How to publish a book: from cover design to distribution
An Indie Author’s Guide to getting your book in front of readers
You’ve got a finished manuscript, CONGRATULATIONS! Or maybe you almost have a complete manuscript and are reading this as your own personal form of “productive” procrastination. I know how it goes. If you’re the latter, save this article and get back to writing.
There’s a lot of ground to cover and you’ll want to reference this as you move through each phase of the self-publishing process. Everyone else, let’s dive in.
Over five years ago, after finishing my first novel, I weighed the pros and cons of publishing In Absence of Fear traditionally, working with an independent publisher, or going the self-publishing route.
Having a background in marketing and little patience for agents at the time, I decided self-publishing made the most sense for me, with one caveat. I didn’t want my book to look “self-published.”
The good news is, several companies and services have now made it possible to put out a quality, professional-looking book, on your terms, and make it available to readers everywhere.
Here’s how:
Work with an Editor
Everyone gets to a first draft differently.
As I worked on my first novel, my writing process looked something like this: Write, delete, rewrite. Rearrange the furniture. Delete. Write. Sleep. Write some more. Engage in some form of domestic procrastination. Delete. Rewrite. Eat. Write. Delete. Cry. Write. Exhale.
After a year of this, I made it to 90,000 words and began looking for an editor. I came across Alan Rinzler, who has edited the the work of Hunter S. Thompson, Andy Warhol, and the great Toni Morrison, no less. I wrote him an email, a cold query, and sent him the first 50 pages, fully expecting not to hear anything back. But he wrote me the next day, asking for the full manuscript. Four days later, he wrote me again, listing the book’s problems and opportunities, and likening it to Orwell’s 1984. I cried I was so happy. Alan and I began working together.
As part of a writing group, I’d learned to take feedback and “kill my darlings,” as Stephen King instructed. And with Alan, boy did I ever. He told me my protagonist was unlikable, “a real schmuck,” to quote Alan. Other characters and scenes were utterly superfluous. Alan sent over his notes and we did a series of video calls (I guess in 2014, we were ahead of our time…) and two in-person meetings at his lovely home in Berkeley.
I was daunted by the amount of work before me, but I’d never felt more alive, either. The story was getting better, and that was all that mattered. By the time we were done, I’d basically rewritten the entire book in a couple of months.
Developmental Editors
Alan was a developmental editor. He helped me shape up my narrative. He told me what needed to be cut, where I needed to add more detail, when the pacing lagged, etc. As a first-time novelist, he was invaluable to me as both a trusted collaborator and cheerleader.
Copy Editors
After working with Alan (and deciding to create my own publishing company…more on that later), I hired two additional editors to look through the book for grammatical issues and typos. The first was offered through a professional On-Demand publishing/print service called CreateSpace (now KDP). The second, was a woman I knew through my writing group.
Both caught numerous typos and errors that I had missed. Both missed typos that the other had caught (I had them edit simultaneously due to time constraints).
Even still, there’s at least one typo that made it into the book. C’est la vie.
Querying Agents
I queried four different agents. Two were recommended by Alan. Two were people I found online. You can probably guess which two responded (recommendations and introductions are important…this is why networking matters). The agents enjoyed the pages I’d sent, and wanted more. Ultimately, after reading the entire manuscript, they decided it wasn’t for them.
Querying etiquette at the time (who knows what it is now) dictated reaching out to no more than a handful of agents at a time and giving them up to two months to respond. J.K. Rowling received 12 rejection letters before landing a book deal. Kathryn Stockett (The Help) received 60. I did the math. I didn’t want to wait years to publish something that felt so timely.
So, I switched gears and decided to embrace something I long feared:
Self Publishing
There’s a stigma that comes with self publishing. Every author knows it, even if they don’t want to admit it. I was highly aware of this, and highly sensitive when people asked. Maybe even a little ashamed (something that’s absurd to me now. For the amount of work I put in and the lessons I learned, I’m proud and grateful).
When it came down to it, though, I believed in the story and wanted it out in the world as quickly as possible. I also knew that most authors needed publishers to do the marketing heavy lifting, something I actually had experience in. Once again, I jumped into the creative unknown.
There was one thing I was certain of: I did not want aesthetics or availability/distribution (or a lack thereof) to impede the book’s chance at reaching a real audience.
I decided the following course of action was best:
Create my own, real publishing company
Don’t skimp on design
Make my book available through every retailer and platform (online, Barnes & Noble, local bookstores, libraries etc. etc.)
Run marketing campaigns to drive traffic
Learn as much as possible, move on and make something else
First, I hired an attorney to create my LLC, then a designer to create a logo. I bought a domain, designed the website, and Corner Canyon Press was born. I once had a boss who constantly told me, “fake it ’til you make it.” He was not a great boss, and I hated this phrase at first, but I have to admit he was kind of right.
I remember attending a writing conference led by Liz Gilbert in Napa Valley. I brought a copy of my book with me. Writers love to ask each other what they’ve written. Some mean it in earnest, others do it by means of comparison or validation. During the conference one guy — dubious, when I fished my book out of my bag in response to the question — plucked it from my hands to examine it and immediately turned it to view the colophon, or publisher’s logo, near the bottom of the spine. “Ah, I know them,” he said, satisfied. “They’re great.”
His smile told me he’d reevaluated me and deemed me worthy. Because he’d been an A-Class jerk about it, I didn’t correct him by saying there was no way he’d heard of them because “they” had only existed for several months and I was them. Instead, I returned the smile. “They are,” I said. I took my book back and walked away.
I include this anecdote only because as much as we hate to admit it, people do judge books by their cover. If you’re going to go the self publishing route, there are things you can do to help your book put the best foot forward. One is hiring a professional designer.
Protect Your Work
Protecting your work is crucial and easy. Copyright your material by registering it with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Book Jacket Design
I hired the infinitely talented Piper Morgan for the cover design. I had a basic idea of what I wanted, a Pinterest board, and some pretty atrocious drawings I’d made, and Piper worked her magic.
The process went something like this:
Knowing that I wanted a boy’s shadow incorporated into the design, but unable to afford any of the photography I came across, I wondered if I could create the exact image I wanted. My then-fiancé, Ted, grabbed his camera and my future brother-in-law, Joe, grabbed his soccer ball and we went out into the street and started shooting. The sun was setting and we were able to get an angle on Joe’s shadow that made him look like a little boy. After thirty minutes playing around, we got several images that were much closer to what I wanted than what I found available (and exorbitantly priced) on Getty Images.
Design doesn’t end there. I worked with one company to do the interior layout. And another (ebooktoepub), for the EPUB file, which essentially became the digital reading experience.
ISBNs and Barcodes
The jacket design also needs to include an ISBN (an International Standard Book Number) and barcode.
You can obtain both by creating an account with Bowker Identifier Services. You need separate ISBNs for each version of your book, meaning one for the printed version, and one for digital versions of your book.
I have one ISBN for my print book (which Piper incorporated into the cover design), another for the Kindle EBook (which I included when I uploaded the EPUB file) and another for all other digital versions of the book.
Distribution
As I said, I wanted to make sure my book was available everywhere books were sold. That meant that you could get it on Amazon in paperback, for Kindle, at Barnes & Noble, at local booksellers, at the library, for iPad, Kobo Reader, etc. etc. I just found out Walmart sells my book.
The key to getting distribution is getting into catalogs. At the time, I had to work through five different companies to achieve this (as memory serves, they included: CreateSpace, KDP, IngramSpark, Brodart and Smashwords).
CreateSpace was my primary printer, fulfilled through Amazon. An on-demand solution, listing with CreateSpace meant that I didn’t have to hold inventory
IngramSpark got me into Barnes & Noble and local booksellers
Brodart was my entry into libraries
KDP is for Kindle, and a self-published author’s best friend (most of my sales come from here)
Smashwords took care of all other digital platforms, including Apple Books, Kobo, Nook, OverDrive and e-lending platforms that libraries often use
These days things are much simpler. CreateSpace and KDP merged. Brodart seems obsolete now that IngramSpark is covering local booksellers and libraries, but I might be missing something.
The biggest question self-published authors usually face is whether or not to enroll in KDP Select, which provides authors with great promotional tools including free giveaways and Kindle Countdown Deals, but prohibits them from being available digitally elsewhere.
When I published in 2015 I decided not to enroll in KDP Select, since my plan was to make my book available everywhere. I’m still pleased with this decision, but this month, five years after publishing, I’ve temporarily opted my book out from other digital platforms (which Smashwords makes super simple!) to partake in the KDP Select program for several months and run a Free Book Promotion.
Book Marketing
The book was published on November 5th, 2015, accidentally. I was planning for a December launch and didn’t realize that uploading my book to Amazon (in order to prep everything) automatically published it and made it live (perhaps this is no longer the case…I hope). Once it was live, I couldn’t “unpublish” it without impacting the book’s performance, so I rolled with it.
All of the marketing campaigns I’d planned, including the Thunderclap social amplification campaign, were launched prematurely. The campaigns I hadn’t finished preparing were scrabbled together or abandoned. My community was incredibly supportive and my sales were encouraging, but nowhere near enough to launch me onto Amazon’s Bestseller’s List, which had been my ultimate goal, for preferred placement within their marketplace and the additional impressions, and hopefully sales, that came with it.
Reviews
Over the next few months I engaged with independent book reviewers on Instagram and Amazon, sending them free copies of the book (sometimes in print, sometimes the EPUB file) in exchange for an honest review. This was one of the most valuable things I did, though it did take a fair amount of time.
I also bought professional reviews from Kirkus, Clarion and Foreword. The professional reviews can be used in your marketing materials and book blurbs, convincing prospective readers to give your book a shot.
General reviews from readers collected on Amazon and Goodreads serve as a sort of social proofing, providing validation, not just to potential buyers but also for the algorithms that rank your book. The more reviews you have, the better your book will do in terms of search (SEO).
Soliciting and collecting reviews are one of the most important things you can do for your book.
(If you’re reading this and you’ve read In Absence of Fear, please take the time to leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon. It can be as simple or detailed as you want. Every review helps and I really, really appreciate them.)
Book Awards
I also submitted my book for the INDIES Awards and became a finalist in fiction and won Honorable Mention in the SciFi category.
Though I can’t speak to how many additional impressions or sales this garnered, I can say the little sticker for my jacket that came with it served as another form of social proofing that tipped the scale. As the only woman to be recognized in Sci-Fi, it also felt good.
Paid Advertising
There are a number of ways to advertise your book — on Facebook, Instagram, Google’s paid search, and Amazon, among others. I ran several campaigns on Facebook on Amazon, spending hundreds of dollars to move the needle forward in terms of sales. I learned a lot, and probably could have done a better job optimizing these campaigns, but at the end of the day, they weren’t that fruitful.
Experiment if you want or hire it out, but ultimately your community and their community are going to make the biggest impact in terms of impressions and total sales.
Book Giveaways
A better way to spend your marketing dollars, in my opinion, is to run book giveaways. You can do this easily on Goodreads. When I did it, it was free, other than the cost of the book and shipping. I didn’t put geographic limitations on my campaigns and ended shipping a lot of books to England and Australia, which cost a lot. At the same time, it’s pretty freaking cool that people in England and Australia read and enjoyed my book. (Thank you guys!)
These days, I think you have to pay a small fee to run a free book giveaway on Goodreads. Still, it’s worth considering as a book giveaway will put your book on thousands of people’s virtual shelves.
The people who win the giveaway almost always leave a detailed review. It helps to send a personal thank you note for entering the giveaway and asking the recipients to leave a review when they’re finished reading (…are you noticing a theme here?).
As I wrote this article I was running a free book giveaway on Amazon. In just over 24 hours, my book had been downloaded more than 200 times, simply from posting about the giveaway to my community on Facebook and Twitter. At the end of the promotion, it was downloaded 3,000 times. Sure, I wasn’t paid for those downloads, but some of them turned into reviews. More importantly, the book is being read, and that’s why I wrote it.
Book Fairs and Clubs
I’ve attended a number of local book fairs over the years and visited book clubs. The book clubs are great because everyone buys the book, and most people want to buy the print version (for which authors get paid more) if the author is going to attend the meeting so they can have it signed. Again, it’s not really about selling books or making a profit, it’s about engaging with real readers and putting yourself out there.
The Bottom Line
Industry wisdom tells authors not to plan on making much money on the first book. I would take it further. Plan on losing money. You might be nodding your head, you have to spend money to make money, right? Sure. But really what I’m saying is your first book shouldn’t be about making money at all. If that’s what you’re doing it for, you’re likely going to be very disappointed.
Writing and publishing your first book is about seeing the process all the way through: from the blank page on your desktop to the spine (and a piece of your soul) on the shelf at your favorite local bookshop. It’s about establishing yourself as an artist. Proving to yourself you can take the leap and get up again, even if you don’t stick the landing. It’s about getting your work out there, then letting it be whatever it’s supposed to be.
All that being said, I’m sure you’d appreciate a little insight into the economics.
I make $3.83 for every print edition sold on Amazon. I make $2.74 for every ebook sold on Amazon. On Smashwords, depending on the specific platform (Apple, Nook, OverDrive) it varies, from $3.49 to $4.81. As of 2020, nearly 5 years after publishing, accounting for all of my costs (which I view as investments) and factoring in all royalties earned, I’ve profited a whopping…$25.
(I just did the math and those 200+ Kindle downloads yesterday and today would have been a nice lil’ boost had they paid…but again, not the ultimate goal here.)
Moving On
When I became a parent (I found out I was pregnant four days before my book was published…from one “baby” to another!). I obsessed over my son’s sleep schedule. A brilliant book to which I clung — Babywise — taught me “sleep begets sleep.” In other words, don’t withhold a nap hoping your kid will zonk out later. Exhaustion makes it harder for little minds to drift to sleep.
The same is true of creativity. Creativity begets creativity.
When I was working on my novel, part of me was upset that I hadn’t thought of something else to write first — short stories, other novels, something to practice on. Because I believed so strongly in this idea, this story, I wanted it to be the best thing I’d ever written, even though, intellectually, I understood that I would become a better writer by writing it.
I vacillated between wanting to “save it” for when I was a better writer and wanting to work on it forever to make it the best it could be. I recommend doing neither.
Let me tell you now, there will be other stories, other projects. This isn’t your best or only creative work waiting to be made. I promise you. This story, these characters, came to you when they did for a reason. Write it. Publish it. Then let it go.
If you can, I suggest you adopt what I call creative amnesia. In other words, make the thing, put it out into the world, and then forget about it.
Sometimes I wonder if I even wrote my book because I can’t remember what happens in it.
(Full disclosure: This approach backfired a bit when I visited a book club meeting last year and couldn’t answer some of the readers’ questions. My uninspired response was part wonder, part confusion. “Oh yeah. That did happen, didn’t it?”)
Liz Gilbert’s brilliant TEDx talk taught me that ideas never really belong to us in the first place. (I know I already linked it, but I’m doing it again.)
Things want to be made, stories want to be told, and they find an open channel.
Be the open channel, then open yourself up for something else.
The Next Thing
When I published my book I had no intention of writing a sequel. I thought I’d take a year off and just see what sparked my curiosity. That’s how I’d find my next book, or rather, allow it to find me.
Turns out, my readers wanted a sequel, or more specifically, they wanted to know Shey’s story. I fully planned on beginning a prequel in 2016 (just a couple months after my book was published). This would have been a great move from a marketing perspective because the audience and community was there, readers were waiting. But it didn’t happen that way.
That January, during the Sundance Film Festival, I serendipitously met a producer who wanted to option my novel. Not fully understanding what an option was and not willing to pay an attorney to look at the contract (which would have cost more than the option fee I would have received), I said no. Six months later, the producer called me and asked what else I had written. I sent him a short story and he encouraged me to adapt it into a screenplay. I had never even read a screenplay, let alone tried to write one, but I quickly immersed myself in all things screenwriting and realized it was a hell of a lot easier than writing novels. (Seriously, novelist friends, I highly recommend.)
I completed that script, optioned it, and began another. And another. Last year, I wrote, produced, and directed my first short film. This year, I’m working on a web series.
I never got around to starting the IAOF prequel, though I did begin another, unrelated, novel which has sat untouched on my computer for two years now. It’s okay. I’m not worried. Eventually, I’ll get back to it. Or maybe not. For now, I’m going with the flow, following my curiosities, and learning as much as I can.
You never know where a creative project will lead. All you can do is answer the call when you hear it. Put yourself out there and follow the signs.
Once you decide you’re all in, there are two ways you can go about it:
You can keep knocking until a door opens, or you can build your own damn door.
(You can also do both, which is how I’m approaching filmmaking.)
The point is: don’t give up and don’t expect immediate results. Just learn as much as you can and enjoy the process.
