There are a number of questions you need to ask yourself before you start down the road of self-publishing.
Why Do You Want To Self Publish?
Are you looking for a way to start a writing career? Are you just looking to get a few copies of your memoir for friends and family? You need to nail down your purpose for self publishing. This is generally pretty easy to do, and it will help guide the rest of your decisions.
How Much Are You Willing To Do Yourself?
- Editing. Do you want to take on all the responsibility for making sure your work has no grammatical errors, that it is coherent, and that it reads well? Can you recruit a few friends to read through your book to look for errors? Would you be better off paying a couple hundred dollars for a professional editor?
- Cover Design. Are you artistically inclined? Are you good at learning software by following tutorials on the internet? How intricate of a cover does your work need?
- Text Layout. How complicated is the layout going to be for your text? Are you willing to spend $5-$10 a page to get your work laid out exactly the way you want? Can you learn to use free tools to do it yourself? For novels, the layout is usually simple, for non-fiction how to books, it can get complicated. I’ll be honest, I’m of the opinion that if you’ve got a novel and you’re wanting to self publish your book, you can lay it out very easily.
- Marketing. How much time are you willing to spend marketing your book? Can you produce or can you learn to produce graphics or videos to promote your book?
Do You Want A Large Print Run or POD?
If you find a printing house or self publishing company that does large runs (say 1000+ copies), you can bring the cost per copy of your book way, way down. Of course, because you’ll be buying in bulk, you’ll still need to come up with a big chink of cash right from the get go. And then you’ll have to bother with warehousing, shipping, billing, and distributing. There are some services that can help you with each of those steps. For example , the Amazon Advantage program allows you to send copies to their warehouse and then they list, sell and ship your book to customers.
With POD publishing, you usually don’t have to come up with any money to publish, except maybe a pittance to print a proof copy. The cost to produce one copy of your book will always be greater, though. The good news is that production costs come out of the book sale, so you never have to come up with the money yourself (unless you’re buying copies for your friends.)
What Self-Publishing Company Should You Use?
There are pros and cons to using any Self Publishing company. Once you know what amount of work you are willing to do, though, it makes your choice a little easier. You just check out a bunch of companies, and then pick the one that works best for you.
I reviewed two of the larger POD companies a while ago on my blog. Choosing a “free” POD publisher: Lulu vs Createspace
Directory of Self Publishing Companies
Should You Get Your Own ISBN?
An ISBN is a unique number that identifies your book. If you are publishing via createspace or lulu, they can assign one to your book. However, if they assign the number, they own it. You can’t take that number with you if you move to a different publishing company. This may or may not be a big deal to you. For my first novel, I didn’t care. For my next books, I think I may buy my own ISBNs.
For more information about ISBNs, you can read this Wikipedia article: ISBN
If you want to buy ISBNs and you are in the U.S. you need to go to the US ISBN Agency.
Just a note – when you buy ISBNs, they will generally try to sell you generated barcodes for your images. There is a free online generator that you can try though. ISBN Barcode Generator