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There’s a lot of self in self-publishing
When I started my business, I took on a lot of clients who wanted to self-publish. Since my own background is in traditional publishing, I didn’t know a lot about the market or how authors succeeded in self-publishing.
To be honest, I still don’t because the market is always changing.
What I do know, though, is thanks to my client Darrow Kirkpatrick. Darrow is an all-around awesome guy who retired early and wrote about his journey on a popular blog and ultimately, in a string of successfully self-published books (some of which I edited). Darrow taught me how much work goes into self-publishing successfully.
A traditional publisher — as well as a publishing professional, like me — has a lot of people working on an author’s behalf. An editor, a copyeditor, a typesetter. Designers not just for the cover, but for the type, the headings on each page, the sidebars and boxed text, plus formatting for the e-book and the hard copy. Publicists and marketers. People who can file your copyright and send a copy of your book to the U.S. Library of Congress (which I always found cool) as well as make sure that your book gets its unique barcode and ISBN (International Standard Book Number). A salesforce that can talk about your book to independent bookstores, make sure that Barnes & Noble has copies of your book, and ensure Amazon lists…
