When I was on a FOGCon panel about self-publishing a while back, one of the things I felt I had to point out — something that everyone else was skirting around but not really touching upon — was one of the most important parts of being a self-published author.
If you’re going to be serious about self-publishing, you’re going to have to be willing to fund it to some degree, out of your own pocket.
It’s a tough thing to admit, I know, but it’s true. You’ll need to budget to some degree.
I knew and understood this going in when I decided to self-publish the trilogy. It’s part of the reason I wanted to try my hand at doing as much of it myself as I knew I could: the editing, the cover art, even the various promotional avenues. [I should state now that some people aren’t interested, willing or able to do any or all of that — and that’s just fine. This is part of what I mean: you need to budget for those things.]
As it happens, the uploading of documents to Smashwords and Createspace is free if you’re doing most all of the work yourself. For the production, the only costs I had were the Shutterstock picture package (five for $40), and trade galleys from CS (~$60 for five). The cost of course will go up if you need to outsource your art and/or editing and formatting.*
*There are many legit sources out there for these things…caveat emptor, of course, but a lot of fellow writers and editors online can steer you in the right direction.
The big part of the cost for me was after that — I had to be willing to budget for promotional things over the last few years such as flyers ($60 for 100 half-page cardstock flyers from MOO.com, which I created and mocked up myself), short-term advertising on a website ($100 at NoiseTrade.com to feature on the landing page and a mailout for a week), and cut the cost of the book for a site promotion (books 1 and 2 free for a month on Smashwords). Recently I’ve spent some money signing up for a few local science fiction conventions (FOGcon and BayCon over the last few months), where I will be using that time to plug my trilogy as well as talk about the writing biz. I also paid a graphic artist friend of mine to create my Mendaihu Press logo (see my blog site header, courtesy of MeaganHealy.com) that I will be using in the future.
I’m quite sure I’ll be spending more funds in the future — the occasional advertising, more flyers, and so on — but so far I’ve been keeping it reined in pretty well. I know well enough that I shouldn’t be creating thousands of flyers or having hundreds of copies of my books printed. I’m notoriously cheapass when it comes to the creative part of it; if I can pull it off well with minimum cost, then I’m happy.
Point being: if you’re going to do it DIY, do it responsibly, and be aware that you’re going to have to prime the pump a bit in order to start making any money out of your endeavor. Whether that’s hiring an accountant or learning how to do it yourself, as long as you do it well and do it right, the end result is almost always worth it.
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