Dan Poynter, author of The Self-Publishing Manual, exposes little-known tips for getting your book published. He shares the pros and cons of traditional publishing vs. self-publishing, choosing an editor and book designer, creating an attractive cover design, promoting your book, and much more.

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Do you need more advice about publishing your own book?
Read his book, The Self-Publishing Manual.

Dan, what are some of the advantages of publishing a book? Are there any advantages to being a published author beyond just selling books?

You get more credibility for being a published author than from anything else you could do. I mean, you could write a screenplay. You could come out with a line of greeting cards. You could teach an adult ed class. Those will all take a little bit of time and money, but nothing gives you the credibility of a book. People think if you wrote a book, you know something. And when you think about it, you probably do because in order to write a book, you not only use your accumulated knowledge, you study everything else that’s been done on that subject. And, when you think about it, you’re giving yourself an advanced degree, you’re giving yourself a Ph.D in your subject because you’re doing the research and you’re doing the paper. So, credibility is one of the major things you get out of it. It’s also another profit center. Some people feel that they know a lot over a lifetime and want to leave a legacy, because your book is going to outlive you and other people will be researching it. So there are a lot of great reasons to write a book, and for most people, the credibility enhancement is the major one.

How do you know if there is enough interest in the topic you’re writing about to make publishing your book worthwhile?

Well, that’s the research you do. You know, many people sit down at the keyboard and they start typing away and they have a whole bunch of information, and then they come to people like me, say, “who am I going to sell this to?” and that’s my question, “who are you going to sell it to?” What you want to do is do a lot of research to make sure that you’re writing the book on the right subject, directed at the right people, and to do that, you can go to a major bookstore—I mean a large bookstore where they’ve got a lot of stock—and also go to an online seller like Amazon. I was speaking just a couple months ago in South Africa and I spoke first in Durban then a week later in Johannesburg and a guy showed up at the Johannesburg meeting and he says, “I was in your class in Durban, it was so good, I’m coming again!” He says, “by the way, that idea you gave me about doing research on Amazon was fabulous!” I said, “what happened?” He said, “well, at Amazon, they have all the books, I mean, they go back 20 years, maybe the first couple of years they’re still in stock, they’re still available, but you get good bibliographic information from the rest, and he said, I started reading the reviews. I found out what people liked and what they didn’t like. I found out what people wanted and what they didn’t want. I found out what to put in my book and what to leave out!” So you want to do as much research as possible, so that when you sit down at your keyboard, you know exactly where you’re going. You know there’s a market out there. You know this is a viable project.


Talk about the different ways you could publish your book. What are some of the differences between using a traditional publisher, maybe using a subsidy or a vanity press, and self-publishing your book?

Well, there are four ways now, Matt. Number one is sell out to a New York publisher. There are six of them left, I don’t recommend that, because frankly, they’re going out of business, and if you don’t think that could happen overnight, think about General Motors—one day they were at the top, and the next day they were gone. You could sign up with a specialized publisher, this is very good. These are the medium-sized publishers. There are three to four hundred of them across the United States, and they specialize in certain kinds of books, so that is the secret – match your manuscript to that kind of a publisher, just do a little search online. The third choice is a terrible one and that is surrendering to the vanity presses. Before you deal with anybody in the book industry, before you have your house painted, before you take your car for repair, do a Google search on that company. Type in the company’s name and the plus sign and the word “scam.” Company name plus “fraud,” company name plus “ripoff,” company name plus “Better Business Bureau.” If people have had problems with that particular company, you’ll read about it online and you can make a personal decision. The problem is, these places have boiler rooms full of people calling every other day, and they just wear people down, and they’re not a good choice because if you use the figures that they print on their websites, on the number of titles printed and the number of books shipped, they are selling fewer than 100 books per title, and most of those are sold to the author. The prices are way out of sight, you don’t have to go that way, so don’t surrender to the vanity presses and always do a Google search on them. The fourth choice is self-publish. Self-publishing is finally being recognized coming into it’s own after all these years. If you publish yourself, you’re going to make more money, you’re going to get to press much sooner and you’re going to keep control of the work, of the production values, the quality of the book. So, many authors now, even though they have published with big publishers in the past, have decided to follow the songwriters and music people and they are publishing themselves. And today, with the Internet, with websites, with search engines, this makes it all so easy to do. And you wind up making a lot more money because you’re not sharing with anybody else, you’re getting to press in a couple of days instead of waiting 18 months for the publisher to get it through their system, and you’re keeping control of the quality. The big publishers, most of them have switched over to a natural stock paper, it looks like newsprint. Next time you go to a bookstore, go over and look at the books on the shelves and you’ll see the ones on white paper and the ones on this, what looks like, newsprint, and they just don’t have any credibility. You wouldn’t buy one. If someone gave it to you, you wouldn’t read it, they’re that bad. That makes it much easier for the small press because we could spend a nickle or a dime more to use good quality materials. So those are your four choices: sell out to a New York publisher, sign up with a specialized publisher, surrender to the vanity presses, or publish yourself.

Dan, I was surprised to learn that some very successful books, big titles like, “What Color is Your Parachute,” “Celestine Prophecy,” “The One Minute Manager,” even John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill,” they all began as self-published titles. What are the advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing?

Well, you know, the reason that happened is because these people believe more in their work and the agents and publishers just didn’t get it. Now, to be honest, they probably submitted it to the wrong publishers. In other words, it’s like sending a cookbook manuscript to a travel publisher—they don’t even know what you’re talking about and they certainly wouldn’t publish it. Interesting that you bring up John Grisham, because most of these self-published books are non-fiction. In his case, it was fiction, and he got out there, he sold it himself, he proved it, and then he finally got picked up and years later, people went back and rediscovered that original book, “A Time to Kill.” So don’t lose hope. If you get turned down by an agent or a publisher, it’s no reflection on your book, its no reflection on you as an author, it just means that person didn’t get it. And you take the Chicken Soup books, they were turned down by thirty five or forty different agents and publishers. They didn’t get it! It’s interesting when you go to a writer’s conference and Jack or Mark are speaking, and they’ll say, “yeah, we got turned down by more than 40 agents and publishers,” and some of the agents in the audience would raise their hand and say, “yeah, I was one of them.” Don’t lose hope, persevere. It’s so easy to break into print today, and it’s so inexpensive to do so, just keep up the pressure. The greatest expenses in self-publishing are the mistakes, and you don’t have to make them, because there are books out there, there are conferences out there, there are blogs and forums, Listservs. There are all kinds of places to get information today, so you have to learn that, and the biggest problem is the people who are experts in what they write about, don’t know anything about the publishing industry, so they make these mistakes. I’ve got a newsletter that goes out every two weeks, I’ve got a website with more than 800 pages of information, I’ve got information kits on writing, on publishing, on promoting, so you’re getting exactly what you need, and I just recommend that people get as much information as possible. It’s cheaper than making a mistake.

How much is it going to cost you to self-publish your book?

That’s like asking, “how much is a car?”! It depends on the number of pages, the trim size of the book, is it going to be in black and white or full color, and so on. But I will tell you this, that the cost has come down tremendously with new methods of printing, with the computer. You don’t print brochures anymore, you have a website instead. There are ways to get your books up very easily on Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com. You can get your eBook done at Smashwords at no cost. There are just so many things, it’s just so inexpensive and just so easy today. So how much does it cost? Well, it depends on how you go about it, and again, the size and shape of the book. You do want to put out a quality book and this means that you do want to have an editor, you do want to have a cover artist, and you do need to print some books, you can’t just put out an eBook. You need the printed book for presentation, for reviews, and so on. But you don’t have to print a lot anymore, you can print just 500 and those 500 depending on the size and shape of the book, they might come in at $2 each, maybe $3. So that’s very inexpensive and the rest of the books can be distributed as eBooks – that costs you nothing – and you make some pretty good money at it.

You always see those little bar codes or ISBN’s on the back of books. What are they for and how do you get one for your book?

ISBN, International Standard Book Number, is reflected in the barcode that makes it computer or machine readable, and that makes your book move easily through the whole book industry. In other words, if somebody orders the soft cover edition of your book, they don’t want the audio book. They don’t want the eBook. They want the soft cover edition, so each version of the book, or each edition, has a unique ISBN and reflecting barcode. You get the ISBNs from the RR Bowker Company. You can just go to ISBN.org and you’ll see all the different countries, click on the US. It’ll take you there, that’s the quickest way to get there. Then your cover artist will take your ISBN and put it on your back cover in the proper format and will put the barcode on there. You can also get your own barcode for around $20 each. The barcode suppliers are listed on my website at parapub.com.

What are the best ways to have your manuscript edited? What are your tips for finding a good—but affordable—book editor?

It’s really important to have your book edited. I was just reading online this morning about somebody who was buying a very expensive book and was just disgusted that every couple of pages, there was a typo. That reduces the quality and the credibility of the book. All good authors use editors. Nobody is so good that they don’t need an editor. And they’re checking punctuation, grammar, style, but also, they’re checking to see if you repeated something on page 87. They really save you. So your book reflects on you, use a book editor. You can go to my website in the supplier list, you’ll see about a dozen book editors listed there. Now you want to call several of them and interview them and see what they’re schedule is, see what they’re charging you, and the most important question to ask an editor is, “Have you ever worked on this category of book before?” You don’t want to get someone who is philosophically opposed to whatever it is you’re talking about. You want somebody who loves the subject but they can also bring in information from past projects, and say, “Well, Matt, have you ever thought of this?” and that is very helpful, too. So they do more than just punctuation, grammar and style, and please, please, use an editor.

What is your advice when it comes to designing your book? What are some things you should consider and what should you look for when comparing book designers?

Well, lets talk about design. It’s already done. What you want to do is go to a bookstore, go over to that shelf where your book is going to be, and look at the books there. You’ll notice that they have a unique size, shape, and so on. The ones on that shelf look pretty much the same. Find a book that you like. You know your subject, you know your reader, what they respond to. Find a book that you like the quality of the paper, the type size, the way the chapters start off, and so on. Buy that book. Bring it home. Use that as a model. You’re going to take that to your book designer and to your printer and you’re going to say, “Turn my manuscript into this.” You can have anything you want, but just make sure that it’s going to fit that particular shelf. You want to respect the category. As you go around the bookstore, you’ll find that the cookbooks don’t look like the travel books don’t look like the business books don’t look like the children’s books. Every one has a unique presentation. Get the model book and then adapt that particular model. Now, one book I did recently, I had to go get three different books, because I adapted certain things from each of the books. Then when it comes to a book designer who is also your typesetter, by the way, they’re listed on my website in the supplier section, and there’s about 12-15 of them listed there. They’re all good people, people I know, people you can trust. So go to a professional, but get a model book before you go.

Dan, talk about designing a cover for your book. Should you try to design your own book cover or would you recommend hiring a cover designer?

Absolutely hire a cover designer. A good cover designer will take your manuscript, read through it quickly, and come back with what we call, “comps,” three ideas, they kind of roughly sketch them out. You may accept one of them, you may marry two of them together, you may tell him to start over, but it gives you something to look at. That being said, you have to write the back cover sales copy, and people can go to my website, there is a free document, Document 116, that shows you how to lay out your back cover, it’s kind of paint-by-numbers. Very important. Then the cover designer doesn’t just give you a sketch, they give you a finished file ready to go to your website, ready to go to Amazon, and ready to go to the printer, and it has the front cover, the back cover, the spine at the right width, everything in the right place, barcode, price, and so on. And it’s just ready to go. So you’re not just getting the sketch, you’re getting the full file ready to go. Now the important thing with cover designers is that they all have a different kind of style. Go to their websites and find a style that you like. Maybe you want a real feminine style. Maybe you want outdoor shots with photographs or something. The big New York publishers are not paying enough for their covers, and that’s why their covers are so dreadful. They usually just have type on a background. Not very inspiring. So if you have a dynamite cover and you’re using good white paper in your book, you have a tremendous sales advantage.

Where should you get your book printed, and how do you take care of book store order fulfillment?

Let’s talk about the printing first. It’s not necessary to print 5,000 anymore. Now you can do 500 and most of the print runs are going to be around 500, and most of those will be used for promotion. You’re going to send them out to various review publications, and we’re not talking about print, we’re talking online now. We can discuss that more later. So you’re going to print about 500, and that will be done digitally. It’s very rare that a printer is going to use a big Heidelberg ink press to do 500 copies. The setup is very quick, the price is very good, and there are 24 digital printers across the United States. The most important thing here, Matt, is deal with a book printer. Any printer can do your book, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to give you a price, service or quality. The most expensive part of a book is the paper, and they’re going to have to pay three times as much because they’re getting one pallet of paper, versus a book printer is buying it by the multi-carload. And by the way, they’re running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the glue never cools down. They’re getting maximum work out of their equipment and they have just a few machines for the printing and the binding and so on. Whenever we have a problem with printing it’s because people went down to a local printer, they thought it was going to be faster or something, and it wasn’t, so deal with a book printer. The traditional fulfillment is getting books out to stores and you can go through a wholesaler or distributor to do that, but I will tell you, looking ahead – not too far! – the brick and mortar bookstores are going out of business. Whether they be a chain like Borders or an independent store – and you have a few around town – they’re going out of business. They cannot compete with online bookstores like Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com because their location, location, location is downtown and their rents are expensive. They also suffer quite a bit of loss. People steal the books out of the stores. So they’re going out of business and the new way to reach your audience is really through the online bookstores. Go to Barnesandnoble.com, booksamillion.com, amazon.com. And by the way, Amazon wants you. It’s very easy to get into Amazon. You just go to Amazon, go to the bottom of the page, it says “Sell,” you click on that, it gives you a choice of two ways of doing it. The whole thing will take you somewhere between five and ten minutes to sign up. And if you do not contact Amazon and tell them about your book, sooner or later, they will find you. So don’t think it’s going to be hard to get in, they pride themselves with carrying everything. They want you. So that’s the new way, to sell your books as printed books and eBooks online. Now, Amazon also wants your book as a Kindle book, and the number of Kindles being sold and the number of Kindle books being sold is skyrocketing. The Kindle books, by the way, are available for reading on the iPhone, the Blackberry, the Mac, the PC, and so on. I’ve been reading Kindle books on my iPhone for two years and before that, I read eBooks on my Pocket PC for a number of years. In addition to that, you want to make your books available as eBooks and the easiest way is to go through Smashwords.com. At no charge, they will take your file and they will turn it into 9 different formats—PDF, LIT, Mobi, Pocket, Palm, Sony, ePub, Kindle, and so on—and post it on their website. No charge. When they sell one, they send you 85%, they just keep 15%. They also have deals with Amazon, Apple, Google, Barnesandnoble.com, then you have to give away a little more because those people have to earn something. On one of my recent books I finished writing it at six o’clock in the evening, within 15 minutes, it was posted at Smashwords. Two minutes later it was available online. It took three more weeks to get the book printed. So the eBook came out first. It’s so easy today. You want to work on your printed book first, and then you can turn out your eBook because you have the file, its already done. Then you can go and record your audiobook, because you have the script, it’s already done. The printed book has to come first, and you can get that out to people, your waiting, buying customers, in just a matter of minutes.

Dan, does Amazon have a one-stop shop for self-publishers?

They do! And by the way, the big New York publishers are going to be replaced by Amazon, by Google, by Apple, and maybe Barnesandnoble.com. What they’re trying to do is get the authors to deal with them, cut out the agents, cut out the regular publishers and so on. And if you publish your Kindle book with Amazon, they’ll give you a 70% royalty. There’s no publisher that can compete with that. And Amazon’s got a world-wide reach because of their website, and, of course, they have outlets in about six different countries. So if you deal with their subsidiary, CreateSpace, their print-on-demand printer, then when somebody orders your book from Amazon, CreateSpace makes one copy and ships it directly to that person. You don’t have to be dealing with inventory at Amazon, and of course, it’s no inventory with the eBook. Now, that being said, you still have to print 500 books yourself, because that’s what you’re going to use for promotion. You have to send printed books out to everybody who has a blog on your subject. Everybody who has a website on your subject. All of the forums or Listservs on your subject—typically they have dozens of people asking questions, and there are 8 or 10 people that are answering the questions, you send printed books to those people that are answering the questions. They are the thought leaders. They are the gurus in the area. People listen to them, they read them. They do what they’re told. So you want all of these people to know about your book. And it has to be done with a printed book. You can’t send a PDF to one of these opinion molders because they’ll look at it and say, “Oh, yeah. Matt’s got a new book,” okay, boom, it’s gone. But a printed book, they take it out of the package, they look at the front, they look at the back, they page through it, and if they put it on the shelf, it’s still there communicating back to them. So you do need that printed book. But the easiest way to get in the system is through Amazon and through their CreateSpace subsidiary printer, and your book is now available as a print book and an eBook.

Dan, lets talk about that a little bit. Amazon recently announced that, in the previous month, for every 100 hardcover books sold, customers purchased and downloaded 180 Kindle eBooks. Those are some pretty surprising numbers, at least for me.

Well, it was surprising. It was almost shocking. They were very selective with the counts that they were doing because relatively speaking, they don’t sell very many hardcovers, they sell mostly softcovers. And traditionally, books came out on hardcover first, and then a year later they came out softcover, and maybe a couple of years later, mass market paperbacks. But since 1980, we’ve gone through a softcover revolution and most books come out in softcover today. It was interesting that they picked the hardcover because their sales on that aren’t that great, but their sales on eBooks are incredible, and they are increasing at a tremendous rate. I travel a lot. I’m in airplanes 6,000 miles a week, and I see the Kindles all over the place. I’m seeing other eReaders. I’m seeing an awful lot of iPads just within the last month, and more and more people are reading eBooks on a device. You know, when it comes to the iPhone and the iPod Touch, there are 55 million of those out there. That’s how many people are carrying a reader. They may not be reading yet, but its a multifunction device, and once they read a book on it, they get hooked. They go to the bank and have to stand in line, they think, that’s a gift! I get to read! They haul out the iPhone and they start reading. So, we’re seeing a tremendous revolution. I think its a very healthy revolution. Right now I’m doing some research, I have to read a book. I hopped into bed last night, it takes two hands to hold a book. I read the iPhone with one hand. I had to turn on the light because it’s not backlighted like my iPhone. And once I’m done with this book, what am I going to do with it? I’ve got a solid waste disposal problem. I have to get rid of the book. I’ve been reading eBooks for probably seven, eight years now, regularly, because I travel a lot, and I see a huge, huge future in the eBook. About a month ago I was downtown in Santa Barbara, and I saw this guy in a wheelchair on the sidewalk and he’s reading the Kindle, and I went into the Apple store and I came out and he’s still there, so I went over and said, “How do you like that thing?” Turns out this guy is paralyzed except for one arm. And how is he going to handle a paper book? And he’s sitting out there watching the people, and he’s just absolutely thrilled being able to read, because he couldn’t do that before. I have a colleague here at work, she has allergies and older paper books drive her crazy. Well, I got her an iPod last summer and she’s reading all of her books on her iPod Touch now and she’s absolutely thrilled. It’s a matter of lifestyle. More and more people are going to get used to the eBook readers, and the sales of eBooks, it’s skyrocketing.

Talk about creating a marketing plan for your book once it’s published. What are some creative ways to promote your book, and what methods should you avoid?

Well, I’m glad you brought that up. A lot of people write their book, they have it produced, they start into distribution and then they just fall down on the promotion part. And it doesn’t matter if you sell out to a publisher, the author has to do the promotion. If you do sell out, you want to realize it’s up to you. The publisher’s not going to promote books. They don’t, they never have. And if you are publishing yourself, obviously, you’re the only one there. One of the things you can do is you look in the back of my book, “The Self Publishing Manual,” and there’s a calendar. And it lists all of the steps. So you can make sure that you’re not only not leaving something out, but you’re taking each of the steps in the right order. That being said, most of us writers are introverts. You know, we don’t really like radio and TV and autograph parties and things like that, we’re just quiet, introverted people. If you’re an extrovert and you like radio and TV, the only way to get on is with a book. 95% of the people being interviewed are there because they have a book. They might be an unknown or a celebrity, but the book got them on. If you’re an introvert like me, well, there are some things that you don’t want to do, some of those things can be farmed out, so you want to go through the list and decide what you want to do yourself and what you want to hire somebody else to do, or get an intern in to do them. But all of the bases have to be covered. And one of the big problems today is most of these introverted writers think that the only way to promote your book is radio and TV, maybe autograph parties, and they don’t want to do that and they do nothing, and nobody knows about their book. Today, the eyeballs have moved online. Today, your customers are online. They are reading blogs, they’re writing blogs, they have websites, they’re contributing or asking questions in forums or Listservs and so on, so you could stay home and just sit there in front of your computer. You don’t have to face rejection, you don’t have to go out, you can be reclusive and you can promote your books from home very, very easily. But just remember that it doesn’t matter if you sell out to a publisher or you publish yourself, the author must do the promotion.

Dan, you’ve got a great website and blog and newsletter. Are there any other publishing blogs or online newsletters that you follow on a regular basis and are there any books or online resources that you can recommend off the top of your head?

Brian Jud is wonderful. Judith Briles is terrific. I’m trying to think of all the things that I read through, dozens and dozens every day. More important than the blogs are the forums, the Listservs, because that’s where people are asking questions and answering questions, and you get all the up-to-date stuff there. There’s the pub forum, the self-publishing, there are four major ones in the book publishing field, and then there’s the specialized ones, like just for children’s books and things like that. That’s the best place to get information. It’s the cheapest consulting you can get. If you have a question, you ask, and all of these wonderful people answer. It’s terrific.

What are the biggest self-publishing mistakes you see authors make, and how can you avoid them?

The biggest mistakes are not following through on the promotion. It’s so cheap and so easy today, and that’s one of the things that I like about the forums. You’re talking to people all over the world. It’s not just the ones on publishing, by the way. You want to look into the forums on your particular subject and take part in them. And now you’re a published author, so you can answer people’s questions and always sign your postings with your name, your book title, and your website address. Also, subscribe to Google Alerts. Put in the keywords on your subject area. Whenever something appears online, whether it be in a blog, a website, a news item from a paper, you’ll get an alert. It’s like an old fashioned clipping service. And then you can go to somebody else’s blog. They have a whole bunch of readers out there. You’ll get to know them, you can post and answer there on their blog. You sign it with your name, your book title, and website address. You are a prestige contributor to these other blogs, because you’re the published author and that blog owner will love you, because you’re a credible person, you wrote the book! There are just so many things you can do online to get the word out and your book gives you the credibility, it makes you the prestige contributor, so I give you permission to spend more time online, but that’s valuable time, not frivolous time.

Dan Poynter is the author of numerous books including The Self-Publishing Manual: How to Write, Print and Sell Your Own Book. He owns Para Publishing, has written over 75 books and revisions, and speaks internationally on a wide variety of topics.