Six Hard Truths About Self Publishing Your Romance Novel

1. You Have to Do or Organise Everything Yourself 

When you have a traditional publishing deal, your job is to write the books. The publishers will organise the editing, production, distribution, and marketing. 

When you self-publish, it's up to you to organise everything. Of course, you don't have to do it all yourself – there are service providers out there to help with most stages of the process – but you do need to make sure that everything happens when it should. 

Many self-publishers choose to self-publish because of this level of control over the process. They like to be in the position to make all the decisions, but there can be a steep learning curve, and it’s likely to take more time to get your book into the hands of your readers than you thought it would. 

2. You're Not Just a Writer, You're Running an Author Business

When you choose to self-publish your book, you become a business owner. Even if you don't set yourself up with a publishing company name. From a practical viewpoint, that means you need to keep records of your finances and comply with the tax regulations in your country. 

If your goal is to make money as an author, this also means you need to put your business head on when you make choices about writing and marketing your books. 

In an ideal world, you'll write stories that you love, and readers will love them as much as you do. However, you do need to track your results and be prepared to make hard decisions if your books aren't selling like you hoped. You'll need to be clear on your goals, both as a business owner and a writer, and you might need to compromise in places to find a balance between your creative and commercial ideals. 

3. You Have to Publish a Professional Book

A lot of readers don’t even know that self-publishing is an option for authors, and even if they do, they’re unlikely to care if your book is self-published or traditionally published. All your readers are worried about is if you’ve written them a good story. 

However, readers will notice if your book has an amateur looking cover and is poorly written or full of errors. 

As a minimum, your novel needs a high quality cover that accurately represents the genre and type of story you’ve written. Your cover is what will attract readers’ attention (or not, in the case of a bad cover), encouraging them to click to find out more.

It’s vital your book has been edited as well. I always recommend a professional edit, because it’s very hard to distance yourself enough to edit your own writing, but if you decide not to hire a professional editor, make sure you self-edit and revise very carefully. Some readers will put down a book and not finish it if it contains lots of errors, and they might even leave a bad review, which is obviously something you don’t want.

One of the best ways to make money as an independent author is to build an audience of loyal fans: readers who love your books, will recommend them to their friends and online, and will jump on a new release as soon as it’s published. You won’t ever get fans like these if you don’t publish a high quality book in the first place.

4. You’re Responsible for All the Costs

Publishing a book costs money, and as an independent author, you’re the one that needs to pay for it. Before you've sold a single book. 

You can do most of the work involved in self-publishing yourself if you want to, though I do suggest hiring professionals for cover design and the editing of your novel.

One of the most common questions from first-time self-publishing authors is “how much is it going to cost?” And the answer, as it often is, is “it depends.” As with everything, there are options for all budgets. For example, you can use stock photography and pre-made covers, or you can purchase exclusive photos and covers, which will obviously cost you a lot more. When it comes to editing, you can just hire a copyeditor, or you can get help at all stages of the writing process with developmental editing, line editing, and copyediting. 

You can hire people to help with formatting, launch strategies, and advertising, or you can learn to do all these things yourself. However, even if you decide to do things yourself, there is still a time cost, and you might have to purchase or subscribe to specialised software. 

It is possible to publish a book for an outlay of a few hundred dollars (or even for free, but remember you need to publish a quality book), and it's also possible to spend five thousand dollars or more. According to this article from Kindlepreneur (and David Chesson does know what he’s talking about) the average for a first book is $2,000. 

The most common costs you will need to cover are for editing, proofreading, cover design and marketing.  

5. You Will Have to Market Your Novel

Your book will not sell itself. No one knows who you are, and without sales, and the subsequent reviews, Amazon is unlikely to display your book high up in their category pages.

If you’re planning to publish multiple novels, it’s important to build yourself a platform and a brand as an author as well. Your platform is your space on the internet that you use to keep in touch with your readers between books. Your platform can include a website and a variety of social media platforms, but should always include a newsletter. If you start to build this platform before you publish your first book, you’ll have an audience you can sell to when it’s ready. 

You can also use this platform to build your own team of ARC readers, who receive a free copy of your book before it’s published in exchange for leaving a review on or close to the release date. These early reviews let Amazon know your book is popular with readers of that genre and they provide proof to other readers that you are an author whose books are worth reading. 

There are multiple ways to market a book, from free and simple options such as newsletter swaps with other authors to running ad campaigns on Facebook or Amazon. The important thing isn’t particularly how you market your book, but that you have to market it, and you need to start creating and implementing your marketing plan before you’re ready to publish.

6. Making Money from Self-Publishing Takes Time

There are some self-published authors who make six figures a year from their books, and there are many, many more who make a respectable full time income.

However, there is a good chance your first book won’t be profitable. Doing anything for the first time is hard, and self-publishing and marketing a book is no different; there’s a lot to learn, mistakes will probably be made, and you’ll likely only have a small audience, if you have one at all.

But once you’ve published your first book, the second one will be so much easier. So even if your first venture into self-publishing doesn’t go quite the way you planned, you’ll have learnt loads about the process, gained lots of new skills that you’ll use for publishing your future novels, and once you’ve got more than one book published, you have more opportunities for cross promotion and growing your income.

If your goal is a full-time income from your author business, be prepared for it to take a long time, often several years, to get to that point. It’s important to remember the authors that are making good money have an entire backlist of books and a large audience of loyal fans, and the more money they make, the more they can put back into advertising. 

So now you know the hard truths about self-publishing – maybe you’re even feeling a bit nervous – but the good news is there’s loads of resources out there to help you in your self-publishing journey. There are a multitude of courses, books, and podcasts out there packed with useful information, and the various online self-publishing communities are full of friendly people who are always willing to help out beginners.

Further Helpful Blog Posts

Struggling to get your first draft finished? Have a read of this post: How to Complete the First Draft of Your Novel.