When you self-publish, you have to be a jack-of-all-trades [and master of none!]. I’ve spent the entire morning working on this website, trying to improve the look, feel and navigability of it.
What else have I done, that traditionally published authors would probably have someone else do? Let’s have a list.
- The editing
- The typesetting, such as is done, nowadays
- The cover design, with a bit of help from my youngest daughter
- The promotion, such as I’ve done, so far
- Legal stuff, copyright stuff (though KDP helped a lot with that)
- Financial stuff. (Did you know, as a UK author selling through Amazon, you have to *opt out* of paying tax to the IRS, for example? Mad!)
And that’s just off the top of my head. There’s probably more. I imagine it’s quite nice to have one’s hand held by a traditional publishing house through the whole thing, but I like to do things for myself, so I didn’t even ask them to look at my book. Anyway, this article is full of excellent reasons not to do anything other than self-publish, and you take a significantly heftier chunk of the profits, so it makes sense.
But it’s probably true to say that if you do self-publish and you do everything yourself, then the actual writing part of the process will only take up a relatively minor proportion of your time.
And we writers do love to Just. Write.
So here I am [was]. Writing.