Writing.Com General Discussion

One of my guild members self-pubbed and then wrote a second book about self publishing (also self-pubbed).

Look up Mike Kowis in Amazon. his e-book is about $4 and for your purposes, is a solid investment. He covers buying ISBN and the costs of cover design and editing.

Never design your own book cover (unless you are a book cover designer). That's about $200

Always pay for copy-editing (about $.03/word).

Those are the two major costs that if you skip, everybody will know because the market is flooded with amateur covers and bad editing.

However...before you rush off to self-pub and possibly ignore that advice and spend $0 because you have $0 to spend...

An author who has trad-published and has some following is more successful at self-pub than a brand new author. Part of that is "has a following", but a second part is that they passed a gatekeeper and their work is better than horrible. I know you can find a trad-published book that is total crap, but the majority of it is better than the majority of self-pub.

What you've got to consider is if your stack of rejections is because you haven't aligned with the right Agent/publisher or because your writing is failing their reasonable protocols to avoid bad projects?

The former happens. Ken Liu spent 10 years on his short story "Single Bit Error" before catching a break in an anthology made of stories that were rejected. Good stuff gets rejected all the time.

The latter scenario is the other part of why self-pub gets a bad rap. People with bad writing were blocked by the gatekeeper and put their crap out as self-pub.

Do yourself a favor and try the traditional route first. You need as much critical feedback by professionals as you can get, so you can learn what you don't know.

I would bet you this, any author who is very confident about the awesomeness of their MS, probably has a steaming pile of crap. Science has found that incompetent people tend to be over-confident in their ability. Basically the village idiot thinks he's a better doctor than the top of his class doctor with a practice.

You owe it to yourself to not take shortcuts and figure out what you have by learning how the industry works and how to make a book the industry wants.