I was raised by the best DIYer [Do It Yourselfer] I know—my dad. Sol was a sound engineer by training. He could figure out how to replicate anything or fix anything.
Take our living room wall as an example. My parents had seen a lovely decorative treatment they had fallen in love with. It was made of white bricks -not clunky exterior-type bricks, but narrow bricks with a pattern on the surface.
My mom really wanted to do their living room wall with these stylish bricks, but it was way beyond my parents’ means. So dad set out to find a mold and learn how to hand mold bricks. After trial and error, he settled on plaster as the medium.
I don’t know the exact number needed, but there were over 400 bricks created to cover their wall. Then dad lovingly placed each brick in its place. He was occasionally removing and redoing a few bricks because they didn’t look right to his eagle eyes until the long living room wall was complete.
And the result was stunning, and no one could tell that a DIYer did the wall. Except for a few small spots in the corners, if you looked closely.
Now if Sol were going to write a book today, he would be inclined to DIY all of it – the editing, the layout, the cover design…
That is one of many ways to DIY book publishing for your book. There are degrees of DIY and options. Each one with its pros and cons.
Here are the three ways to DIY book self-publishing:
- You can do it all yourself
- You can be the ‘project manager’ and outsource various aspects of your book like editing, cover design…
- You can hire a team to manage your entire publishing process – we call this Professional Self Publishing. Others call it Assisted Self Publishing.
With each method, the cost rises progressively in terms of dollars spent. With method one, you could self publish with zero dollars spent. But…
There are other costs, though, including the cost of your time spent, the cost of the time spent to learn what you need to do, the cost of the potential mistakes you will make, and the cost of trying to be an expert at all things – which may result in a cover that doesn’t look professionally designed, or result in poor formatting. These can be costly when they impact the results you get from your book.
Method two is appealing as you can save money by ‘project managing’ your publishing process. This can work well if you have hired freelancers before and know how to evaluate their capabilities. However, it also requires communicating to them what you want the result to look like. It can also be stressful, requiring learning new skills such as hiring a team, managing projects, and requesting revisions. The other downside is that it may be more time-consuming than you realize and hard to stick to deadlines.
While method three – outsourcing all of your book publishing can be the most costly monetarily, it is often the least stressful. If you choose wisely, you rely on your trusted team to advise you, guide you, and handle putting your book together and publishing it on schedule and budget, resulting in a professionally produced and published book.
I have seen authors spending more on #1 and #2 due to factors ranging from rookie mistakes, bad hires requiring new hires, money spent to fix errors made, and overspending by buying overlapping services simply because they didn’t understand their requirements well enough.
The other cost to consider is the impact your publishing choice will have on your brand. Will your results match the carefully developed brand that you have spent time building? Will your published look professional enough to attract the high end clients you are looking to attract?
Trying anything new has a learning curve. When you consider how to do self publishing for your book, It’s up to you to decide how to spend your time and dollars best to realize your goal as an author.
To learn more about the how to successfully write, publish and promote your book, join me for The Visionary Author Summit taking place March 20-24th.
Related Content: Choosing the Best Self Publishing Company for Your Needs