Self-Publish On Your Own?  Work with a Self-Publishing Company?

The first step in self-publishing a book is to decide whether you want to handle the entire process on your own, or employ a self-publishing company to assist you.

Managing your own publishing process is much like being your own general contractor. Unless you’re already in the home-building business or know a lot about construction, being your own general contractor is tough because you don’t even know the right questions to ask. It’s the same thing in book publishing.

When you're self-publishing a book, you have to learn a little bit about a lot of things, quickly.  Whether it's the ins-and-outs of font choice or the nuances of cover design. When you hire separate designers, formatters, and so on, you often end up with territorial feuding between the various contractors. As a novice, you may end up wondering whose advice is correct. This type of situation can stall the project and make authors second-guess everything.

The advantage of handling the entire process on your own is that you can find exactly what you are looking for at every step of the way. However, the micromanagement of this process can be daunting and impractical. Instead of focusing your time and energy on a marketing strategy, you are learning the differences between paper weights and how they might affect the printing costs of your book. Unless you have the time to self-manage the entire publishing process, you’ll probably be sorry once it starts.

When you choose a top-rate self-publishing company to provide all, or most, of your publishing and marketing services, you get cohesion and presumably collective good advice. Of course, if you pick the wrong company, that statement is false.