What I Got Wrong About Self-Publishing

I thought the hard part was the writing.

Not in a romantic way. I knew drafting would be slow, and it was. What I had wrong was where the difficulty actually lived. I assumed the book was the work, and everything after it was administration: a few forms, a few uploads, a cover to approve.

It isn't forms. It's a second craft, and not the same one.

The first thing I got wrong was the timeline. I built my schedule around editing, because editing was the part I understood. What I hadn't accounted for is that a manuscript isn't finished when the prose is finished. It's finished when the metadata is right, the cover survives a thumbnail, the categories are honest, and the blurb does work that no amount of beautiful sentences will do for it. Every one of those is a project. None of them is writing.

The second thing I got wrong was thinking judgement could be outsourced.

I've since learned the difference between doing something myself and being responsible for it. You can hire the cover. You can hire the formatting, the proofreading, the advertising. You cannot, however, hire the decision about what the book is, and if you try, you will get a book shaped by someone who has read a summary of it. That is how a serious novel ends up wearing a cover for a different genre, and it isn't anyone's fault but the author's, for not staying in the room.

The third thing I got wrong was the audience.

I had imagined the series reaching readers as a series. What actually happens is that each book is sold on its own, to one person, who decides in about four seconds whether it's for them. That reader does not care that Book Four is where things get extraordinary. Book One has to be worth reading on a Tuesday night, alone, with no goodwill carried over from the volume before.

Which is why self-publishing turned out to be less about control than I expected, and more about attention. You don't get to decide what readers think. You only get to decide what you keep checking. I check the terms now: every name, every category, every blurb, the way I check the manuscript. That habit came later than it should have.

And I have stopped expecting the next stage to be easier than the last. It isn't. It is only different, and better, because it belongs to the book rather than to me.