Writers have self-published their work for centuries, with varying levels of success.
Self-publishing can provide a rewarding and lucrative route into print for the right author, so long as they’ve written the right book. There are plenty of writers who wouldn’t publish any other way: but there are plenty more who have discovered that self-publishing can be a costly and embarrassing mistake.
So if you’re interested in self-publishing, how can you ensure that you fall into that former group, and not the latter?
The successful self-published author has to do everything: writing, editing and designing books, buying print, and selling and promoting the final product. Along the way that writer will need to cost and evaluate each process and maybe buy in specialist services, which means having a good understanding of every one of the different stages of publication, and having a good business sense too.
Not all books do well when self-published: because of the difficulties involved in getting them reviewed in widely-read review publications, and in getting them into bookshops, they tend to sell mostly online (which, according to the most recent figures I’ve seen, only accounts for around 35% of total sales). So books which have an easily-accessible niche market tend to do better than general fiction, for example.
