Self Publishing 101

Publishing your book yourself makes sense for a number of reasons. Foremost, with the advent of digital printing, a small number of books, say 50 or 100, can be printed at a viably low cost per copy, and reprinted in small quantities as needed. Previously, lithographic printing was the only option, where you needed to print thousands of copies to obtain a low per unit cost.

Also, if you choose to self publish, you retain all rights to your work as well as editorial control. This means that you don’t hand over the licensing rights of your work for a great number of years, most likely the rest of your natural life. Also, traditional publishers will pocket most of the profit. In South Africa’s small market, where even a best seller does not equate to huge numbers of books, this means self publishing makes financial sense too. But it also means that you have to take responsibility for the success of your book, and while this can seem daunting to new authors, again in our small market, individuals have relatively easy access to the media and other publicity channels. For example, we don’t have literary agents in South Africa, and with the professional advice and know-how systematically provided by Self Publish SA during the book-making process, authors will find themselves perfectly capable of acting on their own behalf to sell their work. Local publishing houses “rely heavily on authors to market their own work” anyway, to quote an acquaintance who is an executive at a large Cape Town publisher, and if this is the case, then there's no reason why authors shouldn't be making the money too.

All of this doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to find a publisher for your work, but if you’ve tried without any success so far, yet remain determined, self publishing remains an excellent interim measure. Self Publish SA gives you a professional quality product in hand. And in your efforts to publicise and market it yourself, you stand a greater chance of attracting the attention of mainstream publishers. This is particularly true for writers of fiction, where publishers and literary critics are so often wildly off of the mark when it comes to tomorrow’s best-seller list.

Self-publishing also suits niche writers, people who write their family memoirs, for instance, or poets, and authors of motivational and spiritual books, who often wish to use their books to complement and further broader career objects. These books can be impeccably edited and designed, inexpensively printed in small quantities and distributed to friends and within appropriate circles.