The cover for the audiobook. Cover art by Rose Butcher.
Today, my newest novel, Jay And Char Save The Galaxy, is out. This is my first stab at sci-fi comedy, and I really enjoyed writing it.
Jay And Char Save The Galaxy is my 16th self-published work of fiction. I’ve been self-publishing fiction since 2014.
When I began, everything went to Amazon. It was easy to get the tools for formatting and uploading via CreateSpace (which has since been folded into Amazon, specifically Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)). Over the past few years, other outlets have emerged that make self-publishing just as easy. Easy being a relative term.
A great deal of work goes into self-publishing, far above and beyond the writing. I’m not just an author, I’m also a book layout specialist, website manager, marketer, salesman, and overall entrepreneur.
Putting this latest novel out into the world was a bit more of an adventure than I had prepared for.
Allow me to share what that looks like and what happened.
Adventures in self-publishing start with writing
Because I’ve expanded past Amazon to other online retailers, it takes more work to produce the actual book. For example, the number of files created can be a bit daunting.
I work in MS Word. Yes, there are author-driven options, like Scrivener, that do some pretty cool things, but I’ve been using MS Word for more than 30 years. Due to paranoia born of having files get corrupted in the 90s and early 2000s, I tend to keep my working doc to no more than 60 pages.
These are my unformatted files where I do the actual writing. They get combined into a master file of the whole novel when it’s done, which in turn gets saved to a formatted file appropriate to paperback and eBooks.
Once I’ve done my edits, I send that file to the editor. After the editor returns that to me, I create a new, final master to accept and reject edits.
Then I do a different file for paperback vs eBook, and whether it’s going to Amazon or Draft2Digital. In the end, there are usually 5 completed, formatted, finished versions of a given novel.
Both Amazon and Draft2Digital allow you to set up presales. Ergo, once you have cover art, you can put the given novel out to the world before it’s done.
That’s where it all fell apart this time.
When it all goes to hell
About a month ago, I began, as I always do, to upload the new book to Amazon. Or, more specifically, to set up the existence of the book by doing all the necessary backend work, sharing the cover, and setting the pricing. They give you a time by which you must upload the manuscript, the latest being 72 hours before your publishing date.
After I did that setup work for Kindle, I did the paperback, then repeated the process with Draft2Digital for the eBook and paperback (recording the audiobook is done off of the finished master doc and a whole other, unrelated animal).
And it was here I messed up.
I thought I had uploaded the final manuscript. Well, I didn’t. So my presale was cancelled and – with less than 48 hours to my publishing date – I was scrambling to reset it all.
I wrote about how I handled this in a different blog post on my blog website. By a narrow margin, disaster was averted. In the end, despite Plan A going to hell, Plan B was tossed together, and the book is out to the world.
Self-publishing pluses and minuses
One of the best things about self-publishing is that I’m the boss. As an authorpreneur, I make all the writing, publishing, marketing, formatting, and other business and book-related decisions.
One of the worst things about self-publishing is that I’m the boss. It’s on me to decide how much to spend on advertising, where and when to put ads, any and all additional methods of marketing, business decisions, and final approval of cover art and all else.
Still, I wouldn’t trade this gig for anything. I love being a writer and authorpreneur. That I can see my work in so many places, out to such a wide audience, is exciting. My stories get out of my head and make their way to the page in one of three forms.
As part of running this like a business, I’m in the process of setting up a more pronounced business entity. My self-publishing company, Argent Hedgehog Press, will be a bit more formal. Also, I have offered to make myself available to other self-publishing authors as a publisher (since I have developed extensive experience with formatting for all the different self-publishing outlets).
The other big plus and minus to self-publishing is that I’m a solo act. While I hire a cover artist and editor, all of the business of writing and publishing is on me. This can be challenging when I don’t know how to do something and need to find a resource to learn it, and I can only bounce ideas off my wife and friends before I should hire a consultant or coach.
Treating my writing as more than art, but as a business, has a lot of ups and downs. There are different jobs all around the actual writing of a novel when it comes to publishing and all else.
I, for one, love that I get to take on so many different roles and make use of more than one of my skills.
Hence, the answer to the subheading question – How do I wear all these hats at the same time? – is this: I don’t. The best way is to switch hats per necessary action. At different times, I wear my writer hat, my editor hat, my marketing hat, my sales hat, and so on.
Fortunately, I look good in many different hats. And I love the process as well as learning new ways to make it happen along the way.
Thanks for reading. As I share my creative journey with you every week, please consider this: How are you inspired and empowered to be your own creator, whatever form that takes?
Please take a moment to check out the collection of my published works, which can be found here.
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