Revisiting the decision to self-publish

It excited me when my editor told me my first novel was good enough for a publishing house to pick it up—excited enough to give up my plan to self-publish it, which I wrote about in this blog in May 2018.

The normal way to find a publisher is to land an agent first. So I sent query letters to agents, a few each week. Interested agents will email back and ask for a copy of the novel. No one was interested. So after a few months of knocking on virtual doors, I stopped. My editor was amazed that I had gotten no nibbles. As I worked on other projects, I thought time and again about whether I should go back and contact more agents. But Under Shōko’s Bed is an odd book about a foreigner in Japan. That’s not the sort of thing the average reader is clamoring for. I don’t know what publishers could tap that narrow niche of readers. I also worry that after finding there to be too few, the book would go out of print and that would be the end. Almost every book goes out of print, but I don’t want to face that disappointment so soon.

So after months of vacillating, I have decided to go back to self-publishing. It gives me total control. I get to choose the cover and book design. I get to write the cover blurb. I get to set the price. It also puts all the weight for book sales on my shoulders. There will be no one out there pushing the book but me. That is a sobering realization, since I’m not very pushy. If I end up selling five copies, it will be my fault. If by some miracle I sell more, well, I’ll be thankful for miracles.

A hermit's life

I don’t have COVID-19 yet. Neither does anyone in my immediate family. Some are saying the U.S. will see a vaccine by Thanksgiving. That seems almost hopelessly optimistic. I’m not sure how Japan is doing on vaccines. My classes are all online, and the university has decided that will go on for the rest of the year. I am a hermit. It’s time to connect with some other hermits. It’s time to finish something.

I finished my first novel, Under Shōko’s Bed, months ago. For a long time, I was vacillating over whether to look for an agent and a publisher (as my editor suggested), or self-publish, as I had originally decided. A couple of things have made me shy away from the traditional publishing route. The first was the reaction I got to my first round of agent queries: silence. The second was my editor’s feedback on my second novel, Neyuki. It includes violence and sexual exploitation, and my editor doubted that in today’s climate, any American publisher would pick it up. It is also a book set in Japan, written by a foreigner (even though I’ve lived here for over twenty years, and if you should write what you know, Japan is what I know). I suspect interest in such books is narrow. A publisher is unlikely to want to squeeze into such a niche market. It’s also possible that even if someone took the book on, they would expect me to create buzz for it. If I will be creating the buzz anyway, I might as well just self-publish.

I want the book to be professional, though. I have worked with an experienced editor, but I still feel the need to hire a final copy editor—who is probably shut in somewhere because of this virus, a hermit like me. That will be expensive. Then there is the cost of hiring a cover designer, another likely hermit. This being my first novel, I would also prefer to work with someone on the book design, possibly a third hermit. Then I’ll need a fourth, a proofreader. None of these hermits will have taken vows of poverty, so all of this will push the cost high enough that I will almost surely lose money on the book.

It will be a great book, though.

So this month I plan to find a copy editor. Once the text is set, I will find someone to do a cover for it and possibly have the same person either do the interior or give me an InDesign template so I can do it myself. I want to get the book out in the fall. It will be a major challenge, as my other six novels are calling to me. There’s a lot to do. But when someone asks me how I spent my COVID isolation time, I will have a personal accomplishment to crow about.

The decision to self-publish

The decision to self-publish was not an easy one.  The difficulty, though, was not the choice of self-publishing versus traditional publishing.  That decision requires an author to have a publishing company that is expressing interest.  My decision was the much more common problem of what level of resources to sink into the self-publishing venture.  On a shoestring budget, I could do all my own editing, create my own cover art, and post the ebook for sale on Amazon.  I could sell it to family and friends and maybe cover the cost of the software used to make the ebook (Scrivener, blog post), which is not very expensive ($38.25 academic price, since I work at a university). 

The immediate alternative, not publishing at all and just writing because I enjoy it, I finally rejected.  That decision came during a seminar I attended in January 2018 by Hackerfarm and Zoot Publishing where I got a very useful introduction to the publishing industry.  I had always wished I could find a traditional publisher, because then I could just write and let the publisher take care of selling the books.  What I learned at the seminar, though, and what many online have also said, is that these days the traditional publishing houses expect authors to do much of their own marketing.  So I thought if the publisher isn’t going to handle all the marketing of my book, then why not just do it myself?  After all, on a shoestring budget, what do I have to lose?

I began to think beyond the thinnest shoestring when I contemplated creating a website.  The two platforms most often recommended are WordPress and Squarespace.  My impression is that a WordPress website can be put together less expensively, but the platform can be more difficult to work with for anything beyond a basic blog.  I do not know whether I will actually sell anything from my website, but I like Squarespace’s e-commerce capabilities.  I also want the ability to do pop-ups, etc.  That requires Squarespace's Business plan, cheaper if you buy it by the year, $216.  I certainly don’t have unlimited friends, but a few dollars of royalties each from those who might actually buy could cover the cost of the website for a year.

Then I began looking at more self-publishing advice on the Internet.  For example, one especially helpful site is The Creative Penn.  This site and many others say how important the cover art is for a book, either physical or digital.  My first novel, Under Shōko’s Bed, is about an artist and I think one of the things sketched in pastels in the novel would be a great starting point for a cover.  Unfortunately, inexpensive covers are based on stock images, and the sketch by my artist protagonist is nothing like a stock image.  That means finding a real illustrator, and that will likely cost much more.  And with that decision, my friends are no longer going to cover my costs.  Either the book has to find other readers, or I have to spend money just for the joy of knowing I made something as well as I could.

If I am going to sell some hundreds of books, though, then what about editing?  That is the other thing that Joanna Penn and others say is well worth the investment.  Writers are always gushing over their editors.  Do I need a professional edit of my novel?  I have a Ph.D. from a great university, but it’s in a business field, not language or literature, so while my editing skills should be above average, I don’t know that I am good enough all by myself for a major novel.  My wife, who has also served as an editor on Under Shōko’s Bed, has a masters degree, but it’s in engineering.  She even works part-time as an editor!  But she does native English edits of papers written by non-native English speakers.  (Honest to goodness, what she does with these manuscripts is nothing short of amazing.  Her ability to understand and fix their broken English, making it concise and clear—it’s like watching a psychic channel the author’s innermost thoughts.)  But that is academic writing, not novels.  And in fiction, I am a rookie author.  I thought the first draft of Under Shōko’s Bed was great.  It wasn’t.  I think the seventh draft, though, is quite good.  But having an editor go through my work, someone with experience editing best-sellers, would be both a wonderful learning experience and could possibly turn my very good novel into one with real literary quality.  But whether it can be raised to that level or not, trying is going to cost between $1000 and $2000 (for a 110,000-word novel, freelance editor found on Reedsy, but I will talk about that more in a future post).  From what I have seen online, that is not at the high end in terms of expense.

On top of that, I would like to create an audio book of the novel.  I would like to do the reading myself, since I have been told I have a voice that would be good for that.  But that’s not the kind of recording you can do for free with GarageBand on your Mac.  It requires much higher quality sound with actual recording studio acoustics.  I don’t know the exact price yet, but with the number of hours required, that’s going to cost hundreds, even with extreme pricing competition between recording studios, since Tokyo has a glut.

An ebook, a physical book for a print-on-demand service, and an audio book will require three separate ISBN codes.  ISBNs are much cheaper if you buy them in bulk.  For example, one costs $125, while 1000 cost only $1000.  I can buy 100 for $5.75 a piece.  Since Under Shōko’s Bed is not my only novel, I might as well save money in the long run and buy 100.  Then there is copyright registration, which looks like it will cost only $55.

I have not even thought seriously enough at this point to guess what marketing costs will be.

Total all of this up, and if I manage to sell a book in one of the three formats (digital, paper, audio) to 100 friends and family, I will lose so much money that it will be akin to giving each of them the book with a $50 bill tucked inside as a bookmark.  I am well on my way to becoming a cautionary tale!

At the same time, though, I will have produced something of which I am proud.  And my second novel will benefit from the learning of my first, and some of the costs are fixed, so that the second novel’s costs might be a wee bit lower (although the biggest costs are editing, cover art, and audio studio time, which are not at all fixed).  I hope that the biggest difference between the unconventional love story Under Shōko’s Bed and the thriller Neyuki, my second novel, is that some of those who read Under Shōko’s Bed will like it enough to buy Neyuki.  If I can keep producing the stories that flow out of my slightly twisted mind, and keep readers entertained with them, I may eventually have a large enough following that my children won’t have to decide whether they are willing to pump money into the website, etc. to keep things going.  Royalties that cover my expenses, that’s my long-term goal.  And if someday years from now I finally break even on all the cumulative expenses, then I can sit back with a smile on my face and know that I still could have done better financially by spending my retirement working at McDonald’s.

In the end, it’s for the writing, not the sales.  It’s for the pride in a story well told, not the profit.

Although a little external validation would feel nice; better than an Egg McMuffin, certainly.

Website: mharmonwilkinson.com

I must say that I am very impressed with the user-friendliness of the Squarespace website creation platform.  I signed up for a free trial early in the morning and had a basic website complete with placeholder graphics and text by lunchtime, despite never having worked with Squarespace before.  I used the Pacific template (demo).  I like its navigation options, full bleed graphics, and versatility.  I have been able to easily insert a slideshow, blog, subscription sign-up, and pop-up with download.  It has all been amazingly painless.  I have had to search for help a few times, but have always been able to find an answer, even if a time or two the answer was that I couldn’t do what I was trying to do.  At least I was able to discover that within a short time.

One of the best things about the Squarespace template is that it is built to automatically format the content for mobile devices as well.  For this reason, I tried very hard not to add custom CSS code (cascading style sheet, which controls the formatting of all of the elements on a web page; I added only one simple block), sometimes giving up on things I was considering rather than add too much CSS and break the mobile version of the site.  I have been rewarded in my restraint with a very clean mobile site that seems to work flawlessly.  It has been a long time since I was this impressed with a new software product I have tried.

I will be back in a couple of weeks with another, more substantive blog post about self-publishing.  In the meantime, I am very interested in your feedback about the site.  What do you like?  What would you change?  Please let me know!