10-Step Plan to Self-Publish a Book

by Hank Quense, @hanque99

Self-publishing a book is a complex project.  It gets even more complex when you add in the necessary pre-publication marketing tasks.  The best way to proceed with a project like this is by using a detailed plan.  This article describes such a plan in brief.

The mind-map outlines the ten steps in the plan.

Step 1: Initial Tasks are about preparation.  Is your manuscript finished? (If it’s a first draft, it is not finished).  If not, now is the time to complete it.  Other tasks include using Beta readers and developing the publishing budget.

Step 2: Professional Help.  The author needs professional help on the project.  The two most essential ones are a cover artist and an editor.  Another possibility is technical help to format the book and/or design the interior.

Step 3: Book Description. The mind-map shows this as a marketing step.  Actually, it’s half marketing and half publishing.  The content developed here will be important in the marketing efforts but it is also required when the manuscript is uploaded to a packager (Step 7). In this step the author concentrates on developing the book’s keywords, the book blurb and the description.  This step will take time and a lot of creative thinking to complete and will require a lot of revising.

Step 4: Getting Ready.  At this point the author does packager research, prepares the manuscript for uploading and decides on need for an ISBN (or not).

Step 5: Initial Marketing Tasks is where the author develops a strategic marketing plan and a marketing budget. A vitally important question is: Who are the book’s customers?  This question isn’t as simple as it may seem at first glance.  Developing a marketing plan requires a lot of thinking and a need to match-funding requirements against the budget.

Step 6: Develop an Author Platform discusses a crucially important aspect of marketing.  The author platform consists of several components such as a website page, Amazon Author Central page, social media accounts and a media kit.

Step 7: Pre-launch Activities is where the author uploads the manuscript and cover files to the packager.  It also establishes the pre-order, if necessary.

Step 8: Getting Book Reviews involves just that: getting the book reviewed.

Step 9: Announce Book availability.  On Launch Day, the author works on the tasks necessary to tell the world (or a small part of it) that the book can now be ordered.

Step 10: Post-launch Marketing is the never-ending tasks the author works on to market the book.

In conclusion: An immediate question that will crop up with authors who aren’t familiar with self-publishing is: How long will such a project take to complete?  That answer depends on a number of variables.  These variables include: how much time can be devoted to the project; how computer competent the author is and how long will the professional help require to complete their work.  With a favorable tail wind, I’d say the project will take four months from the time the manuscript is complete until the book becomes available.

This article describes a workable ten step plan.  To use it, the author will need to perform research to flesh out the details in each step.  An alternative is to use the details in my new book, Self-publish a Book in 10 Steps.  It will be available for pre-order on November 15 and will be published on December 1, 2021.  It’s available from Amazon and other book sellers.

Hank Quense’s website Writers & Authors Resource Center provides material relating to fiction writing, self-publishing and book marketing.

Photo credit: shixart1985 on VisualHunt.com