MFA-600 6-2 Short Paper: The Path to Self Publication 12/17/19 in General

In the process of producing a publishable artifact, my biggest challenge is in actually following through and finishing at least a first draft of one of my works in progress. My problem remains that I get a new idea every few days. Scratch a few notes in my idea notebook. Go about my day. I can see the pitcher wind up and pitch, and yet every time I bunt.

For arguments sake let us say I have actually finished something I think meets my threshold of acceptability to try to publish. What next?

Finding someone to provide creative feedback seems to be the first thing I would have to search out. I can’t count the number of times I have read, or seen in videos “Don’t rely on family and friends…” I know this to be true because they are invested in you as a family member or a friend. So even if they think what you have written is total crap, they won’t say
it. I would need to find an honest broker of truth.

Similarly, finding a proofreader is important. Someone who can notice the small, yet distracting failures that anyone too close to work cannot see. I cringe on occasion, reading things I wrote years ago, only to find I dropped a “d” from the end of an “and” or changed tense mid-paragraph. My understanding is a proofreader might catch that before I get too far down the highway toward releasing one of my babies into the wild.

Now assuming the spelling and grammatical errors are caught and fixed, I do believe it would be incumbent on me to re-read my work. The objective being to make sure the tenor of what I was trying to say still exists. I once read that a famous author would often take a finished manuscript and put it a drawer to revisit months later. Just to make sure the story was still there.

At the point all the proofing, editing, percolating, and pondering are over we get down to brass tacks.

Professional formatting seems to be fairly important for self-published authors. It would be up to me to find someone with experience in the process of formatting for publishing in multiple formats.

Finally, cover art. This is not a subject I have ever seriously contemplated. I realize it is vitally important I just never really thought about the process. There have been times I have been horrified by the cover art of books I have read, especially paperback reprints of hardbacks. The cover of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend paperback is awful. While this is pure conjecture on my part it seems someone asked an artist to create a cover for a story that involves both zombies and vampires without explaining the nuance of the story. What resulted was a cover with a bunch of pointy teethed rotting vampires clawing themselves out of a hole.

Marketing would also be my responsibility. I have an MBA and have taken my share of marketing classes. I’m just a bit uncomfortable selling myself. I do believe my characters are all part of me. I will have to get over that. Unless I am willing self-publish and give away a dozen or so copies to family and friends.

Explain how you would locate editors and designers to help prepare your book for publication.

Where it comes to finding editors and designers to help prepare my book for publication, I only had to go so far as youtube. A simple search on “self-publishing” gave me so many results I ran of note taking space on the single sheet of paper I had in front of me. I book marked them all and felt a little numb realizing I can pause a youtube video anytime I want and get a notebook.

First, Grammarly. It took a while to get into my google account and sign up. But once I did, I uploaded a test document. Grammarly provides easily 10X the help that Microsoft Word does on its own.

From there the service available from Scribus, Upwork, 99 Designs, Createspace, Kindle Direct, Amazon, Skillshare, Ingramspark and World Anvil are bafflingly profound. It will be up to me find one of these resources I am comfortable with. Initial swipe seems to make eBook self-publishing the way to go.

Estimate the costs to prepare your book for publication, explaining how you arrived at the number or number range.

The closest to anything I have that could be considered mature is a science fiction story. “Celia” is about 25% complete, truthfully I only have the epistolary format conversations between one of my primary characters and his presumed dead wife. I know where the story is going. I estimate the finished product will come in at about 75K. With that assumption, I went about estimating the costs of self-publishing.

Editing, at the high end, should be about 3c a word so $2250. That number takes my breath away.

Cover art and formatting should be about $600.

Copyright filing once I have a finished product: $35.

Printing and actually publishing varies wildly. From dirt cheap for purely online eBook publishing to wildly expensive for purely hardcover. Since I intend to start in the eBook arena through Amazon or Kindle (and who are we kidding they are the same company) I left this at zero.

My initial outlay appears somewhere in the neighborhood of three grand.

Time commitment. Depending on which of my projects I opt to concentrate on, it could take me between one to three years to finish my writing and self-editing. I have an idea for a historical fiction piece that would take quite a while to research, so that is at the long end of the spectrum. Another three or four months for creative and line editing. At least a month to incorporate changes. Regarding the marketing aspects, I don’t have a clue. So my estimate is four years.

I found this youtube video very helpful. She has a bit of a pottymouth, but I’m a sailor and actually found her approach somewhat endearing. : Gillian Perkins, How to Self-Publish Your First Book: Step-by-step tutorial for beginners: