Self-publishing process for ‘Dead Reckoning’

If you’ve stopped in to read about my recent self-publishing process with my supernatural suspense thriller Dead Reckoning, welcome! After just over one year of writing, re-writing, editing and book production, the book finally published.

What a journey! To say my experience with this book was more difficult than my self-publishing experience with my debut novel (and longer word count, at that) Furlough, is putting it lightly. It seemed like walking through quicksand at every turn with Dead Reckoning. I’m not sure why. I had assumed it would have been easier than my first time around. I wasn’t a newbie anymore, the second book was 10% shorter than the first one, and I assumed the mistakes I’d made during the first experience would streamline my second experience. What I learned, however, was that no two books are the same. Interestingly, my process with the editors and proofreaders I used was much more difficult. Some of that I can attribute to the more intricate material in the second book. The storyline went between two different timeframes, with multiple characters portrayed in childhood and adulthood, and even the plot itself required more discipline not just on my part as the author, but my team of professional editors. Simply put, Dead Reckoning is by far a more complex novel than Furlough.

Something else I learned was that a past experience sometimes does not translate into future increased learning. What I mean is, when you do something for the first time, you have nothing to compare it to. Case in point: with Furlough I’d signed up for the KDP Select program that Amazon offers authors. In a nutshell, it’s a feature that allows Kindle e-readers to borrow and read up to ten books at a time and store them in their Kindles. It works much like a library. Readers can swap them out as many times as they wish, as long as they maintain no more than ten titles at a time. Authors are paid by how many pages are read of their books. It’s a complex system but essentially authors have the opportunity to have their books downloaded or even just seen by millions of people across the world. The catch is authors are bound to a 90-day contract where they can only sell the eBook versions of their book on Amazon. With Furlough, I had a level of success with Kindle Unlimited (the reader side of the KDP Select program) page reads, and with my overall Amazon-only eBook sales. But I had no way of knowing how I would have done had I been able to distribute and sell the eBook on other markets such as Apple Books, Kobo (the Canadian mainstay online bookseller), and a variety of other sites. If I sold 100 eBooks with Amazon and earned several hundred dollars with page reads under the Select program, who knew if I wouldn’t have sold 1,000 eBooks by selling it in wide distribution.

I couldn’t wait for my 90-day contract to end. I felt like my book was being held hostage, preventing me from selling exponentially more books by selling it wide. As soon as my locked-in period ended, I chose not to re-up in the Select program for another 90 days and published the eBook in wide distribution. Fast forward one year. My sales by doing that paled in comparison to what I’d done not just in the 90 days I was on KU, but in a single day at some points during my original contract! But I didn’t pay much attention to this fact since I was engrossed in writing Dead Reckoning. It took me distributing the second book wide, and getting confirmation that those other online booksellers simply cannot match (in my opinion) Amazon’s selling power. As soon as those other retailers delist my eBook version, I’ll be enrolling it in KDP Select.

From editing, cover art, and even my website re-design, the entire process to get Dead Reckoning to print was an exercise in frustration. Maddening may be a better word. Every step of the way seemed to be met with complications and delays. Funny story–while flying out of state to visit family, and while in the final editing stage for the book, I had an opportunity to get a couple hours’ work in on the plane. Luckily for me, the plan was only half full. Since Southwest has an open seating policy, I was in luck, because my early boarding group allowed me to grab the aisle seat. My girlfriend took the middle seat, with our intention being she would eventually slide to the window seat once the plan finished boarding, effectively blocking the middle seat to anyone. Not a bad move on our part since the plan was only half full anyway, and who would choose the middle seat when other prime seats were still open? Well, before she could move to the window seat, a woman boarded and asked for the seat. Unwilling to deny her request, we let her in to take the window. Sure enough, as we take off, I look around to see that our row was the only one with three people in it. Out of about 80 three-seat groups. This didn’t prevent me from working with my laptop, but it was a much tighter squeeze as you can imagine, and was indicative to my overall frustration that even on an airplane, nothing with my book was seeming to go right.

When the book published, I was very happy with how the paperback came out. The cover art is stunning, in my belief. The artist’s name is Xavier Comas, he is out of Spain. I highly recommend him. But the printing company folded my outer jacket wrong on my hardcover author copy, resulting in an uneven wording on the front and spine. Let’s hope that was a one-off error, otherwise it’s just one more thing to content with.

It’s difficult to say which is best–self-publishing, or traditional publishing. I had wanted to self-publish for one main reason: Not having gate-keepers in the publishing business say whether my book was worthy of being published, and if it was, having them also decide on the book’s content, cover design, and release date. There are pros to going traditional, for sure, but for my first book I wanted full control. Gone are the days (mostly) of vanity publishers, who will print something a monkey produced by sitting in front of a typewriter. In days past, those printing companies had no standards, and thus self-publishing got a deserved bad rap. But in today’s world of technology and folks working from home, those presses have given way to legit bookmakers like Ingram Spark, KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) and others. When you load a cover image and document, it must conform to a minimum quality standard. That, and you simply aren’t going to sell many books that are of poor quality. All told, I’m very happy that I chose to self-publish Furlough, so much so that I did it again for Dead Reckoning. My experience notwithstanding, I’m still glad I went that route the second time. I may have waited a year or more longer had I gotten an agent and then waited for a book deal. I can still do that, by the way, and have in fact scheduled to attend several out-of-state writing conferences in hopes of marketing my now-published book to agents. I believe that Dead Reckoning is good enough for a legit publisher to buy its rights. They’ll insist on making their own cuts, and probably a new cover, but that’s just the business. If it means opening the book to thousands more readers in brick and mortar bookstores and libraries as well, then I’ll be willing to make a few small concessions.

Would I self-publish again in the future? It depends. I’ve learned that longer projects (Furlough was 545 pages; Dead Reckoning 490) are best suited for self-publishing. Authors have more lee-way with content and release dates. Traditional publishers seem keen to adhering to industry standards. Unless your name is Stephen King or Kristin Hannah, you’d better not offer a book longer than 400 pages. But for 99.9% of the other authors out there, it seems to me that playing the game and having your book closely match others in your genre regarding length, especially, is the best way to land a traditional book publishing deal.

That, and having your book be as great as it can possibly be, of course.