Lessons Learned From Self Publishing A Book

I was an avid reader from an early age, born lucky with parents who gave me books, time and attention. Formative texts included The Lord Of The Rings, The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, Frankenstein and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. 

At about the age of eight I wrote a story called ‘The Alien From Yxzfexoshs’.  The teacher-nuns at the Catholic school I was going to were open-minded enough to praise me for this ‘work of big imagination’ and I received stickers a-plenty. This planted a seed in me that maybe I could also write stories that other people would read.  

Of course, the teenage years came around, and after a bit of literary experimentation running role-playing games, I changed direction completely and dove into the world of drums and guitar, forming and playing in bands until the end of the 2010s. I did try my hand at songwriting and enjoyed writing country music lyrics, and rap. 

It took a complete change of environment and lifestyle to spur me on to think once again about being an actual Writer, where the only content in the art is words. It’s such a sparse and bold medium. I started shaping my thoughts, songs and bits and pieces into journal entries, and then those into drafts of stories. 

Over the course of about six months I wrote 13 stories and decided to give them a proper home. Having spent years interacting with record companies, distributors, venues and all the machinery of the music industry, I felt well equipped to make the decision to self publish. Why? Because I didn’t want anyone else’s opinions about my Art to slow down the delivery of my work to the people who mattered to me. My goals had shifted from creating work for some nameless crowd, and instead I imagined my close friends and family reading my work. 

So I designed a cover, found a printer, and made 200 physical copies. Some colleagues at work heard about it and arranged a book launch at the office. I sold a few dozen copies and donated the money to the Oxfam bookshop where my wife worked. This event was incredible and stands out as one of the happiest moments of my creative life. Big thanks to those colleagues, especially Leah! 

I gifted some copies of the book to my dearest friends and family around the world, at least those who I thought would enjoy it, and there are still a few lurking in my shed.

I also set up an online distribution and the book is available in various places. I did next to zero marketing of the book in a traditional sense, I think perhaps a few tweets to the couple of hundred twitter followers I had at the time and probably a Facebook post.

That was five years ago.

Today I reflect on some of the things I learned from this experience. 

Image from front cover of Danger Dreams

Completing something feels good

Really good.

I think all of us who want to make and share art struggle with that feeling that nothing gets done, or at least, not enough gets done. This is not healthy thinking, however a small amount of it is needed to generate the momentum to fill a blank page with something. 

Holding a physical book in my hands felt really good, giving it to people even better, and getting positive or even negative feedback was… priceless. 

One success does not make the next one easier

I thought this would be the beginning of a side-career in writing short stories. I wasn’t expecting to get paid or ‘proper published’, but at least I would crank out some more stories for those few people who said things like “it’s not because I know you, I really like it, when will there be more?”

And yet, I have not completed a single story since November 2016! There are a bunch of notes and drafts and ideas and mind maps and all of the paraphernalia of a Writer, but nothing complete. This fact not only saddens me, it astounds me! 

Of course I can rationalise and list many reasons for not writing and I can even forgive myself, but trying to glean the lesson from this, I think it is that making a piece of art does not make the next piece easier. Naively, I expected getting one thing off the ground would create some kind of feedback loop that would encourage me to do it again. I was waiting for it to feel easier to finish than it did the first time. Instead, I should have expected it to feel harder. The analogy I think is appropriate is lifting weights - if you want to get stronger, you need to lift more, which will always be more difficult than the previous lift. 

Self publishing means acting like a publisher, even the bits you don’t like

I have spent too much time wondering about the relationship between art and commerce and when and how to invite that most difficult but essential  partner called ‘Marketing’ into the mix. For many years I thought I was anti-marketing which I now equate more to a fear of success and mild case of sour-grapes. As I stand here now, especially in this world of remote connections and complete information overload, I see that marketing is essential. My book is available on more than ten different online stores, but the entirety of my marketing lasted about one week, a hugely lacklustre and inconsistent affair. 

Extending the lesson a bit more and generalising it, I think this means we need to take ownership of all aspects of a project - and if there is no publisher or marketer to help, then this doesn’t mean those jobs are not important, it means you need to do them, or find someone who will.

Pleasing a small crowd is better than trying to please nameless masses

One thing I did correctly with my book was to focus only on creating something that I was happy with, and which I thought my friends and artistic comrades would get some level of interest from. Nothing was diluted, filtered or removed to somehow cater to a nameless crowd. The book was a huge success against the criteria I had set. This felt good, and made the whole process relatively stress free, and mostly exciting. 

In coming weeks and months I will be re-reading my stories and offering some commentary on them on this site.

I hope this short post might inspire you to press print on something you’ve been holding on to.

Danger Dreams is available through BookBaby and many other online retailers.