 What's shaking? My name's Cam, welcome back to another video. Fellow writers, how are you? How much writing have you done this week? I want a word count in the comments right now. I don't talk about this much on here, which probably makes me one of the worst self-published authors in the world, but I actually have a book out. This video isn't me going sales mode on you, don't worry. Today I want to talk to you about the major things that I've learned or I've taken away from my experience with self-publishing my book. Hold on, this one here. Welcome Descent. I want to talk about some of the things that surprised me about the process or things that I think might help you to know. Things that I know I definitely need to keep in mind when I'm self-publishing my next book, which will be Sexy Spider Lady 2 Endgame. I'm sure it's obvious to everyone that self-publishing your book is going to hurt your wallet. Here's the thing though, technically speaking, you could publish your book with pretty much whatever budget you like. You could set a budget of $1 and still end up with something on Amazon, the only catch is that it's going to be a turd, so don't do that. I am going to make a full video breaking down all of the costs that were involved with publishing my book and the money that I made back, so you should subscribe if you want to see that. But for now, I'll keep it simple. Publishing this book cost me, it kind of cost me like thousands of dollars, that hurts to even say. I can't put an exact figure on it right now, but let's just say it was enough to buy me like 50 life-size boss baby cardboard cutouts, just as an example. There are three major cost factors involved with self-publishing that I really don't think you can skimp on, because they're really important to how well your book is going to be received. The first and most expensive one is professional editing. For a full-length novel, I'm talking about like 70,000 to 80,000 words, you're probably going to be looking at about a cost of at least $1,500, or it could be a lot more, on average, assuming that you're getting a professional editing company to take care of it, which I would recommend. It can vary quite a bit depending on your word count, where you live, blah, blah, blah. Yes, hitting the pay now button on that transaction feels a lot like getting dacked in front of your high school crush, but it is what it is. I can promise you it's a much worse feeling to have multiple people read and review your book saying that the editing was awful. You just, you really can't cheap out on that part. The second major cost is the book cover. Personally, I think that unless you yourself are an experienced and professional book cover artist, you should be paying someone else to do it for you. I think it's just one of those things where it's going to be really difficult for you to, you know, look at the cover of the book that you just designed without some level of subjective warping or bias. It'll be hard to look at that cover honestly if you've done it yourself. I know the saying is don't judge a book by its cover and that's really sweet, but it's also dumb. It's really dumb. Everyone does that. Everyone judges the book by its cover. More than the title, more than the plot, I think the cover is what is going to catch the eye of any new potential readers. It just, it has to be good. Now the cost for the cover is going to be pretty much impossible to narrow down because it will depend largely on how it's made, whether it's painted, whether it's done digitally, exactly how much detail is actually involved, whether it's minimalistic or high concept, blah, blah, blah. A cover like this is likely or at least should be a lot cheaper to get done than a cover like this. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted with this one. I like designed it to a certain degree and in the end I ended up paying the cover artist about $350 to do it, to complete it. It really is quite simple and they finished it in just a couple of days. There's the back. Getting a good cover can be expensive, but it's also really easy to like find good cover artists. There's so many out there. I want to mention pre-made book covers for a minute as well. I plan on doing a longer in-depth video about pre-made book covers because there is a lot of stuff involved that a lot of people don't know about or think about, but to keep it short I would just say be really careful buying pre-made book covers. Pre-made covers can look really good. They can be super affordable which is great especially for indie authors and there are a ton of really really great and talented pre-made book cover artists out there. But there are also a lot of really shady ones. There are a lot of people who will be out to make a quick buck so they will use a lot of copyrighted images that they definitely don't have the rights to. They'll start selling that online and then if you buy it and you start making money with that copyrighted image, you really will be dacked in illegal, in a legal sense. I've seen that like clown dude from American Horror Story on so many pre-made book covers. It's not even funny and that is a very serious copyright violation. Just be careful, that's all I'm saying. Now the third big cost is marketing and that is a cost that is going to stick with you for a really long time if you're playing the game properly as a lot of people would say. That's a cost you're going to be paying long after the book is released. I am very lucky enough to have a platform, this platform where I can market my book even though I rarely do that again. I'm not that great at being a self-published author but I still paid for some ads through Facebook mostly just to see how it would go and how it would translate in the sales and how much exposure it would get me. And I'll probably continue buying Facebook ads in the future just not at a high cost just so it's being shown to at least some people continually. Again I'll go into that deeper in my upcoming video about the costs involved. I'm lucky enough to have a platform but a lot of people don't so they generally have to spend a lot more money on advertising than I do just to make sure that book is being shown to new people. You also have a lot of other smaller things like the fees involved with a third party publisher which in my case was IngramSpark. My point is that if you self polish and you do it the right way you are looking up at coughing up a lot of dollary dues. Unless you have a huge platform way bigger than mine there is no guarantee that you will make all of your money back. If you're in the self-publishing game purely make money you're probably going to waste a few years of your life. For a long time on this channel when anyone has asked me what my number one writing tip is I've always said don't rush it and I stand by that that's why I've spent so long working on welcome descent. It took about two years from me getting the idea for the story to to it being a finished product and in the end I still think I rushed it a bit. Don't get me wrong I don't want every book that I published to take more than two years in fact preferably would take a lot less. But I do think I rushed it a bit towards the end especially within the publishing stage. I had set a release date which was January 21st which at the point of me announcing it should have given me three solid months for pre-orders and marketing. Unfortunately I had a million issues with IngramSpark which I'll get to in a bit. And while I did release the book on time it was only available for pre-order about two weeks before that date. I also didn't have enough time to get like advanced reader copies out to people or do any of that kind of widespread marketing that I had planned for and I think in the end that did kind of hurt me. It was a huge headache and I'm not like that bummed about it it's fine but the next time I publish a book I'm going to wait until it's all finished and really completely prepared and uploaded and ready for pre-order before I announce it which ideally would be about three to four months before the release. I actually have three more books planned to come out this year which is pretty damn exciting. One is a novel of mine and the other two are anthologies of short stories that I have coming out in collaboration with other writers other author tubers that you've probably seen on YouTube. I plan to take my time with those and with any other future projects that I have because having a deadline is great but it shouldn't come at the cost of fumbling the release. I don't actively read my books reviews or go searching for them but if I do come across a review I also try not to like run away from it. I'm a firm believer that the key to improving your craft is to face your criticism head on. The problem with reviews unfortunately especially on Goodreads is that some people will just dunk on authors without providing any helpful feedback because it's super duper quirky and because for some reason it's become a taboo for authors and readers to communicate with each other or acknowledge the existence of each other. Reviews are really scary. Of course going into any artistic career path you have to be prepared for the fact that people might not like what you've created. Hell you even have to be prepared for the fact that what you created might not be good. It's scary because you spend years of your life or year or years of your life pouring yourself into a story or a book and then as soon as it goes up you will have the ability to pop over to Goodreads and see if that book, that thing that you worked on for years has fulfilled its purpose. Do you or would you read your reviews? It's a very challenging question but maybe you have some insight into it that can help people that feel as stuck with it as I do. I am going to make a full video on this as this whole video is me just saying that I'm going to make other videos. I am going to make a full video on this as well. Very soon actually it might be one of my very next videos but I published my book through IngramSpark and my god it was a headache. The only reason I would recommend IngramSpark to my past self is because they are the only direct publisher I know of that lets you make hard covers and secondly because they have a printing facility in Australia which is actually really convenient for me. I don't like that Amazon has an increasing monopoly on pretty much every service and product in the world. I don't like that they mistreat their employees or that they're run by a lame Lex Luthor clone but if KDP added a hardcover option for their direct printing I would switch to them in a heartbeat. Again I'll make a full video about my experience with IngramSpark but here is a quick flash list of the issues that I personally have had with them and technically I'm still having one they keep putting my books in the erotica category which at first was kind of funny but I'm come on two their report system for sales is harder to navigate than the instructions for off-brand flat pack furniture three their pre-orders and availability with Amazon just straight up doesn't work for some countries which doesn't make any sense at least until you contact them about it and then they fix it and then it breaks a week again four am I up to four their online chat is almost literally never online every time I checked it was offline so I dedicated an entire day once once to checking it like every hour I even stayed up nearly all night doing so and it only ever went online once at which point I clicked on it and it was finding an agent and then it went offline again and this is especially annoying because if you're having issues with something on IngramSpark which you very likely will and you send them an email you will either not get a response or they'll get back to a couple of weeks later completely misunderstanding what the issue was five they act like they have no idea what Amazon is despite the fact their business or their service is directly and intrinsically linked to Amazon six and my biggest grievance with IngramSpark is that you have to pay $25 every single time that you want to make a change to the cover or the interior text that's 25 Australian dollars by the way and I'm not talking about changing a book that's already out for sale or has already been sold to people I mean it could be 10 minutes after you've just uploaded it and paid the fees well before the release date when you're still testing stuff when you want to get a proof copy so you can make sure it looks good every single time you make a change you have to pay $25 for either that cover or the interior or both if you're making changes to both so for example you upload everything cover interior $50 gone okay that's fine I get it they need to make money that makes sense so then you buy a proof copy of the book so you can make sure it all looks okay it comes out to you and you notice that oh the cover is a bit out of line or oh there's a typo in the chapter title that I need to change well that'll be another $25 or $50 please then you have to order more proof copies you get it back God forbid if there are more issues because yes you will have to pay that $50 again you should be able to check the proof copy and make minor changes without paying the entire cost over and over again that is just insane to me that is absurd the thing with Ingram spark is that their print quality is uh it's good it is it is really good print quality the customer service if you ever manage to get through to them is great it's fine I think I've spoken to one customer service agent from there like ever and he was actually really cool but everything else is just the worst it's just the worst Ingram spark is the britter of direct publishers I think next time if I want my book to have a hardcover I'll do that part through Ingram spark but as for the paperback in the ebook I'll probably do that through KDP now I don't mean to get corny but there would be no point in me publishing books or writing at all if the only takeaway I have is negative stuff at the end of the day I'm really glad that I self published this book I'm happy with the finished product could it have been better sure are there things about the story that I wish I'd done differently absolutely but that can be said for pretty much anything I will ever create so as long as I know I give it my best shot I'm all good and I'm pretty sure the more I do it the easier it's gonna get and the better it's gonna get because comparing now to before I published this book I know some things that work and some things that don't publishing a book is an amazing feeling it really is it's almost like nothing else in the world especially the first time you open that package and you see your book inside I that's one of the few dopamine rushes of my life that I've never been able to replicate opening the package seeing your book inside something that you created in paper and ink just like the books that you grew up reading and loving it's just it's you get my point it's pretty amazing and every time I doubt myself or I wonder if this is what I really want to do with my life or if there's ever any chance of me actually succeeding with this I just try to remember that feeling or the feeling I get when someone tells me it reaches out to me and tells me that they really loved my book that is kind of what I use as my fuel for driving on hey have you self published before let me know what you learned or let me know if anything I've said in this video hits a chord for you I have lots more writing videos to come so stick around my dude thanks for watching catch you