Self-Published!
“Self-publish” used to be a dirty verb, something one did in the privacy of one’s mediocre writing.
No more! After many long years of banging up against the gate keepers, it suddenly became a no-brainer to publish the darn book myself.
And I did! Since March, A Reluctant Spy has been available, in paperback, Kindle, ebook, and audiobook.
I would love to report that self-publishing was a breeze, that you should drop everything and do it. That would be a lie. Since every publishing journey is unique, I’ll share the rocky road that I took.
On the advice of friends, I created my own publishing company, to produce a professional sheen to the enterprise. One of the great advantages of this was I could keep the fantasy world of my writing finances separate from my Life. You know, grandchildren and all those royalties that would flow in.
I called my company Graveyard Press LLC, a limited liability company in California, which was a perfect name since I was in a murderous kind of mood—die, gate-keeper scoundrels!
Every book that you publish needs an ISBN number—a different number for each format. So A Reluctant Spy needed four ISBNs, the paperback, ebook, Kindle, and audiobook. The company that sold these numbers was Bowker, which has a monopoly. Since I reckoned I’d like to publish lots of books (dream big), I purchased 100 ISBN numbers.
Then there was the matter of a website for my publishing company, separate from my personal website.
Click on the image to the left or the link below to see my new website.
To create the site, I used Squarespace, which is somewhat user-friendly, but you have to put in your time to learn the basics.
Along with Graveyard Press came the need for a logo. What better little symbol than a headstone with a lightning flash for good measure?
I cooked this up on Canva, a terrific design app that had its own learning curve.
Please notice that all of this was foreplay. I hadn’t come close to actually publishing.
For the paperback, I’m going with Ingram (short for IngramSpark), a well-regarded print-on-demand company that distributes to many outlets like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The number one task is to format the book according to their specifications. Tricky. I could not have done it without lots of help.
Get a professional cover. If your cover is amateurish, forget about it. No one will click on your book.
The actual uploading to Ingram wasn’t trivial either—be prepared for special cover requirements and bank account details, for example.
I selected a publication date that was many weeks away, to give me lots of time to make every mistake in the book and still get everything done.
One head-banging detail after another.
Setting up the ebook on Ingram was easier, but still required its own special (i.e. different) epub formatting and cover instructions.
Next came the Kindle version. Another day, another set of instructions, and their own special fonts, headers, and spacing. But suddenly, the Kindle was up on Amazon, a rare glimmer of joy.
Simultaneously, I’d been moving on the audiobook, which involved working with Audible and its production company, ACX. The process is this: you start a new project and upload a book (with its uniquely formatted cover!).
To my amazement, 35 women signed up to audition for A Reluctant Spy, which probably said more about the quest for work than the magnetic appeal of my novel. Listening to narrator-wannabes reading my novel sent me into delirium.
And I found the One—the fabulous Holly Adams, voice actor extraordinaire. Holly animated the characters to vibrant life, turning my detective into Queen Latifa and the Ukrainian lodger into Volodymyr Zelensky.
Holly is a star.
All in all, the audiobook production cost me somewhere between two and three thousand dollars; but the bottom line was that you get what you pay for, and I couldn’t in a month of Sundays have produced the book that Holly did.
There came a day of jubilation, three weeks before my publication date, when I could declare myself done and dusted and ready to open shop for pre-orders!
And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
Here’s the way things stood: Ingram would distribute the paperback to everyone, and also the ebook for people who didn’t want Kindle. KDP would sell the Kindle on the all-important Amazon, where 70% of all novels are sold. Audible, a subsidiary of Amazon, would provide the audiobook.
When I uploaded everything, the Kindle and Audible audiobook appeared on Amazon immediately, as did the paperback.
There was, just one glitch, however, with the paperback: it showed up on Amazon without its cover! Barnes & Noble had the cover. Ingram had the cover. I had the darn cover in every shape, size, and format. But on Amazon, when you clicked on Paperback you got a white square that said No image available.
It drove me insane.
Trying to get Amazon to show the cover of my paperback was a low point in my publishing journey. I contacted the Ingram Help desk and got its ubiquitous and ineffectual AI bots (Hello! welcome to Ingram, your comprehensive publishing platform).
Welcome to the wave of the future.
Finally, I located a “Team Member,” who was an actual person. The first such team member was himself a bit bot-like, and assured me that the cover was in order and had been distributed to Amazon without a hitch. What followed was an assortment of team members, who assured me there was no earthly reason on Ingram’s part why the cover shouldn’t be displayed. I tried with every ounce of my dwindling wherewithal to convince a team member to contact Amazon, which proved to be impossible.
Amazon is very speedy in tracking down lost orders for customers; but if you are an author asking about your listing, they are a fortress. I went through Amazon Author Central, where, eventually, I contacted a knowledgeable human, who assured me that Amazon could not be contacted by an author. I know there has to be a way—publishers do it all the time. But I never did figure out how to crack the code.
In desperation, I joined The Authors Guild, where I went into their forum and described my situation. To my astonishment, an author described having the identical problem! Her desperate solution, therefore—and the one I adopted—was to act as if Ingram didn’t exist, and go through the whole special formatting rigmarole yet again, to sell the paperback through Amazon’s KDP!
The new formatting for the KDP paperback cover was so formidable that I actually had to hire a professional, who spent several days trying to get it right.
As soon as I uploaded the reworked cover, voila! A cover image magically appeared, and I had my novel available for pre-order in all its formats. The evil Amazon had triumphed.
My path to publication has more twists and turns than the plot of A Reluctant Spy, which is saying something, since the book is a very twisty thriller.
Self-publishing is neither easy nor cheap. Nothing is free. I had to pay for the publishing company, the tax number, the ISBN numbers, the audiobook, the host for my website, and many insidious little fees along the way. Next time it will cost more, because I plan to be savvier and pony up for a professional to do the heavy lifting. I’ll suck it up, the cost. It comes with the territory.
I’m now enjoying the benefits of having my book out there. Reviews! Book clubs! Royalties! It’s a whole new world. I’m a published author and I’ve earned my stripes.
Nothing brings me more happiness than readers telling me they loved my book, that they read it through the night, that the book made them miss an appointment.
In retrospect, it was all worth it.
Graveyard Press is now who I am.
R.I.P. query letters, ghosting agents, and contract-breaching publishers.
R.I.P. character-building from a million rejections.
Ding-dong the witches are dead, buried under that cute little headstone in my logo.
But hear ye, hear ye, all the writers among us: A Reluctant Spy now lives.
