What's So Good About Self-Publishing Anyway?

Well, speaking for myself now - Chaz, that is - the main thing is that you have total control over every aspect of the work, end to end. In the past this used to be a difficult or expensive process, and I remember costing a print run for a fantasy role-playing book I was working on with a buddy 11 years ago. Our local printer quoted us a figure I forget per unit, but which would have involved us charging 50 GBP per hard-bound manual in order to see any kind of profit on sales.

These days, that's all changed, with the Internet and POD (Print on Demand) services. lulu.com was my POD service of choice, recommended by a friend of mine on Deviantart.com who recently had his book printed through them. The great thing is that if all you ever wanted was to see one copy of your work bound and produced professionally, that's all you pay - the unit price of 1 copy of your book. For myself, I hope to actually shift the odd copy or two, so picked up a block of ISBNs from lulu - which actually works out cheaper by about 20 GBP than going straight to the supplier. With the cash saved, I invested in this very domain name (fenriswulf-books.co.uk) and an email inbox attached to it. ISBNs of course are essential for distributing the book through official sales channels and online, and are available in blocks of 10 for small publishers, or in larger blocks of 100s for the big posh publishing houses with lots of clients and even more profits.

What I didn't realise was that the retail mark-up would either cut sharply into my own chosen revenue on each sale, or bump up the cover price. As I don't want to price myself out of existence, I took a big revenue cut and threw off a bunch of interior illustrations in an attempt to give the reader more content for their money. When the finalised proof arrived last week, I was very impressed with the results.

Of course, writing and publishing the thing is the easy bit. Anyone can throw words on a page and pay someone to put it all together and look beautiful. They big issue is convincing others that your thing is so good that they'll be willing to spend money to own it - and marketing and publicity is where the real work kicks in. For me, I've written and drawn for as long as I can remember, and stapled wads of paper together as a kid to create my own comic books. Nothing's really changed now, 30 years later, except the paper is better quality and the artwork doesn't look like it was done by a 5-year old - so the impulse to create and produce something has always been there. In the blood, in the genes, an urge to 'do' and create that's now reached it's apex.

And that's what's really good about it...seeing something you've spent all that time and effort on, now looking just as good as something you can buy in your local store.