SELF-PUBLISHING

Everything you Need to Know to Get Started

by Bill Munro

Copyright © Bill Munro 2011

Smashwords Edition

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Foreword

Two years ago, I took the decision to self-publish my eighth book, ‘Taxi Jubilee’, under my own imprint, Earlswood Press. I had written six books for Crowood and one for Shire. I had behind me a decade of producing car club magazines, including writing a lot of the content, editing contributions from others and, crucially, typesetting them all.

I had planned to use an independent publisher of transport titles for ‘Jubilee’, but through our protracted negotiations, the owner was suffering poor health and when, sadly he died, his family decided to sell off the business. This was the spur for me to take the plunge and produced the book myself. It was well received, and gave me encouragement to produce more, which I am doing.

Holidaying in Italy in 2010, our host, an Englishman announced he had written a book about his and his wife’s exploits in settling in the country, almost thirty years before. ‘Would I like to pass an opinion on it?’ He asked, handing me a copy. My opinion was that although the standard of his English grammar, and spelling left a lot to be desired, he could spin a good yarn and there was nothing basically wrong with the book that a thorough edit wouldn’t put right. I took it on, and in doing so, turned myself from a self-publisher to a publisher.

What you read below is the sum of my experience in self-publishing and my first steps into publishing. I hope you find it useful.

Introduction

The publishing industry is supposed to be in turmoil, but publishers in the UK published more books in 2010 than they did in 2009. So why and how has this happened? Simply, they published greater numbers of fewer titles. What does this mean, for the book-buying public and, far more importantly for you, the author? It means that the industry is taking less risk, publishing the titles they are more sure will sell quickly and bring in a profit. For you, whether you are an established author trying to get your next book into print or you are trying to get a deal on that treasured first book, it means they are less and less likely to take a punt on you.

Remember that publishing is a business, and a publisher needs to make a profit, not to be a charity to wannabe writers, whatever talent those writers think may have. Even when times were good, successful publishers still chose as wisely as they could, and they would take on titles they felt they could depend on to show a return, either quickly or over a protracted period. Nowadays, as times get tougher they reject a lot more submissions, look for short-term returns instead of developing talent for a longer-term relationship and the reasons they give for rejecting a title are more widespread in their scope. They range from the purely commercial, such as, ‘no real market for the genre’ to not being appropriate for the house’s catalogue, like, ‘we don’t do religious books’. (This sounds feasible on the face of it, but one author I know was told that by a publisher of children’s books, because one of the characters in her novel for nine-year olds happened to be an angel!)

Now the chances of getting published are more difficult, and it is all the more tempting for the unpublished author, or the published author struggling to get the next book out, to self-publish.

And why not? What have you got to lose? Quite a bit of money, and a lot of sleep too, if you get it wrong, as well as the popularity of your family, who will have to suffer your sorrows. Or maybe even throw you and your books onto the street.

So here is my first, but not my last warning. Quite a few aspiring authors are not business people, and do not necessarily have the experience of such essential business skills as costing out a project, or of selling. Anyone who wants to self-publish will, if they aren’t already au fait with what these involve will have to take a quantum leap into these realms. It’s tough for many, especially the selling part, because a book is a part of you, and you have to sell yourself as well as the book. Without doing either, you are virtually doomed to failure.

If you are producing a book simply for your family or friends or for a club or society and have no intention of selling it on the open market, some of what is written here in respect of marketing and selling will not apply to you, but quite a bit, especially in regard to printing, typesetting and quality control, will.

Now I’m going to tell you what is involved in self-publishing, and what you need to do to make professional job of it.

Chapter 1 Three Golden Rules

There are three Golden Rules to follow if you want to publish a book and sell it successfully. They are: get the book right for the market; get the marketing right for the book; get your sums right.

Golden Rule No 1: Get the book right for the market

This involves making sure the style, size and price is right for the intended market. We will look at this in greater depth in chapter 3.

Golden Rule No 2 Get the marketing right for the book

It is my belief that marketing begins with the conception of the book, not with the finished product. This we will examine in more detail in chapter 5, but you must have a very good idea of the type of person who will buy your book, and understand the best way of reaching him or her.

Golden Rule No 3 Get your sums right

You will be laying out a lot of money to get this book onto the market, so you must understand some basic costings, unless you enjoy giving your money away! Chapter 6 deals with the all-important money side of things.

Follow these rules, and you will be on the right path to being a successful self-publisher.

But what does ‘success’ mean?

It’s a great word, ‘successful’, isn’t it? It can mean a lot of different things to different people. To some it means being driven around in a limo, sipping champagne. To others, it’s clearing debts and finally having enough to live on. But let’s define it for our purposes. It means that the book sells to the market you want it to sell to, in sufficient quantities to show a profit. That profit is not likely to make you a millionaire, but it will, perhaps encourage you to go on and do more.

But before we go into detail about these Golden Rules, let’s see whether self-publishing is right for you, and get you to understand why you haven’t been able to get a publishing deal on your book.

Chapter 2 Why Self-Publish? And, Equally Important, Why Not?

Before you take the plunge, ask yourself why you can’t get a publishing deal, or even get an agent interested. First, have you followed the rules that publishers and agents lay down for aspiring authors? Every publisher listed in the Writers and Artists Handbook and the Writers Yearbook spells out how they will accept, or indeed whether they will accept unsolicited manuscripts. They will also be quite specific about what type of book they publish. Follow these rules without deviation. Don’t send a manuscript to a publisher who clearly does not publish the type of book you’ve written. If they publish academic works, don’t send them a fantasy novel. No, they won’t take the time and trouble to look through it and make a leap of faith, believing you when you say you’ve written a better book than Lord of the Rings or whatever and change the whole nature of their business just for you. Yes, people have been known to demand just that.

And of course you’ve followed their requirements for submission of the manuscript. If they want, say a synopsis and a single chapter, send them that, and only that, in the form they request. If they want a hard copy, present it printed out on one side of the paper, double-spaced with decent-size margins, and in a clear, simple font like Times. Don’t be clever or ‘original’ and try to catch the editor’s eye with fancy fonts or coloured ink. You will be noticed, but for the wrong reasons. Submitting a manuscript is not like sending in a request to ‘Jim’ll Fix It’, with ‘please, please, please’ written a thousand times in the covering letter, like you might have done when you were a kid at school. If you do anything different from what they want, they will ignore your work completely and quite likely brand you as someone difficult to work with. It is vital that author and publisher work together. Both want the same thing: a successful outcome. Trust the publisher to know his or her business better than you.

The Literary Agent’s Angle

In today’s tough economic climate, literary agents work hard for their money, and they are only interested in taking on a title that they will actually earn from. They, like publishers or for that matter the shop in the High Street are in business to make a profit. If you present an agent with a book with a possible cover price of £10 and potential print run of, say 1,000 copies, they will tell you that the economics of it will not make it worth their while working for you. You as an author will only earn a small amount of money out of a short run, small non-fiction paperback and they would only get a fraction of very little. Nor will they spend time hawking a book around that they feel is just plain poor. If it has potential, but needs work they may advise you of this and it is in your interest to listen and get on with reworking it.

If it is too poor a book (and even if there are some obvious beginner’s mistakes, such as a clumsily written plot, poor grammar etc., an agent will have a ‘nose’, for a good story and for an author’s potential) accept what is said and if it has potential, work on it. If the agent tells you, usually politely that the book is rubbish, and he or she is the tenth person to give you that impression, isn’t it about time you faced the fact that it may well BE rubbish and not the next Ulysses or Gone with the Wind?

Remember: publishers, agents and authors all want the same thing – a successful title that earns a profit. Your relationship with publisher and agent should be like a marriage. You should be best friends, working for a common goal, not people you are constantly fighting with. Sometimes it is hard to abandon something you have put so much into, but at times it has to happen. Journalists use a very telling phrase about cherished pieces of work they have to abandon, simply because they are not suitable for the job in hand. They talk about ‘murdering their babies’.

If it is a novel in a genre that is not currently in vogue, but your book is well written, that is a judgement call for both agent and publisher and if it is rejected for that reason alone, it may be a sound reason for you to embark on self-publishing, because publishers can make mistakes in this regard, and if your book is sufficiently different, and good, then it might work.

The Publisher’s Angle

There are genuine business reasons why a publisher won’t take your book, and you must understand them before embarking on self-publication. They are the same reasons that an agent will reject a title, because they are all working to the same criteria. You might reconsider reworking your book, on the advice of an agent or another, published author who is kind enough to give you advice, and doing so might actually gets you a publishing deal. I will recommend you consider giving it a thorough overhaul anyway!

Reasons for Rejection

If it is non-fiction, ask yourself these questions about how, and indeed whether it fits the market:

Do you know enough about your subject in the first place to write a book?

Has the topic been covered well enough before, by other, well-respected writers?

If it covers a subject that has already been tackled in some way, does it say something new, does it bring a long-forgotten topic back to life? Is it in a different format or size, e. g. larger or smaller; a primer to compliment a previous, large book, or vice versa?