Welcome back or welcome for the first time. If this is your first time, please explore my blog/website and have fun. Whichever applies to you, I have worked up a top 5 list for you. Hope you enjoy. With no further ado, here are ‘5 reasons I love being a self-published author’, in no particular order.
Reason I: I love the opportunity to make a difference.
Basically, I wanted to be able to make a difference without having to wait through years of people who had just too many hopeful authors to sort through to take a good look at my manuscript, or just didn’t think my manuscript was a good fit for their publishing house, or ‘not right, at this time’.
I wanted to be able to get my book out into the hands of readers ASAF, as soon as feasible. This did not happen as quickly as I had hoped because I had a hard time finding the information I needed to help me self-publish my book. It took me years to find my children’s book mentor, and my promoting is not going as well as I would have liked. Yet, now I have some little experience and a second book should be easier. I have the ball rolling; it should start to gain momentum.
Even though, things did not go as I had planned (I hadn’t realized how large an undertaking it was), I have the opportunity to get books out, and talk about things that I feel need to be talked about without the rejection letters telling me that my book isn’t worth the time to publish. It is published. It has bypassed the red tape. My message about stereotypes, bullying, self-acceptance, and the power of friendship is now available to those who want to read it.
Reason II: I love the creative freedom that being self-published gives me.
I am glad to be able to write as I see fit without having to have someone else tell me how to write. Naturally, I accept advice (friends and family are important), and I learn from others, but if the process is to be creative, I feel that it can’t be dictated to or forced into a mold. My writing often happens as it happens.
In one of my practice novels, I had a plan for my characters. They had a different idea as to how things were supposed to go. That idea was love. The story wasn’t a romance; it was an adventure. I gave them good reasons they should do things my way and not fall in love. I was logical. Too many dangers confronted them if they didn’t face facts. What did they do? They decided that they had loved each other for a long time, almost from the start, and the reasons I gave them had kept them apart because, well, the reasons made sense. Then, after acknowledging that there were, indeed, problems with them falling in love, they up and decided that they would just face the problems and enjoy their love anyway. I tried to fight it. I kept them apart, for a while. They continued in the adventure, but they kept coming back to the idea that they loved each other, not openly, of course. After long enough, I couldn’t fight it anymore. They got their way. I sulked.
They were right, of course. They did belong together. It seemed to be a good fit. Then again, I was right, also. There were a lot of problems. Oh, well. Better to have more crisis to get the characters through, adding to the story, maybe even allowing for another book, than to make the characters act out of character.
Reason III: I love having all the rights to my own work.
Self-publishing means that I am not selling the rights to my books. My books make money with each sale, not up front in an advance. Depending on how successful the book is, the advance might be all the money an author gets, while those who bought the rights… well, have the rights.
I know that in most instances, where writing is profitable, the person you publish with, be it a book publisher, magazine, or website, usually ends up with the right to copy, edit, and distribute your work, but I don’t see how someone being able to do whatever they want with someone else’s work is right. So, by self-publishing, I avoided that problem. Will I be able to do that all the time? Probably not, but, in this situation, I can say the work is truly mine.
Reason IV: I love the sense of accomplishment that comes with doing most of the work myself.
Self-publishing is not something to be taken up lightly. It can be hard work, especially if you are trying to self-publish on a low budget or no budget. It takes a lot of research. Such being the case, this item in my list takes more time to talk about than the others.
When you self-publish DIY, there are a lot of aspects for you to think about. You write the book, of course, but you also have to edit it, over and over again, because, trust me, you can overlook some basic, even obvious, errors the first ten or twenty times through. I found a site with a free grammar check. I like it so far.
You, also, want to make sure you brush up on your punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure rules, so that your writing comes off as being from an intelligent writer. I have read books by authors who can’t even seem to form a basic sentence. This breaks the flow of the thought, bringing the story to a screeching halt for a few seconds, which jolts the reader out of the story. You want to keep the reader pulled along by the story, not yanked free from it, causing them to have to catch hold again. So, learn your sentence building well. You won’t always get it exactly right, but study helps.
After editing, to make sure all the words, and commas, and so forth are aesthetically pleasing, there is formatting. What font do you want the text to be? Is that font easy to read? If people have to fight to read the font, all that nice editing and word-craft won’t impress your readers, it will make them put down the book. What about paragraph breaks, page breaks, and the first letter of that first word (of the page, or chapter depending on the type of book)? Illustrations need to be placed in a manner that will add to the words, and the words need to not run in front of the illustrations. It also helps if the illustrations are in some general proximity to the text they picture. These are all things to consider during formatting. I learned this from trial and error, and looking at other people’s books from a reader’s viewpoint. I am not trained to format books, and would have to do much more research and put in much more practice time to consider myself adept.
Promotion and marketing is a real kicker for me, and I have heard that it is the same for others. This step includes a lot of consistent work. You can’t stop promoting and marketing your book if you expect it to continue to sell copies. Also, you must begin early. I began promoting and marketing ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ after it was published. It had no momentum. I see advice from most sources that tell me, I should have been doing this promotion work the moment I wrote the first words. I am still struggling to figure out how to market and promote well.
Publishing is something that you really don’t do unless you have your own publishing house. I published through Amazon. Amazon did the publishing. If I published through Barnes and Noble, they would be the publisher even though I ‘self-publish’. I don’t have the machines to print off the books. I don’t distribute (relieved sigh).
Yet, the question, “Who do I publish through?” isn’t really that easy. You don’t only have to consider Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the like. There are also aggregators that will publish the book and distribute it to various retailers, like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and keep track of the sales from those retailers so that you can see everything right there with the one aggregator instead of publishing with each of the main publishers/retailers and keeping track of all that separate data… well, separately. It comes at a cost, though. The aggregators are basically managing, and they need to get paid for that. When I learn more myself, I plan to write a post on aggregators, but right now I am keeping track of things myself.
The long and short of it is: DIY self-publishing is a lot to keep track of, but it can be done if you are willing to keep learning.
Reason V: I love being able to take what I learn and share it with others.
I struggled through the process from the start. The things I needed to know, what I needed to learn, all the work involved that I really didn’t even understand fully, all overwhelmed me for a long time. This stopped me from attempting to publish my book for years. I am still struggling in some ways. Yet, I have learned a great deal. It has become easier with the doing.
I would have loved to have someone back then who could step me through the process, help me feel a little more prepared, help me feel a little less like I was simply throwing myself into the middle of a sword fight with a dagger and no more knowledge than ‘the pointy end goes in the other guy’. (Who can remember where that quote comes from? If you know the answer, please leave a comment.) When I did find my children’s book mentor, her encouragement helped me make my unprepared leap with some grace, as well as made me feel that I was not so fully unprepared after all. Feeling less unprepared was of such great help, I can’t fully express it. Check out my post on Mentors, Family and Friends.
Now, I have the experience of my first self-published book tucked away, and I know more of what I am doing, though I still realize I have so much more to learn that it can get a little daunting. I am no expert, but if I can give another learning author enough encouragement for them to take the leap with some grace, and enough knowledge for them to land on their feet, I would be very happy.
I hope you enjoyed my ‘5 reasons I love being a self-published author’. If you want to join me on my romantic journey through writing; crying, laughing, frowning, smiling, and loving, go ahead and subscribe. If you know someone who would like my posts, please, share the love.
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