Three months of writing. Hundreds of hours of research. A cover I was proud of. I clicked Publish in 2016 with a sick feeling in my stomach and then watched nothing happen for two weeks. Zero sales. Not slow sales. None.
I’d made the assumption every new author makes: writing the book was the difficult part. It isn’t, and finding that out on your own schedule is expensive.
That silence was a bad way to treat new authors. Nobody had told me that clicking Publish is where the hard work starts, and I wrote this book so fewer writers have to learn that the way I did. Back then self-publishing felt like throwing a message into the ocean. There were maybe five decent guides online and most came from people who had published exactly one book and decided that made them experts.
I’ve published 113+ titles since. I’ve made every mistake available in self-publishing, plus a few that seemed impossible until I found my way into them.
Why write another book about self-publishing?
Because most of them explain the philosophy and skip the clicking. What I wanted was a book that takes a manuscript all the way through publication on multiple platforms, step by step, with no diversions. Each platform kept simple and to the point, with notes on the decisions you have to make and what those decisions cost you later.
Getting the choices right at the start makes everything downstream easier. Getting them wrong is recoverable and tedious, and nobody tells you which is which until you’re already committed.
The book on this: Publish Your Book takes a manuscript step by step onto Amazon KDP, Draft2Digital, Lulu and IngramSpark, with chapters on traditional and hybrid publishing and on the scams aimed at new authors.
Why can you skip chapters in Publish Your Book?
So you only have to read the parts that apply to you.
The first chapter covers the fundamentals that hold regardless of destination. Manuscript preparation, cover design, metadata, and the business basics every author needs. Then each remaining chapter takes one platform in depth.
If you’re committed to Amazon, you need the fundamentals and the KDP chapter and nothing else. If you’re going wide through Draft2Digital, read those two. If you’re weighing IngramSpark, you’ll know exactly what’s involved before you commit to it.
That’s deliberate, and it’s the choice in this book I’m proudest of. I’ve got no patience for publishing guides that make you read the entire book before you’re allowed to act on any of it. Most people won’t finish them, and the manuscript sits in a drawer another year while they try.
What’s different about each self-publishing platform?
Each one has its own personality, and they aren’t interchangeable.
Amazon now requires AI content disclosure and has changed its royalty structures. Draft2Digital is excellent for wide distribution and wants a different keyword strategy than Amazon does. IngramSpark opens bookstore doors and demands professional-grade files to do it. Traditional and hybrid publishing get their own chapters too, because deciding not to self-publish is a legitimate outcome and a reader should be able to make that decision with the same information.
There’s also a chapter on publishing scams, and it’s the one I most wanted to write. These operations exist in volume, and they aim at people who have just finished a manuscript and are proud of it. I think preying on that pride is about as low as this business gets.
What are the trade-offs on each self-publishing platform?
Every option costs something, and knowing what before you commit is the entire value of the book. Draft2Digital makes distribution simple and takes a cut of your earnings for doing it. IngramSpark opens bookstore doors, demands professional-grade files, and charges revision fees after the first sixty days. That catches people who upload before they’re ready. Traditional publishing is still very hard to enter, and success means waiting years to see the book in print and giving up most of the royalties for the privilege.
Hybrid publishers promise the best of both worlds, and many of them are expensive vanity presses wearing a better name. I don’t have any patience for a company that takes an author’s money by pretending to be something it isn’t, and the author is the one left with the bill and a book nobody can find.
None of that is an argument against any of them. It’s an argument for knowing the trade-off before you commit your time, your money and your manuscript.
When is Lulu the right choice?
Hybrid publishers promise the best of both worlds, and many of them are expensive vanity presses wearing a better name.
When the physical object is part of the product. For fiction or simple nonfiction, where the words are the product and the book is a delivery mechanism, Amazon’s print service is cheaper, faster and perfectly adequate. Paying more there buys nothing a reader will notice.
Lulu justifies its higher costs when the book is a premium item competing against traditionally published titles in its category. Better paper, better binding, better printing, and the difference between a book that reads as though it came from a real publisher and one that obviously didn’t.
Most guidance treats print services as interchangeable. I think that’s lazy advice, and it costs the authors of premium books the one thing that would have made theirs look like it belonged on the shelf.
| Option | Strength | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon KDP | Cheaper, faster print, adequate when words are the product | Requires AI content disclosure; royalty structures have changed |
| Draft2Digital | Simple wide distribution | Takes a cut of earnings; needs a different keyword strategy |
| IngramSpark | Opens bookstore doors | Demands professional-grade files; revision fees after sixty days |
| Lulu | Better paper, binding and printing for premium books | Higher costs that buy nothing for simple books |
| Traditional publishing | The book can reach print without self-publishing | Very hard to enter, years of waiting, most royalties given up |
| Hybrid publishing | Promises the best of both worlds | Many are expensive vanity presses wearing a better name |
What does a bad book description look like?
This, and almost every self-published book has one.
It opens with what the book is about instead of with the reader’s problem. It promises something for everyone. That means it’s for nobody. It lists topics. Then it says buy this book today, as though the reader had been persuaded somewhere in the preceding four sentences.
This book is about is the weakest possible opening, and the reader clicks away. The fix starts from the reader instead. You wrote the book, so why is it not selling. That’s a sentence somebody in the situation recognizes immediately, and recognition is what a description is for.
Metadata gets more space in this book than most guides give it, because metadata is where a great many perfectly good books disappear.
What happens if you get scammed as a self-published author?
Act immediately and document everything, in that order. Cancel recurring payments first. Then preserve the communications, the contract and the payment records, because that evidence is what supports a dispute or any later action. Contact the card company to report the charges and request chargebacks. Card companies frequently side with consumers against service providers who didn’t deliver what was promised. Then file the complaints, with the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission among others, because a complaint that exists is what eventually shuts an operation down for the next author.
That chapter exists because the people running these operations target somebody who has just finished a manuscript and is proud of it. That’s the least skeptical a writer will ever be.
Act immediately and document everything: the order Publish Your Book gives for recovering from a scam.
How does Publish Your Book differ from Make a Living as a Self-Published Author?
One is the business and this is the mechanics.
Make a Living is about building a career. What to write, how to build a catalog, brand, platform, email, and treating writing as a business over years. Publish Your Book is about getting a specific manuscript onto specific platforms correctly. File preparation, metadata, the decisions each service forces on you, and the order to do them in. You can read either one first. They answer different questions and a lot of authors need both.
My take
The easy half of publishing is the writing, and most new authors learn that the way I did, with zero sales for two weeks. Fix your description first. Open with the reader’s problem and cut every sentence that starts with this book is about. Give metadata the time most guides don’t. If your book is a premium item, pay for the better printer. Print services aren’t interchangeable, and anyone who says so is giving lazy advice.
What’s the best self-publishing strategy?
The one you’ll execute. The publishing world moves quickly. AI tools have changed content creation, royalty structures shift, platforms appear and disappear. Trying to master all of it at once produces paralysis, and paralysis produces an unpublished manuscript.
Start with the fundamentals. Pick one platform. Master it. Expand from there.
Everything in this book comes from doing it. I’ve lived through the rule changes, the file upload failures and the algorithm shifts, and I’ve learned which strategies move sales and which only feel productive. I’m proud of it because it’s the book I needed in 2016, and I’d hate for anybody else to spend two weeks staring at a zero the way I did.
Publish Your Book is the self-publishing guide I wish I’d had in 2016, when three months of writing turned into two weeks of zero sales. The book compares five publishing platforms.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Content Guidelines, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
- Publishing your book with IngramSpark is now easier than ever, IngramSpark
- Draft2Digital FAQ, Draft2Digital
