If you’re writing and self-publishing a book, where should you start? And who do you need on your team?
This episode, we’re changing up our usual format with a short, practical answer to a common publishing question. In a whirlwind tour through writing, design, publication and promotion, Arthur explains how a writing coach, editor, proofreader, designer, and distributor can help your book do its job – and what it means to be the centre of your fan community.
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Arthur Attwell 0:03
Hello, and welcome to How Books Are Made.
If you’re a regular listener, thank you, and you’ll notice I have no guest with me today. Just me, for a little less time than usual.
The other day, an acquaintance messaged me to say he wanted to write a book, and to ask where he should start. And, most importantly, whose help was he going to need. I get that question a lot, so perhaps it’s something you get asked, too, or something you’re wondering about yourself.
So I thought I’d explain, for a self-publisher, what kinds of people you’re going to need on your team. Of course, you can do everything yourself, but the point is that you probably don’t have the skills or the time to learn. So, assuming you have some money to spend, who should you hire?
Now, ‘Who should you hire?’ is the second most important question in publishing. The most important question is ‘What is my book’s job?’ Before you do anything, you should be able to write down, in a crystal clear paragraph, what your book is meant to do for you. Really deep down. Does it need to make you feel useful? Cool! Should it attract better clients for your business? That’s a good job for a book. Write it down, and then whenever you hire someone to help you with it, make sure you tell them what your book’s job is. If you don’t, you’ll waste so much time and money.
Okay, whirlwind-tour time. Let’s divide the publishing process into four parts: writing, design, publishing, and promotion.
And let’s start with the writing. The first person you’re going to need is a writing coach. As you write, you are going to be desperate for feedback, from someone who isn’t your poor partner or parent or close friend, and you’re going to need to be accountable to someone to finish writing, and to rewrite your book and edit it a few times. I’ll put a link in the shownotes to a list of coaches I’ve been recommended, and you should ask around to find someone who fits with you, as a person.
Can you write a book without a coach? Sure. It’s like playing a sport without a coach – it’s totally doable, but the chances are that they’ll get you to a level you won’t reach on your own.
Okay, hopefully within a few months, you have a manuscript. Now it needs pruning and tidying. You’re going to need a book editor.
A good editor isn’t just for fixing your spelling and grammar – you can actually get that for free with AI these days. A human editor is going to clean up and improve your text in ways you never would have thought of, and they’ll spot all kinds of little things that you forgot about.
A good editor is like a hairdresser. And trying to edit your own book is like trying to cut your own hair. Just don’t.
Also, many editors double as overall project managers. And if you’re new to all this, or don’t have a lot of spare time, you really do want an experienced project manager to oversee everything and to help you make decisions. So when you hire your editor, make sure you agree explicitly whether or not they’re also managing the project – wires often get crossed about that.
Okay, it’s time for the second part of the publishing process: design. Here, you really need a professional book designer. Not just a graphic designer – book design is a whole special discipline. Plus, you really want a cover designer and a book-page designer, and those are actually two very different skills.
If you can afford it, it makes an enormous difference to hire a specialist cover designer and separately a specialist book-page designer. The thing is, a cover design needs to attract attention to itself, and say ‘Hey, look at me, you can’t stop looking at me!’ And a page design needs to do the exact opposite: it needs to make reading effortless, and to do that, for the most part, it must not attract any attention to itself as a design. Those are two very different things, and I’ve found that most designers are best at one or the other.
There are a few unicorn designers who can do both, of course, but you have to get a bit lucky to find them.
Also, and here’s a brutal truth I seldom have the guts to tell an author face to face: please, for the love of all that is holy, do not try to design your own cover, or insist on a particular image for the cover, or tell the designer to change their design because your niece who’s just got an A in art doesn’t think it works. There is a design heaven, somewhere, filled with good covers whose bodies were snatched by insistent self-publishers, and replaced with misshapen zombie versions of their former selves.
As you can hear, I carry the scars.
Okay, onwards! Your book is written and laid out. Time to hit publish!
But wait, there’s more! Before you print it is absolutely crucial that you hire a professional proofreader to read every word and check every image in its final laid-out form, because I guarantee there will be errors that you and the editor missed.
I’ve been handling book production for 25 years, and even with the most diligent, experienced editors, a good proofreader will find an average of one error on every page.
And you might be wondering whether there is an AI alternative? No, not a replacement, because much of what a proofreader is checking has to do with the arrangement of the words on the page, it’s partly visual, and AI can’t do that. Plus there is context and nuance involved, and AI will flag loads of things as errors that actually aren’t.
Ideally, a good proofreader is using AI in addition to their own reading, to help them avoid missing little typos. Even the best proofreaders miss things from time to time.
Okay, so now that your laid-out book pages have been checked properly, it really is time to get the book out there.
If I’m keeping things simple and cheap and unsentimental, just use Amazon’s self-publishing service.
If you have good reasons to want to go a little further, it can be worth the extra effort and expense to use IngramSpark. In both cases, you’ll upload the print-ready PDF from your designer, paste in some information about your book, and then Amazon or Ingram will make it available for sale, and will print a copy for each person who buys it. Easy peasy.
There are a million other ways to make a book available, some of them excellent, but statistically Amazon or IngramSpark will do 80% of the job for 99% of self-publishers.
Should you get your book converted to an ebook for, say, Kindle or iBooks? Hmm, maybe if you’re writing in a genre where ebooks are really, really popular, which is basically just romance. Otherwise, honestly, the chances are it’ll cost you more to convert than you will ever make back in sales.
And I say that as someone who literally specialises in publishing ebooks. Ebooks and web books are amazing for sophisticated projects with big budgets and ambitions. But if you’re a first-time self-publisher, they are going to slow you down. You will know when the time is really right to learn the ins and outs of ebooks and web books.
Oh, also, definitely print about 50 copies to sell and give away in person. If you live too far from an Amazon or Ingram printer, ask around for a good short-run book-printing company in your town. You can even ask me on LinkedIn to ask my network for recommendations near you, and I bet we’ll get a good answer.
Also, never print more than a few hundred copies of a book. especially if you’re publishing for the first time. You will sell far fewer copies than you expect, and if you do sell out that’s a great problem to have.
Okay, the final part of the process is promotion! The hardest part by far for most people. And also the one part where I am not going to recommend a particular kind of professional. This is going to depend entirely on who you are.
A much more useful word for promotion or marketing is ‘community building’. If you want people to read your book, you’re going to need fans – champions that will talk about your book, that feel personally invested in it. If for some reason you already have fans, start with them. You will literally ask them to tell people about your book. Give them text and images to use. Give them free books.
And remember, your fans support you, the person, not your business or your brand or even your ideas. You will need to embrace the idea that you, the person, are the centre of your community, and your job there is to be lovable. That doesn’t mean cuddly and soft, it means you must represent qualities that people feel strongly about. If you’re a jerk, there will be people who love that about you. If you’re funny, there will be people who love that about you. If you are brave and principled, that will also attract fans.
Don’t hesitate to hire someone to help you embrace and express that. But I can’t say who that will be. Maybe it’s another, more experienced writer, maybe it’s a marketing specialist, or maybe it’s a therapist or a life coach.
Because publishing is an emotional journey as much as a financial one. And the best way to get through it is with the right people.
I’ll be back with guests in a few weeks. If this kind of brief, concrete stuff is useful to you, let me know. You can get in touch by email at podcast@howbooksaremade.com, or find me on LinkedIn.
HBAM is supported by Electric Book Works, where my team and I develop and design books for organisations around the world. You can find us online at electricbookworks.com