Publication Count Down - P Minus 30

Momentous decision!  I've decided to kick off the self-publication countdown for The Great Project, starting with City of Stone.

The book has been written, edited, revised, edited, user-tested, revised and so on. And finished since the Autumn. I had decided to hold off publishing the series because I was deep into writing my next novel, The Perilous City and I wanted to be free to do the sort of marketing that a self-published book needs. And, in truth, I was hoping that a publisher would take it. Well, no sign of the latter yet, and I've decided that now's the time to go it alone. Rather than waiting for hell to freeze over I'm going to self-publish now, so we're at P minus 30, or whatever number of days it takes, and counting.

The process began with the decision to begin the process. I've made that, so what next? Next was to decide what to do about a book cover. I've been a follower of the self-help community on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which is hugely useful, and the wisdom there is that covers matter. You only have a few seconds to grab someone's attention as they're trawling the catalogue, and a good cover gives you a better chance. Therefore I'm going to direct my financial expenditure to cover design. I tried my hand at using the KDP cover creator and what I produced was mediocore at best, because I'm not a designer.

I then looked at whether or not I should use BookBaby, the ebook promotional service, who also offer cover design. I came close to going with this. Cover design would have cost me about £170 (for the deluxe version) and along with their conversion and promotion package I would have been about £300 plus a 15% share of royalties. I was within a whisker of making the choice, in fact on Saturday I had decided to do it. But I read a little bit more over the weekend on the KDP community and I put a question about BookBaby there. The responses convinced me that there's nothing BookBaby does for you that you can't do yourself, and a number of things they don't do. They don't give you access to reports, they don't seem to do as much promotion as you could do yourself, and they want you to sign a contract which, to my eye, gives too much control away.

So I decided to do the bulk of the publication and promotion work myself, and shop around for a cover designer. I've now found one, and I'm in the process of putting a brief together. I'll report back when I have the designs, and by then I should be at about P minus 15/20 and counting. Hoping to publish by Easter or thereabouts.