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“I wish I had known that before I self-published my book.”

It’s a common author lament. Maybe you’ve said it, too.

Nearly everybody has a story about something they learned after they started the self-publishing process. For many, the discovery came too late to save them time, money, or trouble.

That doesn’t mean you have to make the same mistakes, though.

Lessons learned

Hoping to help new authors learn from the experiences of others, I asked self-published authors, “What do you know now about self-publishing that you wish you had known when you started?”

Here’s what they told me.

“YouTube and Google are a self-publisher’s best friend. I learned Adobe Illustrator and InDesign methods because I self-published and had next to no budget. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Ashley Sutton, Overtime Is SO Over

“The one aspect of self-publishing I wish I knew when I started was to not overthink the process. There’s so much overthinking going on because you don’t want to go about it in the wrong way, but that simply complicates and slows down the process. My advice, just do it and put aside any fears you may have.”

Avni Parekh, Be The Bigger Person

“I wish I knew more about the business end of selling books. When I first decided to publish my children’s books, I wasn’t sure how to get into a distribution network and actually reach people through all sources, so I created books through an off-set printer and through IngramSpark. However, once I started getting my sales reports, I learned I was only making 7 cents a book through those online channels!

“That kind of return was not going to work. Luckily, I was able to get connected to a distributor with a sales team to help run my ads and generate higher returns. But if I had known this sooner, I could’ve saved myself a lot of headache and money.”

Brooke Van Sickle, Pirates Stuck at “C”

“Finding a reputable publishing company is key.  There are a lot of options and resources out there, but do your homework.  Check out reviews and truly evaluate the services they provide. You want to make sure the company you chose is a good fit for your book and your brand, and not just after your pockets.”

Carenda Deonne, Perfect Patty Messed Up Devotional

“I wish I had known more about the process of marketing myself as an author. I also wish I had known more about sending out books for review before publishing. I was unaware of the impact of reviews and keywords on search rankings.”

Cassandra Fay LeClair, Being Whole: Healing from Trauma and Reclaiming My Voice

“I wish I would have known specifics about the financial investment up front. To do it right, you really need to hire a designer for artwork (~$800), establish an LLC (~$125), format/edit the book (I did this myself, but most people don’t; ~$400), obtain ISBNs and copyrights (~$200). By the time you market the book, you’re out of pocket around $2,000.”

Jessica Duemig, WARRIOR

“Start the marketing piece much earlier. As a new author, I was taking everything one step at a time, learning as I went. By the time I got to the point where the book was finished, had a cover, and was in proofreading, I started researching the publishing and marketing piece – only to learn that I was now way behind. It’s not something you can really make up; you just do what you can with the time you have.”

Joyce Kristiansson,The Last Straw, Change Your Life and the Planet – for Good

“I wish I knew when I first started how important pre-launches and publicity are in the success of publishing.”

Kathryn Starke, Amy’s Travels

“I wish I had been more “realistic” with my expectations with regard to sales of self-published books versus established authors and major publishers. It’s far easier to create a best-selling book if you are well-known or very popular.”

Kevin Darné, My Cat Won’t Bark! (A Relationship Epiphany)

“Use IngramSpark for your print books! I just learned this valuable lesson. Bookstores and libraries don’t buy from Amazon – they use IngramSpark to purchase books, and if you don’t publish there, you are missing out on many sales. Also, I have noticed the quality of the print books is higher with IngramSpark.”

K. J. Gillenwater, Aurora’s Gold

“I wish I had known how important reviews were. Once your book is live on Amazon, it’s harder to give away free copies. Many authors find reviewers before their launch, and when the book goes live, they have it listed for free for the first week or two, so the reviewers can ‘purchase’ the book. When I launch my second book, I will focus more on getting reviews in the first few months rather than sales.”

Lynn Moore, Solidarity: Finding solidarity in heartbreak, anxiety & depression

“Don’t get carried away with yourself. It’s a beginner’s mistake. I self-published my first book decades ago, long before the days of the internet. In my naive self-confidence, I paid to have a local printer make 1,000 copies. Sales were embarrassingly dismal. I resorted to giving them away wherever I could. Decades later, I am selling subsequent books through Amazon and am much more savvy about marketing. I still have 100 copies of my first book as a humbling reminder.

Marianne Jones, The Serenity Stone Murder

“I wish I had known about Amazon ads and used them right away!”

Milana Perepyolkina, Gypsy Energy Secrets: Turning a Bad Day into a Good Day No Matter What Life Throws at You

“I know now that we the writers don’t need the exclusivity to one platform. Other platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and Scribd and more formats are better for those people who have different types of e-readers.”

Núria Añó, The Salon of Exiled Artists in California

“Creating an enjoyable book is one thing, but attracting an audience to your book is something very different. Before you begin to write, you should identify to whom you are writing your book for and what are the benefits the readers will receive from reading your book.”

Paulette Harper, Secret Places Revealed

“While I knew I would have to do the marketing myself for my self-published novel, I didn’t realize that, with the 24/7 opportunities of the internet, book marketing could become a full-time job.”

Phyllis Zimbler Miller, Mrs. Lieutenant

“You will spend 30 percent of your time writing your book and 130 percent marketing your book.”

Rae Stonehouse, Blow Your Own Horn! Personal Branding for Business Professionals

“Writing the book was the easy part. When you decide to embark on the self-publishing journey, you need to have a marketing plan zipped up and ready to launch. If you don’t shout it out from the rooftops, no one will find your book.”

Renée Bauer, PERCY’S IMPERFECTLY PERFECT FAMILY

“I didn’t realize that when you self-published a book that you had to do all of the marketing yourself since you weren’t really hiring anyone to do it.”

Shelby DeVore, Think ‘Inside’ the Box: An Essential Guide to Edible Container Gardening

“I wish I’d known earlier which tasks it made sense for me to embark on the learning curve for myself, and which ones it made sense to hire people who already knew how to do those things. Because I hadn’t published a book before, I didn’t have a full appreciation, at the outset, for the thousand things I would need to think about and do in order to publish to a professional standard, or for how time-consuming some of those things would be.”

Siri Carpenter, The Craft of Science Writing

“I wish I had known how much time and effort it takes to market a book. Some experts say you can do it in 10 to 30 minutes a day, but for the newbie trying to learn all the intricacies of book marketing, that is simply not realistic.”

Sonia Frontera, Solve the Divorce Dilemma: Do You Keep Your Husband or Do You Post Him on Craiglist?

“The biggest surprise for me was just how time-consuming the promotion side of things can be. I work in online marketing in my day job, so I thought it’d be simple – especially as I had a bit of a following on Twitter and LinkedIn already – but I underestimated how much time it takes to promote it effectively. It’s easy to think only about ‘getting it out there’ and thinking the hard work stops as soon as it appears on Amazon, but that’s not the case. So my advice to other self-published authors would be to make sure you have your promotion strategy in place way before you publish if you can.”

Steve Morgan, Anti-Sell

“Always order a printed proof before releasing the book.”

Tara Alemany, Publish with Purpose

“When I published my first book of poetry, I wish I had understood two things. One, that there’s no such thing as a perfect manuscript. Two, that your manuscript gets stronger when you recruit talented people for your project.”

Tenesha Curtis, The Newbie’s Guide to Book Development

“Reviews are hard to get. This felt like a perpetual revolving door for me: I needed people to buy my book so they could leave a review, but people didn’t want to spend the money on my book if it had no reviews. Had I known about advance review copies, and secured some reviews before launch, I think I could’ve saved myself a lot of this hassle in the beginning.”

Tim Koster, The Probability of Time

What have you learned about self-publishing that might help others? Please tell us in a comment!

Why?

Because the first book of this author’s that I read was profoundly disappointing. It was the length of a long magazine article and lacked depth, detail, and specifics.

Ugh.

I should have known better. There were several warning signs, including a do-it-yourself cover. The “product details” noted the (short) length. But the book’s excellent description hit all the right buttons — it promised the specifics I needed — so I took a chance.

Deliver what you promise

I would have overlooked many flaws if the book’s content had matched its description. All I asked of this book was to teach me something new.

But it didn’t.

Instead, the book was a shallow overview that left me feeling foolish for buying it.

Is this the reaction you want from your readers?

Do you want to give them the impression that you don’t really care about delivering on your book’s promises?

Probably not. I think you want to write a great book that readers will recommend to their friends.

To help make that happen, here’s a short list of what I see on Amazon that sends me back to the search bar for another option.

1. The book’s title is a mess.

Punctuation or spacing is missing. Words run together. A cover blurb is included in the title, even though it’s an endorsement, not part of the title.

For nonfiction, there’s no separation between the title and the subtitle. Almost as bad? There’s no subtitle.

2. It’s obvious you designed your own cover. (And that you’re not a designer.)

Nothing shouts “I don’t really care about my book” more than an obviously do-it-yourself cover.

If you don’t care enough about your book to make sure that the cover is appropriate for the category, why would I care enough to read it? You’re telling me that what’s between the covers will be amateurish, too.

(For tips on how to select the best cover, read “7 tried and true ways to make a book cover decision.”)

3. You aren’t letting me “look inside” the book on Amazon.

The “look inside” feature is the online equivalent of flipping through a book in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore. It gives the reader a preview of content and writing quality.

When you haven’t made it possible for me to peek inside the book, I start to wonder if there’s a reason why. That could mean that a preview might discourage people from buying.

That’s probably not the message you want to send.

4. Your book description is written and formatted like an advertisement.

Nothing shouts, “I’m an internet marketer trying to grab your dollars!” like a book description that looks and reads like a website sales page.

Hype might fool others, but it doesn’t fool me. I want thoughtful text that helps me see what I’ll learn from the book, not a huge, boldfaced font shouting at me.

Major publishers don’t use this approach. Minor publishers shouldn’t either. It’s insulting to the reader.

5. The book description is one long block of text with no paragraph returns.

This is a problem for two reasons. First, I can’t read text with no white space. My brain craves paragraph breaks!

Second, it tells me that you care so little about your book that you didn’t even review your sales page before it went live.

If you don’t care, why would I?

On the other hand … authors have been complaining that the system has messed with their descriptions. To be safe, go to your book’s page and make sure it looks the way you want it to.

6. You don’t have an author bio or the one you’re using isn’t relevant to the book.

Until recently, I was guilty of this. My bio just disappeared — poof! — from my Author Central account. One day it was there, the next, it wasn’t.

So, even if you’ve added your bio to your Author Central Author Page, check your book’s sales page to make sure it’s still there.

You’ll find a lot of helpful information online about how to write your author bio (including on this site), but the one thing that most self-published authors overlook is relevance. Novelists write that they’ve fulfilled a life’s dream by writing a book — not relevant — and nonfiction authors use a generic bio that doesn’t shine a spotlight on their best credentials for the topic.

Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, I need you to connect your life (and personality) to this book so I understand why you’re the right author for it.

Help me love your self-published book

I want to read more self-published books. I really do. I loved Karen Inglis’s and Kim Norman’s. I’d love to discover fiction that’s as good as their nonfiction.

But what I’m seeing tells me that many authors don’t care much about quality.

Here’s what Apple founder Steve Jobs says about that.

“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” ~ Steve Jobs

When someone tells you that what counts is quantity — when they tell you that you need a lot of books in the pipeline to be successful — look at the quality of what you’ve already written first. If it’s not as good as you can make it, don’t move on until it is.

Quality still matters.

Convince me to read your self-published book. What’s the best thing about it? 

Are you a self-published author who’s participating at a library? What do you have planned?

Whether you’re indie or not, involved with your local library’s celebration or not, you can still participate. There’s a live webcast that day at 2 p.m. Eastern featuring a panel discussion with agents, authors, and industry experts. To watch, click “Watch the live webcast” on the Indie Author Day site.

Planning for next year’s Indie Author Day

What can you do if your library isn’t participating this year? (Mine isn’t either.) Here are three things you can do now for next year:

• Visit your library in person this week and ask them to follow what others are doing this Saturday so they become more informed. They can get a list of participating libraries on the site’s “Where?” page.
• Offer to meet with your library to brainstorm ideas for an event next year. Be enthusiastic; help them understand how important their support is to local authors.
• Rally other local indie authors and start discussing a proposal you can submit next year for an event that will help give local self-published authors more well-deserved exposure.

Learn more at IndieAuthorDay.com.

Are you participating with your local library this Saturday? Tell us how so you inspire those who hope to join in next year.

SELF-e Select curates self-published/indie books for libraries so that librarians know which books are worth adding to their lending collections. Here are a few links with more information:

• Library Journal‘s press release announcing the program
• The SELF-e FAQ page explaining that even if your book isn’t selected as one that gets recommended, you can still add it to a statewide database of available self-published books
• A guest blog post by publishing consultant Porter Anderson with specifics on the program, which Anderson is paid to promote

The author who contacted me was debating what to do because authors aren’t paid for self-published books that libraries select through the SELF-e program.

Should you offer your book to libraries for free?

Here’s what I told her.

Because authors aren’t paid for books selected, SELF-e seems like an option for an author with a backlist.

Applying the strategy for e-book giveaways (be sure to read the comments on one of our most popular guest blog posts, “Why you shouldn’t give your book away“), offer your first book free to libraries only after you have four or five published already. Once readers sample your work, they are more likely to buy more of what you write or ask libraries to carry your subsequent books because they’ll know what they’re getting.

With the “no royalty” option limited to your first book and demand for subsequent books you’ve written increasing, libraries are more likely to buy subsequent books through the only channel you’ve made available for those books — the one that pays you a royalty.

Options for selling to libraries

If the no-royalty option isn’t a good fit for your book, you’ve got other ways to get into libraries.

ebooksareforever is a new service that charges libraries the same price that you charge consumers. The site says that libraries will own the e-books they buy and will have easy access to as many copies as they need so more than one patron can borrow a title at the same time.

Three things to note:

1. This service is still in beta mode, so rules and procedures could change.
2. Once you register on the site as an author, the company “will review your books and back catalog, and promptly approve or deny your application.” (After applying five days ago, I still haven’t heard from them about mine.)
3. Authors are paid a 70 percent royalty.

Simply put, just because you want to use this service to get your e-book into libraries doesn’t mean you can.

There’s a do-it-yourself option, too. I’ve taken Elaine Wilke’s e-course that teaches you “How to Get Your Book and E-Books into Libraries” and particularly like that it includes a database of U.S. public libraries, but the insider tips from librarians are really helpful, too. My affiliate link at Udemy will save you $30 on the course fee and get you free access to Elaine’s other course, “Let Siri Save Time, Boost Productivity & Keep You Organized” (regular price $39).

(Pro tip from Elaine’s DIY course: Librarians like it when you’ve got some buzz going for your book. That includes reviews and media interviews.)

What’s the best move for you?

In the end, it all comes down to your goals. Do you need to earn money from the book to help pay off publishing expenses? Do you  want to build a fan base for subsequent books? Will getting it to as many readers as possible boost your speaking or consulting career?

Always take your goals — and nobody else’s — into account when making book marketing decisions. Blindly doing what another author is doing without thinking about what’s best for you and your future could take you in the wrong direction.

And that’s what I told the author who contacted me to take into account before she made a decision. Only she knows the answer to the question: “What will help you reach your goals for this book?”

Do you want to get your book into libraries? Why or why not? Please share your thoughts in a comment.

Here’s why: I spend a lot of time participating in online discussions among self-published authors so that I can learn as much as possible about their book marketing challenges and help them solve their problems. I’ve noticed that some people come off as knowledgeable, competent, and just plain smart while some do specific things that make me think, “I won’t buy anything written by that person.” Their online behavior makes me think  that I won’t enjoy reading their books.

The importance of a writerly social media persona

Think about it: I’m getting the information I need to accept or reject books sight unseen from social media personas.

The rejections come from four author patterns I’ve noticed in social networks. Perhaps these behaviors don’t influence anyone but me — but I doubt it. I can’t be the only reader who wants an author to use their/they’re/there correctly on an ongoing basis.

The influencers for me don’t relate to foul language or political preferences (although I will admit to disconnecting from people who make racist statements). They’re specific to an author’s ability to craft a book that meets conventional publishing standards.

Are any of these four behaviors interfering with your self-publishing success?

1. Arrogance.

If you act like you know everything there is to know about just about everything, I’m going to think that you haven’t bothered to research your topic or craft. If you’re writing nonfiction based on your own knowledge only, your book won’t be thorough enough for me. If you write fiction, I have the impression that you haven’t taken any courses on novel writing or haven’t been open to feedback on your manuscript. There’s a good chance that your book isn’t as good as it could be (or as good as you think it is).

2. Consistent typos or spelling mistakes.

Most people make mistakes now and then and it’s no big deal. But if you’re somebody who consistently writes “your” instead of “you’re” or just plain can’t spell on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or anywhere else, you’re giving me the impression that your book will be riddled with those errors, too.

This is less of an issue if you have a traditional publisher because that model includes professional editors who catch and eliminate those mistakes. But too many self-published authors skip that professional editing step, so what you see in social networks is also what you get in the finished product. I know that some people can overlook these issues in a good story, but I can’t. There are many other books without those problems that will be less frustrating to read.

3. Jack of All Trades Syndrome.

Perhaps you truly are gifted, but most great writers are not great cover designers or manuscript editors. Pay for specialized help. If you don’t, your book won’t live up to your own expectations.

4. No rules at all. 

I suppose some people are just too busy to even use the shift key when posting on a social network, let alone try out a few commas or an occasional period. Sentences that have no capital letters at all and no punctuation give me the impression that the poster is either e e cummings or a lazy writer. Lazy writers don’t write good books (and e e cummings is long gone).

Tips for presenting the most writerly social you

You can pay a copy editor to find and correct the misspellings and grammar errors in your book, but what can you do about those problems in social media?

First, learn how to spell. This probably sounds petty, but it’s more important than you might think. One of the best ways to learn how to spell is by reading articles and books. Not so coincidentally, the people who write those articles and books also read a lot of articles and books — because they know that to be a better writer, they have to read a lot. You learn from the work of others. The best writers — and spellers — are typically big readers.

You can also run everything through your word processing spell checker before posting it.

Second, proofread what you write before hitting the submit button. Honestly, when I forget to do this, I always regret it because I make mistakes when I type too fast. Even worse (quite frankly), sometimes my brain isn’t forming sentences that makes sense to anyone who isn’t in my brain! So I need to fix them. Proofreading gives me the chance to do that.

If you re-read your tweet, status update, or discussion comment just once before sharing it, you’ll not only find any mistakes, but you’ll have one more opportunity to ask yourself, “Is this what I really want to say about this topic to these people?”

I want to buy your books, but I need you to show me that you’re a good writer before I do that.

Am I being unfair? Does an author’s social media persona reflect what we’ll find in a self-published book, or not? What do you think?