The thing about publishing a book yourself is that you get to do all that a publisher has to do. Some items can be fun (like selecting the cover), but others you never think about until you need to do them. You can find some checklists online, but they don’t really tell you how much work is involved with each item.

First, I decided early on to have both an eBook and a printed edition. Things might have been easier with only an eBook version, but I felt that to be a real published author, I needed to have physical copies of my book. Second, I decided that I would start by selling on Amazon, but if things evolved in the right way, I’d want to sell my book elsewhere, too. Both decisions did impact what I needed to do.

Editing

Chrysalis isn’t a new book for me. I started to write it back in 2016, and its first draft was done around March 2017. I had decided to ask a professional editor to look at it around September 2019 in the hopes of being able to sell more easily to agents or editors with a cleaner draft. The delightful Parisa Zolfaghari took on the job of copy-editing that book. We exchanged a lot in the coming months until she delivered the edited book around the end of February 2020. Editors like to do at least three different phases for editing: story, copy-edit, and proofreading. As that story had already been seen by my whole writing group and my beta readers, I was confident enough that it didn’t need a big structural edit, so I asked Parisa to only do the copy-editing. As part of her finished work, she gave me back the edited work (both with changes in-text and with general comments), and a spreadsheet describing all she could gather about the characters (including physical/psychological attributes), places, setting. I still refer to that spreadsheet from time to time. It is so useful! Parisa gave me several pointers about the story and answered some of my questions, the chief one being about the bird husbandry section of the book and its impact on the story (short answer: it’s OK to use some middle chapters to explore a solution that won’t work to solve the story’s problem). I was quite happy with her work.

For proofreading, I’m using Grammarly to check the grammar and spelling inconsistencies. Parisa pointed out other Inconsistencies in the previous phase, so we’re mostly OK on that front.

Cover art

If you think of it, that’s the main job of a publisher: to commission a cover that will convey to the readers the right atmosphere and draw them in so they can read a few pages and maybe buy the book. It’s basically marketing, and if there’s one thing I’m not good at, it’s selling anything. My idea here was to fall back on the types of covers I like: I don’t care much for modern covers with only text or a simple drawing (like for instance the Gollancz covers for Wheel of Time). I wanted a drawing, pretty much like the classic eighties Tor covers (like the Darrel Sweet WOT covers). I also like sweeping landscapes (like Wheelan does for the Stormlight Archives books). I also wanted the look and feel of an early 20th-century setting. Imagine the sepia tint of old photos.

I thought I was ready. After all, I had already made the brief for the copy-editing job. This is nothing like it.

What cover artists want is to have the feeling you want to convey, so it’s a bit difficult to explain with a few words. They ask you a ton of questions, and the first one is, “What is the budget?”. I have worked on proposals for almost all of my career: the one thing you aren’t allowed to ask your client is “how much are you willing to spend?”. My idea was that if I described to them what I wanted, they would come up with their proposals, and I would choose one which fit my budget. Apparently, you tell them how much you want to spend, and they’ll adjust their work accordingly. That’s strange to me. Anyway, I described them three scenes from the book (one from the first chapter–the actual one which ended up in the cover, one from the second chapter which takes place indoors with a ghost, and one from the middle of the book where the characters are outdoors watching their birds). All of that description took me a lot of time (even did a quick map of the scene for the 3rd idea).

They also asked me the actual dimensions of the cover, which I didn’t have yet. Note to self: do the basic typesetting BEFORE asking cover artists to work on your book. Why? You might be asking yourself? Well, you do know the book’s dimensions (page height and width), except the spine, which depends on the number of pages (and also the paper quality, but there’s a calculator for that), and the number of pages depends on your choices for typesetting. So at that point, I had more or less to roll the dice. I knew the interior design I wanted (including the type of font), so I had the bulk of the work, but I had no idea about what extra pages I would need (say for the acknowledgements, for instance). So, roll the dice, and hope I don’t come up twenty pages more or less if I decide to change the interior’s look for some reason.

The rest of the collaboration went smoothly. A little bit too smooth, in my opinion, since I didn’t get to see the three ideas because the artist got it right on the first sketch. It only took him a couple of days to send me something which looked very close to the final version with two slightly different poses, each in two colours. The choice there was tough as I liked the four versions for different reasons. I ended up choosing one which felt better for the book, even if it wasn’t my favourite one.

I only had few comments on things to correct, which he did quickly. A few days later, he sent the final work, and it was done. Very productive collaboration.

Formatting

Now comes the time to format the manuscript. Years ago, when I tried to make samples for my beta readers, I tried to dabble with InDesign. That thing is complex without measure (it’s an Adobe product, you’ll tell me), as it can do pretty much anything. It’s not just complex: it’s difficult to use. Say you want to insert a chapter somewhere. You have to extend past the first page by hand. Not easy.

I had heard about a Macos product tailored for books: Vellum. I tried it for my testing ebooks and was surprised about how easy it was. All you have to do is export your manuscript in rtf from Scrivener, import it into Vellum and already, you have something that’s almost ready to go to print. If you want to go further, you can customize page headings, breaks, and page layout. All within seconds. You can preview live how it’s going to look on a few different types of eReaders, or in the printed version. Once you’re done, you can build the eBook (with multiple platform formats) and the PDF for the physical version.

Plus, you can still edit your work within it, with search/replace, and that super function to change all your straight quotes to smart ones. It’s pretty cheap when compared to InDesign (InDesign doesn’t do only book formatting, but I don’t need these other functionalities for now). Vellum was a very nice surprise in my book design process.

The administrative stuff

Here comes the part nobody thinks about. You have a manuscript properly formatted and want to print it. Amazon makes it clear that they can provide you with an ISBN but that it’s theirs. If you want to print your book on another platform (say, Smashwords), you have to get your own ISBN. Turns out that you can’t use the link Amazon provides to buy one if you’re not a US resident. You see, ISBN have to be assigned by an organization which is in the same region as the publisher. Since I’m the publisher and I am based in France, I had to find the French organization which assigns ISBNs.

That organization provides several options: do you want to buy in bulk (not for now, thanks), do you want your ISBN fast (30 EUR for 3 weeks delivery, or 85 EUR for 3 days), do you want an actual barcode (who would want that since any app, including Amazon, can generate one from the ISBN number?). I ended up selecting the slow way, but I am still wondering what could take them 3 full weeks to generate what is basically a new number in a sequence. Anyway, I waited until I received my shiny own ISBN (I now own an official publisher number, thank you!). On the email, one sentence caught my attention: “don’t forget to register your book with France’s legal deposite”. Crap, I had forgotten about them, and I should have remembered because they already have one of my works (PhD Thesis). I think it’s pretty much a universal thing: the state wants to have all the published works to preserve the country’s culture and to allow academics to look at them when they need to.

So, I went to the French National Library’s website and looked. I’m in a strange situation since I’m not writing in French. They have a section on English works but no indication whether there is a special procedure to submit to that section. Plus, the registration forms to deposit your work don’t even mention the work’s language. I had questions, so I used their contact form. They replied very politely the next day, saying that I should use their main site to register the work and that it’s their job to put it in the right section afterwards. I also asked them about the legal mention I should put in the printed book, but they seem to be very lax about that (as long as you say that you did the work of submitting to them).

One funny thing: they ask on the form where the book is actually being printed. Since Amazon will print the book closer to the customer, it’s not an easy question to answer. After looking it up, most books on Amazon France are printed in Poland, so I put Poland in the form. It turns out when I received my proofreading copy that this particular one was printed in Italy. Oops.

The Amazon side of things

After I enrolled in Amazon’s KDP program (pretty easy if you’re an Amazon customer), I got to create my book in my “Bookshelf”. That process is pretty easy. You are asked about the book’s category (easy: Fantasy), some keywords (Tough question, more on that later). Then, you can upload the epub file; they’ll process it to check for formatting errors. You can set-up the price, upload the cover, and you’re good to go. That’s for the eBook part. The printed part is a bit more complex since you have to check the formatting for every page (they have a simulator for that). Time to see what the book looks like in the physical world: here comes the printed proofs. What’s strange is that if you want a printed proof, you just have to click a button, and they’ll send you a shopping cart link as though you were buying anything else. The downside is that since that order is being classified as a book (for me, it’s not a book: I’m ordering a service as a publisher), stupid French law says that I have to pay for the full delivery price, even if as an Amazon Prime member, I don’t pay for delivery on any other product type. The upside is that, since it’s a “Cultural” item, I get to use my employer’s coupons to pay for it.

About a week later, I received my proofreading copy. It’s strange seeing your work in physical form for the first time. Now, I’ve bought a ton of books in my life, and I could judge that the quality is there, especially in the paper type being used. I’ve often seen mass-market paperbacks or even trade paperbacks being printed on paper you could use as blotting paper. If you write in any of those, you can expect the ink to spread. In my review copy, I found a book with a very smooth paper and a very nice cover. Everything looked good (even the spine, which had me worried because the book has a bit more pages than when I commissioned the cover).

Everything looks good. Except the text feels somewhat off. I couldn’t get what was the problem until I noticed my quotes. Straight ones. Time to look up some typography rules. No, straight quotes are for computers and every good looking book should use “smart quotes”. Damn, I had to redo all the book’s formatting. Plus, I noticed some big errors on the first page I flipped open in the middle of the book. Time to do another editing pass. Vellum’s “Apply smart quotes” really saved me hours there. Note: Grammarly has a similar feature when it notices you use straight and smart quotes at the same time, but it’s just less straightforward than telling Vellum “please update all my quotes”.

After a new version was uploaded to Amazon, I was ready to go. Only there was a category I still needed to fill: keywords. Did I mention I can’t sell anything to save my life? That includes describing my work in a low number of words. After some research, it turns out that the more words you put into Amazon’s keywords, the better your book visibility is. That means I need to fill in as much as possible. I’ll try later some plugins which show how successful your keywords are.

That being done, you only have to select the price you want, and you’re good to go. I set a release date about a week later just to prepare everything else, but all seemed to be in order. Amazon takes a few days to review the book, and then you receive an email telling you that you can order author copies. Only, you can’t. Not yet. The book needs to be ‘Live’ for anyone to order it, including you. So much for “You can order author copies to get copies of your book before it’s visible to readers after your book is ready to print.” That’s a minor inconvenience for me, but I imagine that someone planning a real book launch party might get upset not being able to have the books until a week after the actual party.

Author accounts

All the marketing blogs I read mention how crucial it is to have an authors page, both on Amazon, and on GoodReads (you might wonder why they’re not the same, since it’s the same company, but I digress). The thing is, even with an eBook on pre-order, it’s difficult. You can’t create an Author page on AuthorCentral, unless the books have been reviewed on Amazon. The AuthorCentral form might take your book ISBN, but until that book has been approved, it won’t be found. Once the book is approved, you can create the AuthorCentral page and see your lonely book there. The point is that you should be able to see all of the author’s books there, but since there is only one for now, that seems pointless.

The GoodReads page, on the other hand, I can see why I’d need one. The process is a bit more involved there to link your goodreads account to the book, since you need to prove that you’re the actual author. They take all the information you can give them (email, website, …). Quite reminiscent of applying for an ID card. They then send your application for review, and after a few hours, I’m now a certified GoodReads Author. Now, that’s an achievement!

The only thing after that is to wait for the book to come online and see readers flocking in. Unless?

Now, that part is over. The next post will be about marketing and generating sales. That will be the difficult one!