Figuring Out Self Publishing

April 11, 2025

I’ve been claiming that I would self publish my books for a long time. Everyone on Inkitt is no doubt growing sick of hearing me say in Author’s Notes that “Okay now that I’ve finished writing Just A Whatever, I am definitely going to get back to figuring out how to self publish Guardian.”

Right?

And I think for about five books I said that in every Author’s Note, barely made any progress with figuring out how to turn my books into real live hold-in-hand products, and instead wrote Just A Thingamajig. Or I couldn’t stand staying away from Gregor for one more second and went and worked on another 162,000 word book in the Guardians series.

Apparently I have very little self control. The lure of instant reader feedback is pretty compelling as they read chapters where a hot lycan finally can touch his little hybrid wolf mate. It’s like needing one more hit of heroin. Did I get emoji reactions? Comments? Or thrill of all thrills, another review? YAAAAS!

So, grinding out the editing and formatting and navigating the labyrinthine process of publishing my own books has very little appeal.

But, I finally got sick of waiting for myself. I think it might have been marking Horizon complete a few days ago which finally did it. The 10th book in the Guardians series, and other than the handful of readers who have faithfully followed along, who seem to love Gregor and history as much as I do, even the Recently Completed shelf on the Inkitt app barely created any additional reads.

So, clearly if I want to find a larger audience for guardian angels, I’ll need to do it off of Inkitt. Folks seem to like my Just Wolves series here, and for that I love them, but Guardians has my soul, and I feel compelled not to just let it languish here unnoticed.

So, time to get serious.

Here’s my plan with this “book”:

It’s not really a book. It’s not even a how-to guide. It’s sort of a blog/explanation of what I have done in figuring out the ONE MILLION things that have to be done. I don’t anticipate getting many reads on this thing, but I feel like putting these ideas in tangible form.

It’s to help me keep track of where I am in the process, what I am doing, and what is still left to be done. It’s to share the information I have gathered, to hold myself accountable, and to help any other authors here who are trying to do the same thing. I know that a lot of other writers would love to see their stories out in the real world as well. So there might be a couple of folks who will check this out.

I anticipate maybe a chapter per topic?

Like:

Writing the story

Editing the story

Formatting the story

Querying agents, and the subsequent giving up on querying agents

Figuring out the cover art, AI/no AI

Figuring out how to create the actual cover after the art is done

Deciding what print on demand service to use

ISBN’s (doesn’t that sound exciting?)

Proof copies (spoiler alert: I ordered from two different places today!)

There’s a lot more which I have absolutely no idea about. Marketing and Beta readers and ARC readers and podcasts and websites and god spare me, maybe I need to go write JUST AN OSTRICH!