The Four Cornerstones to Self-Publishing Success

Adapted from our BookBaby Live series, Steven Spatz, BookBaby president and self-published author, talks about the four essential things you need in place to achieve self-publishing success.

Self-publishing truly is a journey. There are some parts you’ll find easy — others are more onerous, but it’s a journey that begins with the notion that you want to write a book and continues long past the point of publication.

And there are a lot of questions surrounding book publishing. Should I try to get published via a traditional publisher? Should I look for an agent? Should I pursue self-publishing? If I self-publish, do I have to do it all myself?

There is so much information about self-publishing on the Internet, in books, in blogs and on YouTube, and sometimes I think it’s too much. So, for folks who are just starting out on this journey, or if you’ve published a book and you’re thinking, “I can do this better the next time around,” I think you need to look at the foundations of self-publishing success.

The cornerstones of self-publishing

Just as a well-built house starts with a strong foundation, a successful publish needs these four cornerstones of a strong foundation for success.

1. A team

DIY is a viable option. Many people do this themselves: they write their book, they do their own editing, and they upload their book to the various platforms. That’s great, but it doesn’t need to be that way. In fact, I say there’s DIY and there’s D-I-For-You — there are people who can do it for you. In my experience, it takes a community to pull off a successful self-publishing launch. In fact, that’s really the story with traditional publishing, too.

In traditional publishing, you have your editor, your designer, your distribution channel — there are people helping you along the way. As a self-published author, you can have the same, either by paying for services or enlisting the help of experts. You want to look for experts who have experience in publishing, and you need to be able to trust them — this is an important project to you.

2. Great product

Maybe this should have been number one, because to succeed, you really need a great product, and I’m talking about your book, of course. For you to feel good about presenting your best, you need a few things in place.

Editing is a must. It’s not something you can avoid if you want to produce a quality book. The number of best-selling titles that haven’t been edited is zero.

Design is important too. Your book’s content doesn’t just need to be interesting and compelling; it’s got to look that way. There’s a lot of competition out there and you’ve only got so many second of someone looking at so few pixels on an Amazon page to make an impact, so it’s so important to work with a designer who can create a cover and work the interior formatting of your book.

2(A). Print on demand

This is THE game-changer for self-publishing. Print on demand allows us, as printers, to produce just one book and do it at an economical price. You don’t need to have 5,000 books in your mother’s basement and dole them out one by one. Find a company that does print on demand, because that’s going to be important to your cash flow and your book’s availability for sale.

Now, I stress that people should also produce eBooks. While some wrongly predicted that, by now, eBooks would be all we’d be reading, they have settled in to be about 35 percent of the market, and during the pandemic, eBooks really took off again. They’re even more popular outside of the US, so if you’re thinking about global reach, they’re ever more important.

3. Access to the marketplace

You may have a beautiful book and have built a great team, but unless you get eyeballs on your book, you’re not going to be successful.

Of course, you need to be on Amazon. Amazon sells 65–80 percent of the books in today’s market. But… you need to go beyond the jungle. Kobo is surging in the marketplace. Why limit yourself to one location? People want to read where they want to read, so give yourself the opportunity to reach the widest possible audience.

3(A). Direct sales

We’re actually part of a 75-year-old music company that caters to independent musicians, and we’ve brought a lot of lessons from the music industry into publishing. One of them is the notion of selling direct to your customer. Now, musicians can sell directly to their fans at gigs, and I don’t know that authors will have reading gigs — other than a book launch or reading at a school or library. So this means selling through your website or finding opportunities to get your product directly into the hands of your readers. Not only will you have a relationship with your readers, you’ll keep a lot more of the money in those transactions.

4. Confidence

This is a really important project to you. You’ve spent months, maybe even years, working on your books. You need to be able to trust everyone you’re working with. Interview any prospective company or team that you want to work with. Look at all the fine print on every contract or agreement, make sure you will retain your rights — that’s a very important thing. We’ve heard too many sad stories of authors who didn’t realize that submitting their manuscript to another entity meant they were losing the rights to their work.

When you do find someone you want to work with, ask them exactly what it is they guarantee. First, no one can guarantee your book is going to sell, and no one should pretend to guarantee that. But they can guarantee their products and their service so you come away with a book that you’re proud of.

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