How to Self-Publish a Book

Video Transcript

"Hi everybody, I'm John Graden. I'm a professional speaker, trainer, and the author of seven books including The Impostor Syndrome. How do you self publish a book? Well, I've been publish by the big New York houses. I've self published, and I've even done print on demand. So, I've got a lot of experience in this area, so let me help you go through this process, because it's really somewhat complicated at first, and you have to really have a plan going into this thing. Number one, ask yourself why am I doing this? Why am I self publishing this book? If I can't get it published by the big guy, why do I have to do it? Well, sometimes self published books have to get out in the market, and you've got to be responsible for getting it on the market, so it gets some traction, gets some attention. The One Minute Manager, which is a bestseller, started out as a self published book. So, in today's world, with the Internet and technology, the stigma of self publishing books is gone. It's fine to self publish, there's nothing wrong with it. But there's a couple of things to understand, though. When you self publish your book, you don't want to--you want to be very careful about not over-ordering. One time one of my books ran out, and we re-ordered, and my secretary just ordered five thousand books. I still have some of those books. So typically, a publishing house is not going to publish more than three thousand to five thousand copies of your book if they were doing it. So, you probably want to do about five hundred to a thousand copies initially. So here's the process. First, there's a couple choices. One, self publish is when you hire somebody to do the layout, hire somebody to do the editing, send chapters out to your peers for reviews, and then get quotes from various print houses, place your order, clear your garage out, and let the truck back up and dump a thousand books in your garage. Because now it's your job to sell all of those books. So that's labor intensive, and it's expensive. The new option is print on demand, or POD. With a POD program--there's lots of them out there and you have to be careful--they do the layout for you. They do the editing for you, they do the book cover illustration for you, they do the storage, they register it, they get the ISBN, everything that you need for the book, and then they print them on demand. So if you get an order for three books, they'll print three books out. Here's the downside to print on demand. Because it's print on demand and it's kind of customized for your needs--it's only one book or it's a thousand books, they're prices vary each time, so they typically will charge more than the market for the book. So with print on demand, if the books you're competing with are on the stands at $14.95, the print on demand version might be $19.95. That could cost you sales. You also want to make sure that with a print on demand scenario, you retain rights to the book. You retain the copyright, you retain the rights to all the art work. Everything continues to be yours. So, when you get into self publishing a book, you have to realize that you're going to shift from author to businessman. You're going to shift from author to sales and marketing, because right now, once that book is printed, sell, sell, sell, market, market, market. That's how you self publish a book. I'm John Graden. Hope that helps. Thanks."