“Self-Publishing is Super Easy… Kinda” Part 1 – Basics

Publishing is hard. You need to write the book, edit the book, edit the book some more, make some more edits, go back and edit the start, revise the ending, edit the book again, rewrite the opening, and edit the book again. Once you do that, what do you do? Try to get it published. Five hundred rejection letters later though, what do you do? Well, you could give up, that’s always an option. You could start over with a new book and try again, or you could take matters into your own hands, and self-publish your book. Publishing your story has become easier than ever through the modern methods of self-publishing. Self-publishing has become so profitable, that some authors who have only been at it for three years are making upwards of $200,000/year on their stories alone. 

Websites

I don’t need to delve into the hundreds of sites where you can upload and publish a story for free. DeviantArt, AO3, Tumblr, Wattpad, WebNovel, and Royal Road, or if you’re brave enough, post your story through Twitter. All these sites offer the same service. Just upload your book and let people read it. However, you won’t be making money this way. You can claim all you want that you’re only doing it for the art of literature and you don’t care about money, but if you want to keep doing this and make it a career, then you need to make money off your work. Thankfully, that’s easier than ever to do today. I can’t promise this works in every genre, as some are more profitable than others. I also can’t guarantee that these techniques will work for you, but these are just some techniques that I have looked heavily into as plausible methods of making money off of my writing. I’m just going to give you a quick walk-through of some techniques for self-publishing that you can utilize as well. Hopefully, if you weren’t aware of these options before, you will become more familiarized with them and can look into pursuing them as alternative options to publishing. 

Serialization & Patreon

One technique you can utilize that is rising in popularity is serialization. Think of it like a TV show. Rather than write an entire book, and publish it all at once, you can break the book up by its many chapters and release it periodically. This creates a steady stream of content that your audience can keep returning to over several months, rather than forcing them to wait a year or more for your next installment. One installment a year doesn’t look as pleasing as a new chapter releasing every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The most common method of making a profit out of this practice is by starting a Patreon and offering subscribers a chance to read a certain number of chapters in advance for money. The website Royal Road is notorious for this practice. Readers can log on and read Chapter 34 of your book now, or pay $10 on Patreon to read ahead to Chapter 44. Dedicated fans will pay to read in advance, while the public chapters draw in new readers who you can likely influence to pay for advance chapters. You’ll make a little bit of money doing this, so long as what you’re writing is what your target demographic wants. It will also require finding the best place to publish your story. The method of serialization, however, requires a consistent writing schedule. The standard advice most in this field will give you is to make sure you’re always a good forty chapters ahead of whatever is being published. This gives you ample time and opportunity to edit mistakes or corrections before the next installment is sent into the wild. After all, now that each chapter has a deadline, you don’t have a year to flesh out an entire book. You’ll be writing as you go along, so make sure you have a solid plan and future laid out for your story. This technique is usually in the favor of ‘Assassin’ writers, those who plan out their story meticulously before writing, as opposed to ‘Barbarians’, writers who write by the seat of their pants and pray something good comes out of it. This method of publishing can work for barbarian writers as well, so long as what you’re writing can stay consistent with the story you are telling, and can keep your readers’ attention. 

Let’s say you want to release three chapters a week. That means to keep up you will need to write at a minimum, three chapters a week. Write an entire backlog of chapters as a head start, and keep a consistent pace with how many chapters you want to upload. Most in this field would recommend a schedule of posting chapters around two to three times a week depending on the reader base. Now, let’s say you promote on your Patreon that for $10, readers can get access to 10 chapters in advance to what the public can read for free. After a month or two of uploading your awesome story, you might get 500 subscribers. You’re looking at $5000 a month. Maybe you add another tier, charging $15 for slightly more chapters in advance, or bonus materials such as first drafts of chapters for those interested in the writing process. The more tiers you provide, the more opportunities you have to make money through this business. On the higher end, I’ve found authors with this method making upwards of $21,000 a month charging only $10 for a handful of advanced chapters. At that point you’re self-made, you don’t need a ‘real job’, and you can dedicate your time to work on more chapters to keep the cash flow coming.

Above all else, the thing you truly need to succeed in self-publishing is the drive for success. It isn’t a simple matter of writing something, releasing it, and waiting for the money to roll in. You need to carry the motivation to push yourself through difficult times and continuously work on your material to keep up with whatever schedule you set up for yourself.