Prepare for launch

Going from “The End” to the beginning of your career as a published author

Nov 21, 2023

Twenty years ago, only one out of every nine hundred Americans who wanted to write and publish a book managed to do so. Even if the flowering of self-publishing has since raised that success rate by as much as a factor of ten, when you publish the book you’ve written, you will still be passing a milestone that 99% of the people who set out in your same direction didn’t reach. Don’t sell yourself short: that’s an achievement to be celebrated.

However, there remain some hoops for you and your shiny new manuscript to jump through before you can call yourself a Published Author. This article will focus on the self-publishing route—that’s the way I went—and I’m going to walk you through that obstacle course: editing your book, crafting your brand, putting together your product listings, and pressing “publish”.

Editing your book

Beta-readers are your first allies in the quest to make your manuscript fit for publication. These people—preferably avid readers, and familiar with books like yours—fill the indispensable role of telling you what your paying readers will think, while you can still improve your work on the basis of their feedback. You can find beta readers among your friends and family (try to choose those who you think will be honest with you), in writing groups where you might beta-read others’ work in exchange for them reading yours, or even among the strangers on the internet, such as those participating in TCK Publishing’s free service.

A professional editor is part of the traditional publishing package, but if you’re self-publishing, you’ll have to consider whether or not it would be worth your while to pay someone to clean up your manuscript. If your beta-readers report lots of typos, grammatical errors, and minor mix-ups, an editor might do you good: those kinds of issues could easily cause potential readers to pass up your story. If the beta-readers report major plot holes, tedious slogs, characters they can’t stand... well, an editor isn’t going to turn a story that isn’t working into a story that is working. That’s your job.

Crafting your brand

Once the book is presentable inside, it’s time to address the outside. People say not to judge a book by a cover, but a picture is worth a thousand words, and, like it or not, that cover is often going to be the first opportunity potential readers have to stop paying attention to your book. You’ll want something genre-appropriate, at least vaguely related to the visual elements of the story, and not obviously made by an amateur. That doesn’t mean you can’t make it yourself, if you have an eye for that kind of thing. I made my own—and if you don’t want to do it yourself, you can hire me to make yours too, if you feel so inclined. But there are a plethora of people on the internet whom you can pay to make you cover art, with varying levels of skill, customization, and cost.

In addition to the cover art, you’ll need to settle on a title, and write a compelling blurb. There are a thousand and one articles offering advice on these topics, and I have no independent expertise, so I won’t go into detail. I’ll just note that you’ll probably want to start your blurb with an attention-catching headline, and keep the whole thing relatively short, 250 words or so.

You’ll need to decide how you want to present yourself, the author, too. Much as the book has a cover, a title, and a blurb, you’ll need a nice author headshot (although a decent amateur photo will do, especially if your budget is tight), a pen name, and bio. You’ll want to take into account how well your name fits as a brand name for your work, in addition to how closely you want to be associated with what you write. For your author bio, the main objective is to introduce yourself (in the third person), making yourself sound as interesting as possible, and staying within about 100 words.

Putting together your product listings

Once you have your brand ready, you can start putting together your listings wherever you intend to sell the book. (Kindle, NOOK, iBooks, and Kobo are the main eBook stores to consider. There’s a wider variety of print-on-demand services.) It’s time to choose a release date, decide whether or not you want to offer pre-orders (if your services of choice offer that opportunity), and set a price that you think both you and your prospective readers would appreciate.

This is when you might want to buy yourself some ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers, which identify each edition of a book as a unique product). Most self-publishing services offer platform-specific product numbers; the main benefit of having your own ISBNs for the book is that they make it considerably easier for bookstores and libraries to understand that your book exists. Most countries have their own ISBN distributors.

You’ll probably have to pick categories and keywords, and, if your book is for children, an age/grade range. This is an exercise in trying to figure out what the reader who would love your book might search for, and, again, there’s far more wisdom about this elsewhere on the internet than I can offer. Something to keep in mind, though, is that you can almost always change your keywords and categories to test what brings in the most traffic. You don’t have to get it right on the first try.

Pressing “publish”

In fact, "you don’t have to get it right on the first try" applies to everything I’ve mentioned. If necessary, your book could be entirely re-edited, re-illustrated, re-branded, and re-launched, somewhere down the line. That’s not the ideal outcome, but any element can be tweaked if you change your mind later. The best book you could make by now is the book you have. It’s time—press “publish”—and celebrate joining that 1% of aspiring authors whose dreams have come true.

The Independent Wordsmith

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