Self-Printed: The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing: How to Use Digital Self-Publishing, Social Media and Common Sense to Start Earning A Living ... or Shouting 'Down With The Big Six!') [Paperback]

Catherine Ryan Howard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 29, 2011

Self-Printed: The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing - How To Use Digital Publishing, Social Media and Common Sense To Start Earning a Living as a Writer Through POD Paperbacks and E-books (And Do It Without Saying "Gatekeepers" or Shouting "Down With The Big Six!") 

 

Do you think that no one has the right to stand between you and your published writer dreams? That the publishing industry is going down in flames and self-publishers are going to rise like a 99c phoenix from the ashes? That all literary agents are interested in doing is blogging sarcastically about the rhetorical question at the start of your query letter, that editors will just use your submitted manuscript for kindling and that you'll be senile before you hear back from either of them? That once you've uploaded the book you finished yesterday afternoon to Amazon, it'll be mere minutes before the money starts rolling in and you can quit your day job? Do you say things like gatekeepers, The Big Six, Dan Brown, legacy publishing and indie authors a lot? Are you self-publishing to "show them all"? 

  

If you've answered yes to one or more of these questions then I do apologise, but this isn't the book for you. 

 

This book is for writers who consider self-publishing to be a good Plan B, or even a sideline to traditional publication. Who want to do it the cheapest and easiest way possible while still producing a quality product. Who understand that much like Starbucks outlets and Nespresso coffee machines, traditional and self-publishing can peacefully co-exist. Who know that they don't have to sell a million copies of their book to start earning a living from their writing, but that they do have to work hard and treat it like a business. Who are blessed with common sense and live in the real world at least most of the time. Who find my jokes funny. 

 

If this sounds like you, then SELF-PRINTED: THE SANE PERSON'S GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING may be just the "How To..." guide you were looking for. It will tell you everything you need to know in order to publish a Print On Demand paperback and e-book, and - crucially - sell them, without sounding like anti-Big Publishing propaganda produced by the Ministry of Truth. 

 

Be warned: you are now entering a No Saying "Gatekeepers" Zone...

 

Visit SelfPrintedbook.com to see the full table of contents. 

 

ABOUT CATHERINE: Catherine Ryan Howard is the coffee-guzzling twenty-something behind the popular blog, Catherine, Caffeinated. In March 2010 she self-published her travel memoir, Mousetrapped: A Year and A Bit in Orlando, Florida, using the Print-On-Demand service CreateSpace, Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords. Using free promotional tools like blogging, Twitter and Facebook, she managed to make Mousetrapped an Amazon bestseller and sell 4,000 copies of it in a year. Her success story has been featured in The Sunday Times and The Sunday Independent newspapers, and Catherine has been interviewed on BBC Radio Ulster, Newstalk and RTÉ Radio's Marian Finucane Show. She lives in Cork, Ireland, where she divides her time between her desk and the sofa. She wants to be a NASA astronaut when she grows up. (She's 28.)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Catherine explains clearly and consisely how ... to make self-publishing work for you. Laugh-out-loud funny in places, this book covers everything you need to know to make your book a success." --Vanessa O'Loughlin, founder of Writing.ie

"It's authoritative, engaging, and, like [Catherine's] blog, caffeinated. If you're thinking of self-publishing and you want to give your book a great start in life, get Self-Printed."  --Roz Morris, author of NAIL YOUR NOVEL

From the Author

My favourite piece of writing advice has always been "write the book you want to read" but in this case it was more like "write the book you need to read" or "write the book you'd need to read if you could find a quantum physicist to build you a time machine that would allow you to go back to a year and a half ago, to before you self-published, and thus instead of having to figure all of this out for yourself you could have read this book and got it right first time." 

When I decided to self-publish my travel memoir, Mousetrapped, and started to research the topic, I couldn't find any information that didn't come with a generous helping of "Traditional publishing is dead!" propaganda, or that wasn't written by someone with a literary agent-shaped chip on their shoulder who could clearly benefit from attending some kind of Resolving Your Bitterness course. 

It all seemed so angry. There was talk of evil "gatekeepers" and a shadowy group known only as "The Big Six." (I was surprised to learn that these weren't in fact horned demons but merely literary agents and major US publishing houses.) These people weren't just self-publishing their novels or trying to sell e-books - they were sticking it to The Man, man! As soon as their novella, Complicated Stuff That Happens in Space During a Bleak Time in the Future, hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, they were going to send a reply to every one of the 1,532 rejection letters the book had received along with a photocopy of the list and a crayon drawing of a middle finger. 

There was also a very strong smell of eau de delusional in the air. One self-publishing website advised would-be self-publishers that writing a book actually wasn't all that hard - if you could say it, they claimed, then you could write it. Another said that agents never responded to unsolicited submissions and only used their slush piles for kindling. A parade of the usual Bad Writing, Big Selling suspects (Dan Brown, James Patterson, Stephanie Meyer) were regularly dragged out to prove the point that Big Publishing wouldn't know good writing if it set up camp on their desk, as were famous stories of missed opportunity, such as J.K. Rowling repeatedly being told there was no money in children's books while she and Harry Potter were getting rejected up the wazoo. And everyone seemed to think that by uploading a file to a website today, their book was going to be stacked in a pile just inside the door of every bookstore in the world no later than Tuesday. 

I just wanted to self-publish. I wasn't angry, or bitter, or on a list of Persons Unwelcome at the security desk of a major publishing house. Yes, my book had been rejected, but I wasn't taking it personally. I was also brutally realistic and knew that by self-publishing a paperback with a Print-On-Demand site like CreateSpace and e-books with Amazon and Smashwords, I was not going to get rich, famous or rich and famous. In all likelihood, I'd be lucky just to recoup the cost of the coffee I'd have to drink to get me through the formatting process. And I knew that despite what the Self-Publishing Evangelists claimed with their James Patterson arguments and the like, most self-published books were rubbish. This was just a fact, and a fact that could be easily proven with a quick trip to the store on any self-publishing service's website. While I would try to ensure mine was as not-rubbish as it could possibly be, I wasn't under any illusions that it wouldn't get picked out as the impostor amongst a line-up of "properly" published books. So where was the information for people like me?

I couldn't find it, so I started posting about self-publishing on my blog, making it the blog I'd needed to read before I started this whole self-publishing adventure. Whenever I collected some information, I'd run it through a Delusions of Grandeur filter and spray it with common sense, and then post it under the heading "self-printing." Because that's what this is: self-printing. It's not publishing. It's printing copies of your book or making it available to download in e-book form, and then whatever happens after that is entirely up to you. The posts became popular, and soon I was getting e-mails from other would-be self-publishers - or self-printers, I should say - asking for the answers to questions I hadn't covered, or that they couldn't find in the ever growing collection of posts I'd written on the subject. Mousetrapped was out a year in March, and my thoughts turned to writing its sequel. Before I got started on that, I wanted to do something for the new visitors to my blog who perhaps didn't have the time or inclination to trawl through what was now more than a year's worth of posts. Maybe I could consolidate them into a downloadable document, and copy and paste them in chronological order. A PDF maybe? A little e-book? I sat down one weekend to start doing just that, but soon realised that there was so much more about this whole self-printing business than just the stuff I'd blogged about. So I started writing a guide, from scratch. That guide became this book, the guide I wished I could have a read a year and a half ago, back when I didn't know what POD meant, or what a Kindle was, or anything about the migraine-inducing horror that is formatting your manuscript for e-book conversion. 

There's two things I need to tell you before we proceed, one thing about me and one thing about this guide. 


The thing about me is that in the self-publishing world, I'm small fry. Yes, I sold 4,000 copies in a year of a book about the strangest collection of things that agents and publishers assured me had no market - and I did it without spending any money on marketing or promotion - but if you've been within spitting distance of the internet lately, you'll know that there's self-published e-book authors selling 4,000 copies of their book every weekend. So why would you want a self-publishing guide written by someone like me, if there are thousands of other writers out there selling a lot more books? Perhaps you've heard of Amanda Hocking, a writer who made a few million dollars from her self-published books and - while I was writing this book, actually - reportedly signed a seven-figure deal with a major publishing house. Her success has been truly amazing, and utterly deserved. But there's only one Amanda Hocking and if there's ever another one, the odds are you won't be it. On the other hand, you have every chance of being the next me or someone like me: a writer who has used self-publishing to build an author platform, find a readership and start to earn a living from their writing, maybe even enough to enable them to do it full-time. It's not impossible. It's achievable. So instead of reading this book and thinking, "That's great for her, but this couldn't happen for me," you can read it and think, "What am I going to spend my first royalty cheque on?" 

(Tip: I like presents.)

The thing about this guide is that when I say "self-publishing" I mean 

• publishing a Print-on-Demand paperback book with CreateSpace, 
• publishing an e-book with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and 
• publishing an e-book with Smashwords. 

I won't be telling you anything about other types of self-publishing or how to use other services, because this book is about how I did it, and how I did it was the cheapest way possible to get a book out into the world without said book being a total embarrassment, but in fact with said book looking pretty good, if I do say so myself. 
And what I will be telling you is everything you need to know to do just that... --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 346 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (April 29, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1460996283
• ISBN-13: 978-1460996287
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,171,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

CATHERINE RYAN HOWARD is a writer, blogger and coffee enthusiast from Cork, and one of Ireland's most successful self-published authors.

Catherine self-published her first book, a travel memoir called MOUSETRAPPED: A YEAR AND A BIT IN ORLANDO, FLORIDA in March 2010, after her book about Space Shuttle launches, humidity-challenged hair, Bruce Willis, the Ebola virus and an Irish girl working in Walt Disney World failed to find a publisher. Starting from scratch and using only social media, Catherine has managed to shift over 12,000 copies of MOUSETRAPPED to date, and gone on to release two other full-length books: BACKPACKED: A RELUCTANT TRIP ACROSS CENTRAL AMERICA and SELF-PRINTED: THE SANE PERSON'S GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING.

She is also the author of MORE MOUSETRAPPED: A LITTLE BIT MORE FROM THAT YEAR AND A BIT and THE BEST OF CATHERINE, CAFFEINATED: CAFFEINE-INFUSED SELF-PUBLISHING ADVICE.

Her next book, TRAVELLED: 10 TALES ABOUT NOT STAYING AT HOME, is scheduled for release towards the end of 2012.

Her success story has been featured in the likes of the Irish Independent, Sunday Times and Irish Examiner newspapers, and Catherine has been interviewed on numerous radio shows including Arts Extra on BBC Radio Ulster and The Marian Finucane Show on RTE Radio 1. She also delivered Faber Academy's first ever self-publishing course at Faber & Faber, London, in February 2012 and continues to be a guest tutor there.

Before writing full-time, Catherine worked as an administrator in the Netherlands, a campsite courier in France and a front desk agent in a hotel in Walt Disney World, Florida. She dreams of becoming a NASA astronaut when she grows up. (She's 30.)

She currently divides her time between the desk and the sofa.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The All-In-One Guide that will leave you laughing June 1, 2011

By Michael Harling

Format:Paperback

This is a one-stop shop for all your DIY publishing needs, covering everything from formatting text and getting accounts on all of those different web sites to how to navigate the often intimidating world of social media. Originally, I was disappointed at not having had the opportunity to read the book before I published mine, but despite coming at it after the fact, there was still a wealth of critical information to be gleaned. Because the book is so comprehensive, it filled the void left after reading half a dozen "Twitter For Dummies" type books and did so with simple, concise and easy to understand directions.

In addition to this, the book is almost frighteningly readable. Catherine's writing style, which I was first introduced to in her self-published travel memoir, "Mousetrapped," is so captivating and comical I literally had a hard time putting the book down.

The other unique appeal of this book, making it--to my mind--the quintessential self-publishing guide, is that all this information is served with a heaping portion of delusion-busting, real-world common sense. "...[Amanda Hocking's] success has been truly amazing...but there's only one Amanda hocking, and if there's ever another one, the odds are you won't be it."

Catherine does, however, point out that, while dreams of millions should remain dreams, the idea of earning a respectable amount is clearly within your reach--if you do it right. And `right' is not what she purports to teach you; she is merely showing you how--and just as importantly, why--she self-published "Mousetrapped" and sold over 4,000 copies in the first year.

If you are thinking of self-publishing, you must read this book. If you are as confused about social media as I was, you could do worse than read this book. And if you are tired of the "How to Make Millions Publishing Your Own Books While Sticking It To the Big 6 Publishers" manuals, and are ready for some real-world, real-life advice that will leave you chuckling, you definitely should read this book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The bible of how to self-publish your book August 14, 2011

By Martin P. Turnbull

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Howard's guide to self-publishing is so practical, so readable, so thorough, so easy to follow and so fun to read that I don't even want to think about how I would have fared before embarking on self-publishing my novel. I'd probably still be flapping around in a sea of question marks, swear words, hard liquor and prescription medication. But this book saved me from all that. HOORAY!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The BEST book on self-publishing ... Seriously, GET THIS NOW! July 18, 2011

By David Wright

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Catherine Ryan Howard's "Self-Printed: The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing" is easily the BEST (and most thorough) book on self-publishing that I've read.

While I've already helped to put four books to press, and knew a lot of this material, there was still lots of useful info. Additionally, it was good to have confirmation that I was doing things right (more or less).

Howard's book is perfectly formatted, providing information in a natural order, and answering questions I had in my head moments after I thought of them. Best of all, perhaps, is her sense of humor. Reading "Self-Printed" is like having a funny friend help you through the book creation process.

If you're new to self-publishing and not sure what to do, or just want to perfect your process, BUY THIS BOOK NOW! I bought the Kindle version, but I'd say the print version is also worth the cost, as most reference books are easier to read (to me, anyway) in print. In either event, you CAN'T GO WRONG with this book. It is THAT GOOD.

Want more evidence of how great "Self-Printed" is? Before I read it, I'd planned to write my own "how-to" book detailing my process. But truth is, at the moment, I don't think I'd come up with something that will top Howard's effort.