My advice on self-publishing: Don’t even think about it until your novel is completely finished.
A year ago I started looking into self-publishing and the independent author surge alongside the ebook phenomenon. A year ago I was getting prepared to put my novel into publication.
A year ago.
And now twelve months later I have finally done it. For a long while I had spent too much of my time researching self-publishing, figuring out how to format for ebooks, learning the market, trends, tips, tricks, and techniques. All that while I could have been finishing my novel, or starting on the next project.
Interest in self-publishing is fine, and I would recommend self-publishing for authors looking to remain independent, but a writer needn’t worry about it until he or she has a complete piece of work.
It takes all of an hour to format a book properly for an ereader, and another twenty minutes to make an account and upload a completed book onto Amazon or any of the other ebook programs. That’s all.
Any delusions of grandeur or secret knowledge attained by hours and hours of market research are false and cumbersome. It will only delay getting your work onto the market. After completing a novel and after uploading it into the market should the independent author concern him or herself with knowledge of the market.
To sum it all up, don’t waste your time thinking about self-publishing until you are ready to publish. There is little to gain from it until your project is ready.
Write. Write well. Edit better. Finish it, then focus on publishing it.
Just two cents from a first-time self-publisher.
