Your Team, Part A
There are a lot of reasons why someone might decide to go indie to publish their book. Maybe they feel like they aren’t getting access to the right agents, maybe they feel like the traditional publishing industry is too weird, or maybe they just want exclusive creative control over their final product. No matter why you want to go indie, the fact is that if you do it on your own without anyone else to help you, the results are going to suck.
No, seriously. Unless you are yourself an award-winning editor, and a brilliant graphic designer, and a top-notch book designer, and an absolute beast of a marketing genius, and the most personable, dashing, and downright charismatic person on the planet, you are not going to be able to get your book 1) to market 2) looking amazing 3) to sell well and 4) not cost you a dime.
Anyone who says otherwise is probably trying to sell you a book.
Let’s get into a non-exhaustive list of the roles you will need other people to fulfill for you to give your indie publishing journey a reasonable chance of success. It’s not short, though, so I’m spreading it across two articles. The first part covers your test readers, your editors (yes, that’s a plural), and your artists (possibly also a plural, see below).
Test Readers
I have personally known a ridiculous number of people who claim to be writers but who are staunchly against letting anyone read their work. I call these people “diarists” because even though the work in question could be fiction, fantasy, or whatever, the words aren’t meant for other people, just like a diary.
And if that’s all you want from your work, then that’s great. Writing should be, at some point, its own reward, and what we get out of it is very personal and sometimes intimate. No one is judging anyone for not publishing. But, if you’re serious about your work generating any kind of revenue, other people have to read it before it gets to market. If you’re reading this article, I’m assuming that you’re not a diarist.
So, who do you get to read it? And what are you looking for in terms of feedback? This is where getting involved with a solid writing group1 is going to be a lifesaver. Each group has its own method for sharing and creating critiques, and this is something to investigate so you know what the expectations are. You also want to select a group that you feel a solid affinity with, people you are compatible with from a personality perspective. Yes, genre congruity is important, but there are lots of different perspectives on what makes horror or romance or anthropomorphic isekai fanfic crossovers “good” – and while they’re all valid on some level, you at least want to find a group that will be able to discuss it without being mean.
Barring a writing group, maybe you’re lucky enough to be surrounded by English majors and avid, critical readers, and maybe they’re willing to provide that critical insight – but do not assume that. Ask your literary nerds for permission before sending them your manuscript, and state clearly that you are looking for their educated opinion on the quality of your story. I should add here that an avid reader is not necessarily a critical reader, so perhaps have a few conversations about how they themselves analyze the books they read. Ask them about books they didn’t like, ask them what they did or didn’t appreciate in various stories – ideally stories that you, too, have read because the very best writers are always avid readers.
At a minimum, you want five different pairs of eyes on a single version of your work. Don’t ask your mom or other close friends to do this service for you unless you can be absolutely assured that they are not going to sugarcoat it. If Grandma thinks it’s fantastic, remember also that she put that janky five-legged horse with two heads you drew in second grade on the refrigerator for over ten years, and it was only removed when she replaced the refrigerator. On the other hand, if Grandma thinks the story has merit but points out the plot holes and lapses of continuity between the third and seventeenth chapters, and also mentions that the main character lacks dimension while the other characters seem more fleshed out, and additionally that the fourth act revisitation of resolution seems to be a little to deus ex machina compared to the rest of the story, then your grandmother is probably a retired English teacher, or at least a critical reader, and totally awesome in either case and should be adored and protected at all costs.
Your test readers can be likened to development editors and will arm you with the feedback you need to do your final edits, the ones that will give you enough confidence in your story to hand it off to the real editors.
Editors
Again, if you’re lucky enough to have professional-grade literature nerds at your disposal, you might be able to get through this phase with a minimum of expense, but understand that even if you are relying on the generosity of loved ones, you owe them big-time. Editing a manuscript can be a grueling job that requires time, energy, and lots of snacks (oh, so many snacks!). And doing honest, serious editing requires a level of dispassion and surgical excision that has literally destroyed personal relationships in the past. (I’ll tell you that story sometime, over drinks.) If someone loves you enough to do real editing for you, make damn sure you are prepared to pay them in some kind of material way and possibly take a vicious emotional beating along the way.
If you aren’t lucky enough to have a personal relationship with an editor, what’s a professional editor going to do for you that you can’t do for yourself? Well, first of all, they’re not watching the “original film” in their heads – you know, the one that you’re describing as you write. They’re reading the words, which means they’ll catch errors like using “their” instead of “there”, or mislabeling a character because your Find-And-Replace skipped over a typo when you decided to change their name late in the book.
There are a few types of editors: developmental, who help you strengthen the actual plot and power of the story; line editors, who focus on line-by-line language, structure, and readability; copy editors, which check additionally for syntax, usage, and accuracy (fact-checking and more continuity); and proofreaders who do the final pass-through for errors and compare the finished manuscript with the original (pre-final-edits) to make sure that critical context is not lost. While sometimes the terms are used interchangeably, trust me when I say that these are four distinct and specific phases of editing2, and each one must be completed.
Are there ways to do this yourself without paying anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars? Sure, I guess, but I promise you on your precious English-lit grandmother’s soul, it will never be as good as getting another set of eyes on it.
Artists
Everyone – you, me, the guy on the street corner, the corporate leech, the barista, everyone – judges a book by its cover.
That’s why books have covers. So they can be judged.
So, if your cover sucks, it will be logically and completely assumed that the book also sucks.
I think I can state without any hyperbole at all that the single greatest weakness of self-published books is when the author skimps on the cover art. Go through obscure genres on Amazon, the ones that have a high number of indie authors, and you will see all manner of horrible covers: bad Photoshop, janky AI, comic-style panels, flat titles on bad colors… It doesn’t matter if the story itself is the most beautiful mind-bending prose on the planet: if the cover is boring or otherwise terrible, no one is going to read the inside.
(I’m not going to screenshot here because I don’t believe in directly cover-shaming, but go to “Urban Fantasy” and search for “cryptids” to definitely illustrate my point. Pun intended.)
Even if you do have a background in graphic design, you still want to get someone to at least look at your cover design for the same reason you need an editor: these are our precious babies and our judgment will always be skewed.
Okay, but, how do you know when a cover is good?
There is no simple answer to this, but there is a way to figure it out. Go browse book covers in a store, and I personally recommend doing that both online and in person. Ideally, you’re using the same cover image for both versions of your book (you are making both digital and hard-copies, right!?), but they occur to people in slightly different ways in each context. The synopsis is crucial for online listings, but it might not be ideal for the back matter of the paperback version if you have glowing reviews to share instead – or maybe it is. A lot of factors go into that determination.
Look at books in your genre, and look at books in adjacent genres. Most of us genre-bend anyway, so look at all of them. Take your time and really think about which covers draw your eye: why do you like them? What’s appealing about them? Now, go back and look at the in-between places where your eye skipped over a cover. What made you ignore or reject it? Was it too generic, too specific, too beige? Keep a handy-dandy notebook of observations.
Lastly, think about the books that you love to read, and think about the covers. Think about the very first cover you ever saw of your favorite book. Was it the dragon that caught your eye, or was it the fire blazing in the distance? Was it the bodice-busting damsel, the fabulous man-hair, or the snarling demon? Was there an image at all, or was the cover dominated by the title and author? Why did you pick up that book?
This process of self-examination will give you an opportunity to sketch out a rough idea of what you want the cover to look like, and then you hand it off to a professional to produce the real thing. You will have the opportunity to review the work and request changes – most graphic design contracts include a certain number of change requests per deliverable – and in the end, everyone will experience far less angst over it.
Okay, What Does All This Cost So Far?
Test readers in a critique group or your friends should be paid in love, gratitude, and whatever other form of emotional currency is appropriate. If you have already started building a fan base, a lot of them will be willing to read it, but they might not be as honest as you need, so approach this cautiously. If you don’t have a trusted group, just know that developmental editing – the kind of feedback you’d get from a really good writing group – is the most expensive type of editing to pay for.
Because, yes, each type of editing requires a different depth of critique and skill set, so they have different cost ranges, and additionally those prices are often charged by the word, sometimes rounded up to a set amount per 1000 words. According to Reedsy (which is one place but not the only place to find freelance editors), developmental editors can run between 2.4 cents a word and 4 cents a word. To do the math for you right quick, that means that the median cost for an 80,000-word book is about $2,500. Before you faint dead away or swear to only write flash fiction, remember that developmental editors are the ones that rip your story apart and put it back together with more than the duct tape and hot glue you started with. Copy editing is a little less expensive usually, between 2 and 3 cents a word, and final proofing (proofreading) is less than that, so the other really important question to ask yourself is, how good do you want your book to be? And, yes, there are sometimes hourly rates applied instead – $30 to $70 per hour – and newer editors looking to get a few pieces into their portfolio may charge a flat rate ranging from $300 to $1000.
How about the book covers? Freelancers can be fairly affordable, perhaps in the $150 to $400 range, and design companies with multiple people working on your cover can charge upwards of $1500 to $3000. You do have the option of spending between $50 and $300 for a pre-made book cover, but remember that you might inadvertently end up with a cover that looks entirely too much like a totally different book – and it’ll be hard to find something appropriately representative of your actual story. (Or not, there’s a lot of weird covers out there.)
The Current Take-Aways
I’m not trying to discourage you from pursuing indie publishing. Quite the opposite! I want to arm you and inform you so that you know what it’s going to take to be successful. If all you want is to just have a book out there, then a lot of this isn’t that important by comparison. But, if you want your book to succeed, then you need these roles on your team. I know when we start talking about a money outlay, it gets uncomfortable, but this is what traditional publishing normally takes care of. The reason that royalty rates from TradPubs are only 7.5% for paperbacks to 15% for hardbacks is that the rest of the money that your book generates in sales is going to pay the people who did the editing and arting and massaging and marketing and fact-checking and all that. When you’re the one responsible for it, you realize that… well, in my opinion, the cut that the Big Five take still isn’t worth it, but you have to appreciate the amount of work that goes into getting a good book into a successful market.
Next week, we’re going to look at the rest of your team: book designers, research partners, and marketers.
1 Yes, we’re building a directory of writing groups, too, for North Texas, and there will be a whole other article dedicated to figuring out who your people are and how to connect with them. Click the link to add your group.
2 At the Tenth Annual Roanoke Writers Conference during my surprise-emergency presentation, I mistakenly said that there were five levels of editing. There are only four editors, there are four editors, there are four editors…
Don’t forget to check out Part 1!