Episode 236: Random Things to Know About Self-Publishing

Today on Fable and the Verbivore, we dig into indie publishing and talk about the ins and outs of prepping your work and putting it out there in the world.

This episode is a natural extension of our recent series on developing your author brand and last week’s conversation about traditional publishing (querying and agent contracts). Today, we talk about how your individual brand knowledge is useful when preparing your title, keywords, book categories, blurb, and elevator pitch.

We talk about some of the reasons you might prefer the indie publishing option. For instance, having full control over your publication time frame and how often your work comes out, being able to make changes and fix errors quickly by simply re-uploading a file, timely access to sales data and ability to use it in real time to adjust your sales and promotion strategies, and full transparency and control over all aspects of the process.

In this conversation, we talk about a variety of resources to research into if you plan to go the indie publishing route and what to be aware of.

Things like:

  • Choosing whether to go only with eBooks at first or both eBooks and physical books

  • Planning for up front costs if you decide to invest in professional Editing and Cover Design

  • Design programs and/or buying illustrations if you decide to create the cover yourself

  • Buying multiple rounds of proofs and reviewing them closely to fix errors and get your work as good as it can be 

  • Awareness of process to purchase ISBN number and register work for copyright, if you decide to do so

  • Use something like ProWritingAid.com to check your writing and learn about your sentence structures

  • PublisherRocket.com can help you identify keyword and category trends and determine what combination could be most effective to try for your project

  • Familiarize yourself with the royalty structures and pricing rules and make choices on initial price and any sales with those in mind

  • Allow yourself to play around with and update your choices if something isn’t working. Like: price, categories, keywords, blurb, cover, etc.

  • Understand how quickly work shows up on publishing platforms when you go to publish

  • Kindle Unlimited rules and requirements

  • Kindle Direct Publishing Rules

  • IngramSparks Rules

Towards the end of this conversation, we talk a little about the psychology of pricing — especially if you’re in Kindle Unlimited — and making sure to consider how a lower priced eBook could be perceived and valued by a reader. Also, Fable mentions several learning experiences she had with the Amazon publishing system — like how it often takes 72 hrs for edits to show up and that pricing changes do not go into effect immediately.

We hope you enjoy listening to this episode and that you find it useful wherever you are at on your writing journey!

Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

We reference a couple past episodes from the Fable and the Verbivore podcast. They are:

Here are several resources referenced in this episode:

Books Mentioned:

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
’Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Bethany Stedman