Jim: In this episode, we're going to talk about the process of going from a book idea in your head, to an actual book in hand. If you've ever been curious about the details of publishing independently, today you’ll find out.

The independent publishing process breaks down into different phases. We've done whole episodes on some of these elements, and a lot of people are indie publishing right now without all the details they need. We're excited to walk you through the process.

Thomas: Traditionally published authors may find it helpful to know some of the process your publisher goes through. It’s also good to be familiar with indie publishing if you ever decide to go hybrid, which many traditionally published authors are doing now. They're adding independently published books to the mix, and it's helping them make more money.

Jim: That's where I'm at right now. I'm going to jump into indie publishing and become a hybrid author. I resisted for years, but now I'm turning to the dark side, or the light side, depending on how you look at it.

Step 0: Fund the Book

This is a four-step process, but we call this step zero because it's somewhat optional. Some of you have already done this step just by nature of who you are, and that's funding the book. The biggest challenge with independent publishing is that you have to pay for it. That's the biggest difference from traditional publishing. A traditional publisher pays you. With independent publishing, you pay them. If you're writing checks, you're not traditionally published, that's how it works.

It takes money to be successful. A lot of successful independent authors are already successful somewhere else, which is how they have the money to afford the professionals, the training, and the time away from work to write their book.

Jim: It's so tempting for indie authors to spend money before they have enough money to spend. You have to spend a little to make it work, and I've seen authors skimp on book design, cover design, and editing, and end up with an inferior product. How do you save up enough money?

Thomas: The easiest way is to already have a good job or a rich spouse. But let's assume you don't have money saved up.

You want to save between $1,500 and $10,000, depending on the choices you make down these steps. If that seems daunting, you can use crowdfunding. I've helped many authors crowdfund their books and I offer a course on how to do it.

Crowdfunding works by getting your fans, readers, friends, and family to pre-order copies of the book, which gives you the money you need to make it happen. I successfully crowdfunded my own book.

Jim: What about the person who feels uncomfortable asking family and friends to fund their book?

Thomas: You'd be surprised how much easier it is when you have a Kickstarter page, because you're not asking people to give you money. You're asking them to buy your book and help make it a reality. That combination, where they're not giving you something for nothing but getting your book as a reward, really motivates family and friends. I've seen it time and again. They want to give.

You're not asking for a lot either. Maybe $10 for the ebook, $20 for the paperback, and a pro level at $30 or $40 for a signed copy. You post it on social media, share it, email your list, and you'd be surprised how easy it is to raise a few thousand dollars through crowdfunding. If you don't have money, I strongly recommend learning how to use sites like Kickstarter, because it's a wonderful way of testing your idea, testing your audience, and raising money at the same time.

To learn more, listen to these episodes on crowdfunding:

• How to Crowdfund Your Book
• How to Crowdfund Your First Novel on Kickstarter
• 7 Questions Authors Should Ask Before Crowdfunding
• Kickstarter Tips and Tricks

Step 1: Write the Book

Thomas: If you're a novelist, you typically have to write the whole novel before you can move forward. The first step is to write the first draft. Then you sleep on it and rewrite it. These are steps you're probably already familiar with.

The next step is to get beta readers to read your book. Beta readers are not editors, and they're not necessarily friends and family. They're fans of the genre, so if you're writing science fiction, you want people who like science fiction to be your beta readers.

Jim: There was an article that just came out on beta readers, saying no beta readers, "I'm an artist, I'm the one who decides what it's going to be, no one's going to tell me what to do." I understand that perspective. You can get too many opinions, but I think it's shortsighted. Beta readers, in my opinion, since I've had them for all of my novels, are a critical process. Like Thomas says, they're not editors or agents, but people who read in the genre and whose tastes you trust.

Thomas: You need to be confident in your own writing and know what good writing looks like, so you know how to handle the feedback you get. In general, you want beta readers to tell you where the problems are, where they got lost or confused, or where they put the book down. If everyone takes a break from reading your book on page 72, you need to go look at page 72 and maybe have an alligator fall from the sky or a bomb go off to ramp up that tension.

Different kinds of books need different things to add that tension back in. Once you get feedback from your beta readers, you do another rewrite, draft three. Don't send your rough draft to beta readers, you send draft two. Then you get a substantive edit.

Jim: And that could potentially be another editor. A copy editor has a different skill set than a macro or line editor. Things you two know, but if you're doing this for the first time, know that each editor has a very specific, specialized skill set.

Thomas: This is probably the most common mistake of the whole process. Independently published authors don't realize they need multiple editors with different skill sets, so they often bring in only one. That missing piece is often what would have made their book successful.

So that's step one. Write the book. You've now got an edited copy of your book. It's shiny, the story works. The substantive edit fixed the story. The copy edit fixed the language, all the commas in the right place. Now you're ready for step two.

• How To Find a Good Editor
• Beyond First Drafts: How to Master the Art of Revision With Angela Hunt

Step 2: Make the Book

Typesetting

This is where you do typesetting, which is arranging the words in just the right way on the page, for the paperback and again for the ebook. You can't just copy and paste a Word document, it won't look professional. You can hire somebody or do it yourself.

Book Cover

The next step is to get a book cover. You should hire a professional. While you could learn typesetting, you can't really learn book covers in a short time.

Jim: You could probably learn it if you worked hard at it, in about 12 to 15 years?

Thomas: A design degree will carve a couple of years off, though even college graduates who've studied it for four years aren't ready to do good book covers. Book covers aren't just art, they're also design, crafted to accomplish the goal of selling the book. If someone doesn't understand the psychology of a good book cover, you're going to lose sales. That's why you crowdfund and save money. The book cover is at the very top of the list of things to spend on.

Back Cover Copy

The next piece is back cover copy. The front of your book is the cover, with your name, the title, maybe a badge or two for awards or bestseller status. The back cover copy is where you describe your book, and it's critical.

Jim: In a bookstore, and online too, somebody looks at a cover and thinks, "That's interesting." They immediately go to the back cover and read that blurb. Online, they read the back cover copy right there in front of them. After that, they go inside the book and skim a few pages, or read the opening line. That whole process, from glancing at the cover to deciding, was studied a number of years ago and takes anywhere from twenty to thirty seconds. That's why back cover copy is so critical. It needs to give you enough that you think, "I've got to go deeper," without giving away the entire story. That's a fine line, and it's an art.

I've been writing copy professionally since 1994, my own and for other authors, and we're going to talk about the process I use to write back cover copy that entices someone to peek inside the book or buy it outright.

Formatting

Thomas: The final piece of making the book is the book formatting. When you're done with step two, you'll have a file for your cover and back cover copy, one image covering the front, back, and spine since they print at the same time. You'll have a file for the interior pages that you upload to your printer, and several book files for the various bookstores you plan to sell through.

Jim: You can do the formatting on your own but consider whether that's where you want to spenc your time. People who know the programs and can do it quickly and relatively inexpensively.

Thomas: I had somebody else do it. There are authors who spent the time to figure it out and now offer it as a service to others, so there are a lot of places to go. Ebook formatting is one of the less expensive things to spend money on, and you can learn to do it yourself.

Ebooks are actually HTML under the hood, kind of like web pages. If you understand how to code a web page, you understand how to code an ebook, since the applications you use to make an ebook file operate in a form of HTML. So if you're familiar with websites, book formatting may come easier to you. But it's also an easy thing to find somebody to do for you.

• How to Write Bestselling Back Cover Copy
• 10 Things Every Book Cover Needs
• How to Format a Book With Vellum

Step 3: Print the Book

Thomas: Book printing has three pieces.

• Printing is having a machine create physical copies.
• Distribution is getting onto the computers and websites of stores so people can order your book.
• Fulfillment is taking the book and handing it to the delivery driver, boxed and labeled, to get to your house.

Sometimes one company does all three pieces, sometimes different companies handle each one.

If you're going through this for the first time, I recommend print on demand. There are two ways to print a book: offset printing and print on demand. Offset lowers your cost per book, and that's the siren song for many authors. Print on demand typically runs $2.50 to $3.50 a copy.

With offset, you can pull that price down to as low as fifty cents or a dollar a copy, depending on volume. So if you spend $100,000 printing your book, you might get 100,000 copies, which sounds great, but if you only sell 500, you have to pay for warehouses to store the rest. It's a high-risk approach. I generally prefer print on demand. You can always go offset later, and the companies that do print on demand often handle distribution and fulfillment for you too.

The company I like is KDP (formerly CreateSpace). They're easy to work with, and honest and transparent about what you get.

I'd avoid any company owned by Author Solutions, including Xlibris and Westbow Press. They use very aggressive sales techniques and sell you things you don't need at inflated prices.

Check out our episode about Hybrid Publishing before signing anything with such publishers.

Jim: Author Solutions becomes like an imprint. Reputable publishers put their name on it and call it their self-publishing arm, then farm the work out to Author Solutions. There have been lawsuits against them, and they'll charge you anywhere from a $10,000 package up to a $20,000 package. You do not have to spend that kind of money.

Thomas: You're better off hiring your own graphic designer for the cover and your own people for the other pieces. I'm not saying never go with a full-service company, but before you do, find a happy customer of that company on your own. There are full-service companies that do good work, and that rule is incredibly useful, just find a happy customer.

You won't find one for Author Solutions. People don't have good experiences with them, but you can find happy customers of some of their competitors, players who do good work and are transparent and honest.

The problem isn't that they charge $10,000, there's a way to provide real value for that. The problem is they promise things they don't end up doing, and they get gullible authors lost in the jargon. That's another reason I recommend print on demand over offset: offset requires a big lump sum up front to print all those books, while with print on demand you pay as you go.

You can save that lump sum for the audiobook instead, because a lot of authors skip the audiobook and leave a huge market on the table, people like me who primarily listen to audiobooks. If your book isn't an audiobook, I probably won't read it. I read about one non-audiobook a year, and a hundred audiobooks a year, so you're far more likely to have me read your book if it's an audiobook.

Jim: And right now, with audiobooks exploding, it's not just the potential money. It legitimizes you as somebody serious about this.

Thomas: It also gets you into a much more exclusive bookstore. There are 5 or 6 million books on Amazon and only two or 300,000 on Audible, so you're competing against 90% fewer authors, in a very exclusive club.

Once your book is printed, if you went with KDP (CreateSpace), it'll already be on Amazon's and Barnes & Noble's websites and orderable through bookstores, though the stores themselves won't carry physical copies.

Getting onto bookstore shelves takes a sales team, which independently published authors typically don't have and can't really afford unless they're already selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of books. But you will have a presence online.

To "print" the ebook, you just sign up for KDP, Amazon's independent publishing arm. Typically, independently published authors make the majority of their money there. So now it's a matter of marketing the book, which is what the rest of this show is about.

If I could point you in one direction to get started, I'd say start with branding. It'll help you create a brand that supports the rest of your marketing.

• 041 – How to Create A Breakthrough Author Brand Step 1: Look in the Mirror
• 042 – How to Create A Breakthrough Author Brand Step 2: Look at Your Readers
• 043 - How to Create A Breakthrough Author Brand Step 3

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