Self-publishing has given me a safer space to learn and make mistakes in regards to releasing my work. When I started out, I was pretty nonchalant, and the process wasn’t as straight forward. With the refinement of online Print on Demand services, self-publishing is much easier than it was five years ago.
While I'd been using Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, I eventually decided to trial Smashwords as a different distributor. Smashwords is very flexible and easy to use, they have a basic interface and are very clear about their guidelines. I haven’t found publishing on Amazon very flexible, there's a lot of fine print. Smashwords only have very limited distribution to them anyway, so moving away from them has worked for me. I've also been looking into Lulu, whose interface is a lot quicker however I haven't seen the end result as yet.
Authorship has been highly glamourised lately, especially considering who has found success based on their dubious titles. So now it looks “easier than ever”. And with the help of vanity publishers, this has become truer than ever.
Adding this model into the paradigm shift I can tell you my experiences and knowledge of vanities are very recent. These models didn’t exist when I was studying writing in university nearly 20 years ago. Never once had our experienced author-turned lecturers mention the words “vanity publisher”. So always do your homework. Also, be careful of leaving contact details on certain websites that claim to be sending you a list of publishers, you may end up on a callback list for a very unscrupulous vanity publisher who will keep hounding you to sign a deal with them.
While I’m not at the end of the journey – there isn’t really an end to this journey, books are eternal and can go everywhere, and you go everywhere with them, mostly into other people's heads – I have reached a point I can fairly make a comparison. Getting physical copies out there and really pushing to make this a success from where I am, it’s going to be tough. I have had to spend some money on marketing, and I’m also finding ways of how to do this cost effectively. Thank goodness for the internet, because none of these resources were easy to access when I was out of uni and looking to get published.
It’s been incredibly educational for me to go through both processes, and I have to say self-publishing first was so beneficial in terms of me learning about ebook formats and how to format and edit effectively. So I’m glad I did it now, just as I’m glad to be able to do this a little more traditionally. There are headaches with both, but I did like the freedom of being able to be in full control of my self published titles in terms of release dates and making my own covers. It was a lot of fun to see my titles gain traction; it was even a little addictive at times.
I’m looking forward to talking about this with other people as well, and hearing about other’s experiences is good for me now I’m gaining momentum.
No comments:
Post a Comment