Advice For Self Publishing

So you’ve written a book and you want to prepare it for publishing yourself. What advice do you have for me? The short answer is, don’t do it.

 

Legend has it that a woman asked Pablo Picasso to draw her portrait. He sketched it and said, “That will be 10,000 francs.”

She was outraged. “10,000 francs? It only took you five minutes to create that drawing. Isn’t 10,000 francs a lot for five minutes’ work?”

Picasso replied, “This portrait may have only taken me five minutes, but it took my entire life to learn how to do it.”

Publishing a book is similar. You’ve written a book and done the basic formatting yourself. You ask a designer for help reaching the finish line, and the designer wants to charge what you think is an inordinate amount of money.

You have basic text editing software and you think you’ve done most of the work. The book looks pretty good.
Maybe you’ve seen that commercial where the kid at the local carnival tells the mom and her son that he thinks he did an “okay” job assembling the ride he’s having trouble buckling them into. And the mom wisely grabs her son and runs. Books are the same way. Do you really want someone to open your book and have their first thought be “this looks like it was self-published”? Just okay is not okay.

Your book is your baby; maybe even your lifelong dream. Even if it’s your tenth book and you’re a fairly seasoned pro at this point, you understand that professional design is essential. A professional will help you with everything from page count to page layout, font choices, chapter headers, drop caps, where to put the ISBN, product barcode, and copyright information, how to create a spine and bleed for your cover, setting up attractive and helpful page headers and footers, and more.

You might also think, “well, I’ll hire a pro, but someone from cheapdesigns.com, because at least then I’ll get a really good price.” There are lots of reasons that designers will do work for a really low price, and most of them do not add up to a great publishing experience. There are time zones to overcome, language barriers to cross, industry standards to be considered. Do you want to wait eight hours for a simple text change because your graphic designer halfway around the world just went to bed? Do you want to hire someone whose education and experience include “Completed online book publishing seminar” in 2021?

Do yourself a favor and hire a professional. I happen to know someone who is highly qualified.