- Review process: CreateSpace has an online reviewer that will go through your manuscript and tell you what the issues are. Some of these issues don’t exist. For example, in my book, the automatic reviewer misidentified chunks of type as an image, and kept coming back with flags that the DPI was wrong and so on. Some of them you can safely ignore (talk to your designer), but most of them need to be addressed.
- Order a hard copy: CreateSpace gives you many opportunities to review what you’ve put together before you
Every dog-eared page you see represents at least one copy-editing correction.publish, but what you see on the screen may or may not be what you intended.
- Tip: Get a copy printed and sent to you for review. It’s a lot easier to see errors in print than on a screen. What I thought was a good product on my screen ended up with 77 errors in the print version that I purely did not see on my screen.
- Description: You have about 4,000 characters to write your online description for Amazon, so be sure you load up that bad boy with as many keywords as you can while making it interesting, provocative, exciting and so on.
- Pricing: I had no idea what to do, but you can change the price at any point.
- Take Amazon’s top 10 books in your genre and average prices and used that.
- Kindle: What a nightmare that was! The first company I hired (on Fiverr) simply PDFed all my book pages and said, “Voila! Here’s your e-book.” Um…no. It had to be specifically formatted for e-readers so your readers can enlarge the type, etc., and my e-book designer didn’t get that. While adjusting page size is possible on a PDF, it’s not mobile friendly (requiring much scrolling back and forth) and I got several nastygrams on Amazon’s ratings because of it. I had to hire another company — at a much higher rate — to take the original Word document and reformat the entire thing so it would work in Kindle.
- Tip: Be sure your Word versions are all up to date before you get your book formatted for Kindle. Yes, it’s a pain in the butt going along, but it will be well worth it in time and money when you get to the e-book part of publishing.
Have you written a book? What was the biggest lesson you learned? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.