Everyone Has a Little Book in Them…

“Everyone has a little book in them and, in most cases, that is exactly where it should stay.”

So advised Christopher Hitchens, the late English philosopher, wit and all-round bon vivant. But it seems that I’m not the only one ignoring his counsel. Since bringing my own book The Wrong Way Round out, many people have got in touch to ask me how they can get their own masterpieces into print, rightly figuring out that if, I could manage it, then it really can’t be that hard. 

The Good Old Days 

Had you asked me this question a decade or so ago, I would have replied that you needed to find a publisher who thought that your book could sell, and do so well enough to both recoup their printing costs and return a decent profit to split between the both of you. I would have added a warning to brace yourself as, being a new author, the vast majority of publishers would either reject your manuscript or more likely just not reply at all, no matter how damn good the content. 

If you were lucky enough to find an interested publisher, the good news was that they would edit and proofread your work, commission a nice cover, and do everything else necessary to turn it into a proper grown-up looking book. They would then organise and pay for an initial print run, market it, and get the thing into bookstores. In return however, they’d demand a healthy cut of the revenue of each and every book sold. Forever. Plus you’d be obliged to sign over a bunch of rights to them, effectively handing over ownership of your book and anything else derived from it in the future, including that nice little TV mini-series you’d been fantasising about. 

New Brooms

But all that has changed thanks to a big shake-up in the publishing industry that means doing it yourself is now a viable and an attractive option. 

Firstly, advances in technology have eliminated the need for some of the services that publishers have traditionally provided. The real game changer here has been print runs. In the past, you’d be obliged to order at least a few hundred copies from the printer in order to make it economically viable for them to churn them out. That was an especially unattractive proposition for the first print run when you had yet to sell a single copy. So it meant that having a publisher to stump up the cash until you’d made some sales was an especially attractive proposition. But new fangled machines and automation now mean that it’s perfectly feasible to print just one copy at a time. And in any case, people are increasingly choosing to read their books digitally rather than physically, eliminating printing altogether. 

Second, a bunch of specialist companies and freelancers now offer all the services you do still need to get into print that were previously the preserve of publishers. And they do so in return for a one-off fee rather than a life-long cut of your sales. This means you no longer need to rely on a publisher for proof reading, editing, designing a cover, or getting your book in the right format for printing. 

Third, you also no longer need a publisher to get your book into a bookstore, be it a bricks-and-mortar or an online one. That’s because such stores increasingly source their books from a couple of global distributors. And these distributors now have online platforms that allow individual authors to upload and publish their work, so no need to go via a publisher. Best of all, these same distributors will also do the printing for you, meaning you can keep everything under one roof. 

This brave new world has also drastically cut margins for selling books. In response to this, publishers have in turn cut the services they offer to authors, for example even sometimes now requiring that you design and finance your own marketing plan. And you can absolutely forget about getting an advance payment from them before you sell any books, unless you’re already a celebrity, your book really is THAT good, or you’ve managed to find an absolute beast of an agent. 

All this means that now it’s not only much more feasible, but also much more financially attractive, to self-publish, especially when you remember that it also means keeping all the rights to your work. Finally, as self-publishing has become increasingly commonplace, so any stigma associating it with vanity publishing (i.e. paying a publisher to put out your work) has largely faded away. Plenty of famous authors have cut the chord with their old publishers and started going it alone, and plenty of new ones now never see the need to have a publisher in the first place.

The Right Way Round

So how do you actually self-publish in practice? Well, here’s how I did it for The Wrong Way Round: 

Proofing the Pudding 

Once I’d finished writing the thing, first on my agenda was to get it proof read - in other words to weed out the remaining typos and grammatical errors that were inevitably still buried in the text, even after what felt like a few hundred read throughs - and edited - that is checked for the quality, flow, and coherence of the writing. A simple web search brought up a bunch of outfits offering such services and, after having a look through their offerings and reviews, I settled on a company called 1106 Design. I’m pleased to say they did a sterling job, but I’m sure there are also a lot of other fine outfits out there.  

Laying it Out 

Now I had the text finalised, I needed to sort out the layout. This included deciding on the overall physical size of the book, the margins, and the font, then making sure the text flowed through this format properly. I also wanted to add in a Table of Contents, an About the Author section, and a map (which I commissioned a freelance artist to draw). I decided to use the same company who had done my editing and proof reading, 1106 Design, for the layout and was again very happy with their work. Instead of using a company or freelancer for this though, you could go the DIY route, making use of one of the specialized book layout software options that are out there, just waiting for you on Google. Whichever option you choose, the finished product should be the same - a digital file in the right format for uploading to the distributors that you’re planning to use to sell your book. Actually, make that two digital files if you’re planning to publish an e-book along with your paperback, as they require a different format.  

People Do Judge a Book by its Cover 

I realised that people were not even going to lift my book up off the shelf or click on it online if they were turned off by an unattractive, boring, or amateurish cover. After a couple of unsuccessful stabs at knocking one up myself, I came to the conclusion that getting a design, colour scheme, and font that looked professional, attractive, and reflected the content and style of my book was something of an art in itself. I therefore decided to contract a freelance graphic designer to do it for me. Unfortunately that didn’t work out too well either - maybe because I didn’t really know what I wanted in the first place and so was unable to give her a detailed enough brief to work from. So, when we parted ways, I still did not have a cover I was happy with. Thankfully though, I then chanced upon 99 Designs, a company who run a competition for you amongst dozens of designers to make a cover, meaning you get a whole smorgasbord of designs that you can then mix, match and further refine.

That worked really well for me and I finally had something I was happy with. Another (cheaper) option would have been to choose from a catalogue of pre-made covers or templates on a site like Canva and then customise one to my book. 

My back cover also needed two things that a designer wouldn’t be able to provide. The first was a snappy blurb telling the prospective reader what the book was about and hopefully making them want to read it (text that I later found out was also very handy to send to people I wanted to promote the book to). So I spent a good deal of time drafting this, trying to get it as polished and snappy as possible, The second was an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and accompanying barcode. This allows easily classification and processing of any book, as well as making it look that bit more professional (though if you are planning to only list your book on Amazon then you can get away without one as they use their own classification system). These numbers are issued by a global ISBN Agency via their national-level affiliates for each country, making sure that each and every book in the world gets a unique one. So I went to the global ISBN Agency website and found the national-level affiliate in my country, the UK, from their menu. I then went to this affiliate’s own site where I was required to register some basic details about my book and make a credit card payment in order to get my ISBN. 

What Are You Worth? 

As I wasn’t using a publisher, it was up to me to set a selling price for my book. I spoke to some other authors who advised me to shoot low to win readers, given I am a completely unknown name. So I looked at what other books in the same genre and format were selling for on Amazon and then priced mine at the lower end of that bracket. 

I set different prices for the paperback and the e-version, given the latter has no printing costs to be covered, pitching them at $9.99 and $4.99 respectively. It’s at this point that I need to tell you that the drinks are not going to be on me however as, even with no publisher to compensate, I make only $1-2 from each paperback sold and $2-3 from each e-book. So, no, don’t quit your day job just yet.

Bringing it All Together

With my digital interior and cover files complete and my price set, I was finally ready to publish. I chose to use the two main global distributors to do this. They would also, as mentioned above, do the printing of any books ordered from their platforms, and do so on an on-demand basis, meaning no upfront printing costs for me.

The first is Ingram Spark and they are who most bookstores across the world seem to order their books from. 

The second is Amazon who, as you may have heard, do a tidy line in selling books directly to readers. They do also sell to bookstores, but if you want them to do this for you too, then they insist that you use them and only them, meaning you can’t also sign up with Ingram. Given Ingram have a much larger client base of bookstores, I decided to use Amazon only for direct sales to readers. 

Getting my book listed was a pretty similar process for both distributors. First, I signed up for an account - here for Ingram and here for Amazon. I should note at this point that Amazon confusingly call their distribution service “Kindle Direct Publishing”, or KDP for short, despite it being for both e-books (Kindles in Amazon-speak) and paperbacks. Once registered, I uploaded my interior and cover files and completed some basic info about my book and me (including bank account details for those revenues to pour into). I then ordered a print copy from both to check that everything looked tidy in the flesh. Once I had verified that, a couple more clicks had my book live, meaning bookstores could order it from Ingram and civilians could buy it direct from Amazon. 

I am now able to log into either account to see how sales are going and both distributors send me a monthly report on books sold in each country as well as of course paying the royalties into my bank account, though these payments come two months after the sales in question have taken place. Both distributors also let you log in and order copies for yourself at cost - or have them sent to anyone else you fancy. That’s useful for when you want to send books to people who you’re asking for a review etc. 

Finally, I should point out that both distributors also offer basic proof reading services prior to publishing, plus Amazon also offer layout and cover design, though personally I feel that you get a better service by using a dedicated company as I did.

Pushing Out the Merch

Once the book was live on Ingram, I emailed major bookstores to tell them about it (quoting that blurb from the back cover) and beg them to order a few copies. They were actually surprisingly receptive with over 90% of stores I’ve contacted in this way, from Tokyo to Thailand and from Delhi to Dubai, having ordered books to stock. 

I also searched for relevant podcasts, YouTube channels, Instagram “influencers” (breathe, breathe…), and celebrities, offering to send them a copy and asking that they then posted something about it on their social media. Where relevant, I also proposed an interview or book review. Of course these are busy people and they get a lot of such proposals so the percentage hit rate has been low, meaning it’s a numbers game - so just keep plugging away…

Finally, I did a book launch - this was not something I had been planning but a good friend of mine just happens to be the President of the Bangkok Foreign Correspondent’s Club and offered me the venue for free. She was also the person who persuaded me to write a book in the first place so I couldn’t very well refuse. The launch - which you can see here if you really have nothing better to do - gave me the opportunity to present my book and answer questions about it, generate some interest and sales, and was also something that I could subsequently post on social media and reference when I contacted people, making me look that little bit more serious.  

If you’ve got money to burn then you could hire a company to do all this marketing stuff for you, as well as running ads and all kinds of other fun stuff, but, hearing others’ experiences, I felt the chances of getting a positive return on my investment were going to be pretty low so I didn’t go down this route. 

So, voila, that’s it, I’m now just sitting here watching the pennies roll in, ears pricked up awaiting that call from Netflix... 

Good luck!