Publishing your own first book – your experiences?

dcharold

Main things: don’t expect it to be a living - my best year was about £5000 and that’s off around a dozen self published books. You can’t just write, you also need to do at least a modicum of promotion. Have beta readers who will be honest with you. It’s essential. Watch out for scams! Sounds too good to be true? Probably is.

dcharold

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82143577#Comment_82143577

You’re describing vanity publishing. No real publisher expects to be paid by an author.

redped

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82145167#Comment_82145167

No, this is a hybrid model of publishing rather than vanity publishing. Her publisher is definitely a "real" publisher.

My wife's first book is on sale in bookshops (and has sold well), with the marketing & distribution taken care of by the publisher (including promotions at trade fairs) - this wouldn't have happened with a vanity publisher, which just prints the books for you.

Savvy_Sue

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82145167#Comment_82145167

The fancy pants US publisher definitely expected DH to pay, and would then have charged 4 times a reasonable price for his book.

GeordieinAotearoa

I self-published my first novel on Amazon a few months ago, using three tools: Reedsy Studio for drafting and formatting, Kindle Direct Publishing for uploading to Amazon and creating a template for my paperback cover and Canva for designing the cover.

I'm quite tech savvy as I already run two websites and an online store, so I found most of it quite straightforward. In all honesty I did it for the love of writing rather than to make money; nevertheless I've received 3 months of royalties so far and nearly 100 ratings with an overall score of 4.6. The first royalties were around £10! - but now they're into three figures and climbing, and I'm stupidly excited by that. I've almost finished the sequel and hope to publish it next month.

There's a lot more detail I could go into, but that's probably the gist of it for now.

SarahBauhaus

I self-published my first novel using Amazon Kindle Publishing. It is free and the guidance is great. It took some effort to get to grips with the formatting, etc. but you just have to persevere. I haven't sold many because I haven't figured out the marketing 🤣 but it's out there and I'm now working on the sequel. (Removed by Forum Team)

PocketCompass

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82143577#Comment_82143577

That's really useful. Especially as your wife has experienced both routes. How did she find the experience with the publisher compared with publishing the other two through Amazon? And if you don't mind me asking, did she actually have to pay the publisher several thousand pounds for the first book?

I'm definitely not expecting to make much money from it. For me it's primarily about writing something I'm proud of and hopefully finding at least a few people who actually enjoy reading it.

PocketCompass

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82143595#Comment_82143595

That's actually much more impressive than I realised from your first post! Having the National Trust take up your books for a while must have been quite something. Even if the payment sideof it wasn't ideal. And 1996 to 2010 is a pretty long run too.

Thanks for explaining the manuscript reader part as well. I hadn't really considered taht as a way of getting some insight into the publishing world, but it does sound interesting. I'll have to look into whether there are opportunities like that around. Your point about the amount of work and money that can go in before seeing much in return is definitely something I'm taking away from this thread. The more I read, the more I realise that actually writing the book may only be one part of the whole process!

PocketCompass

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82144023#Comment_82144023

That's a good point. I think I've probably been associating marketing a bit too much with social media so far. Things like readings or getting in touch with bookshops would be quite different for me, and I could definitely see myself doing that more than regularly creating content for Instagram or YouTube.

That's probably exactly why I'm trying to find out what options there are between doing everything yourself and going with a traditional publisher. Especially with a first book, I'd find it reassuring to have someone alongside me who knows the process. At the same time, I wouldn't want to hand over all the important decisions either.

Do you know much about this yourself? Have you ever published anything?

PocketCompass

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82144353#Comment_82144353

Thanks for explaining all that. It sounds like quite a journey and also like there was a fair amount of luck involved in eventually finding the right publisher through that connection! It's interesting that so many people read the draft and gave detailed feedback along the way. That's something I'mstarting to think I should probably do too before worrying too much about publishers. I suppose after spending so long writing something yourself, it must become quite difficult to judge it objectively.

The £4k offer from the American publisher would definitely have made me wary, especially at £40 a copy on top of that. The arrangement he eventually found sounds much more like what I'd hope for. And thanks for answering my question about sales too. For a niche subject, having it gradualy find readers through reviews sounds like a pretty decent outcome to me.