NaNoWriMo is over and I now have two more drafts! But now that the month is done, it’s time for me to start getting Hero Complex ready for publication, and working out just what I’ll be doing for next year.1 However, there have been a few people from the Vancouver region who have been curious about self publishing and were asking how they were to go about doing it.
Self publishing is my jam, so I have been having a few conversations about what my process is and the specifics of what I’m doing. And now I am going to go through it all over the next few weeks with you.
I’m not going to be going through things like how to write or edit your book. Those are very different processes that vary wildly between people, so I am not the one to go to in order to figure out what’s best for you. This series is just going to be how I personally go through the process of formatting and publishing my novels. But first, a small preamble to get us started.
Why am I doing self publishing?
People have a lot of different reasons for getting into it, so I can only speak for why I’m doing it. I ended up getting very quickly disillusioned with traditional publishing after going to a writer’s convention and actually talking to industry professionals and other authors. My assumptions about what I could get published were cast aside and my belief that interesting ideas would win out were largely proven to be untrue and that marketability and the ability to sell were much more important.
I was very idealistic back then. Very.
Worse, after talking to a lot of other people who actually had books published, I found that some of these people were having to start from scratch to get their next books published, back t the conference to pitch to agents fresh despite already having a book published. Some were looking to expand into other genres, some had their books go out of print and were unable to get their rights back, and none of this was something I wanted to hear at the time.
And the final nail in the coffin for me, the main reason I wanted to go the traditional publishing route, was finding out that many of these smaller authors had to do their own marketing. As some of you may already be aware, I am absolute garbage at marketing.
In the end, I figured that I might as well just start publishing them myself. At least that way I could publish whatever I wanted on my own schedule, and I wouldn’t have to re-pitch every time I had a new project that targeted a slightly different demographic. I also wouldn’t have to rebrand myself every time I wanted to expand into new genres.
It’s a much more time-consuming route, to be sure, and takes up a lot more resources. I need to come up with my own cover art, need to find my own editor, and still have to do my own marketing, but in the end it’s been rewarding on its own. Even if only now, five years later, I’m only really starting to hammer down a process.
So, if you want to know what my process for getting a book published is, stay tuned. First up is file preparation.
- Probably the White Noise sequels and another Wonderland book [↩]