the limits of control

I self-publish for a number of reasons, but high on the list is the sense of control. I don’t need to compromise on how I want the finished product to look. I still rely on an editor, but it’s an editor of my choosing who knows my genre^*. I release the book when I want, market it the way I want, and pick whatever I want for my next project.

Of course, all that control comes with a flip side. When you get to take ownership of everything, that means you have to take ownership of everything.

CLEARCUT, the first Adrian Cervantes novel, has been effectively done for the last six weeks. But that doesn’t mean I’m done with the text. I’ve been fiddling with it in Scrivener, trying to turn a polished draft into the professional product that a reader will buy. Scrivener has plenty of fans—I certainly love the way it helps me manage a draft in progress—but I won’t pretend it’s easy. There are a thousand different settings that you have to fiddle with in compiling your draft into a finished product. Overlook one of them, and you’ll be staring at your e-reader in frustration, wondering why every chapter starts on the bottom three lines of the page.

(I don’t blame Scrivener for this. Every piece of software has its learning curves. But I have to steer into all these curves myself. You forget how much you’ve learned about MS Word until you try using another product)

And that’s just for the e-book. Print layout is a whole other forest fire. There are several services that will automatically convert the e-book into a corresponding print book, but I never know if I can trust their output until I go through the conversion process. I know a little bit about InDesign, but nothing looks more amateurish than something designed by someone who knows just a little. I can always pay someone to do the layout, but then I’m revisiting budget.

Then there’s promoting. There are hundreds of outlets, platforms, and specialists who promise they have the means to get your book reviewed, promoted, and featured. They can’t all be telling the truth. And even if you blanket the Internet with ads, who’s to say which ads are effective? You got into this line of work because you want to make up stories; now you’re gonna become a media planner?

Self-publishing is a bet—rather, a concurrent series of bets—that you know more about bringing a book to market than the professionals. The democratization and levelling of publishing over the last 10 years has made that a plausible gamble. But it’s not certain. It takes time, an investment of energy and attention, and a willingness to experiment. It takes a broader set of skills than creativity and style, which used to be all a writer needed^**.

I tell myself I don’t mind it. I usually believe it. Just help me remember that the next time I’m trying to teach myself CSS, please.

____________
^* Given the instability of publishing these days, many editors working for traditional publishing houses are also freelancing on the side. So I have access to the same pool of talent a traditionally published author would!
^** That, and the right networks, and a taste for a hotel’s well vodka.