The Eight Things You Must Have Before Self-Publishing

When you’re just starting out on your journey to self-publish your first book, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the details you have to keep straight.

And if you’ve signed yourself up for some kind of workshop or coaching package that promises to give you all the inside information you need to optimize the process for yourself? Well, sometimes those programs can start to feel like they’re giving you a little too much value for your money, if you catch my drift.

I mean, you’re likely already overwhelmed by this whole new world you have to learn about, and here comes some (well-meaning) guru with a whole video module about best practices for picking BISAC codes and writing metadata. 

It’s at this point that you’re probably thinking a trip to your local UPS Store to print out a stack of photocopies might be your preferred escape route so you don’t have to wade through all these distribution-related subtleties just to get your book out into the world.

And while I do love a good zine-style publication, there’s no reason for you to abandon the notion of turning your story into an actual book just yet.

If you’re just getting started, I’m going to let you know right now that there’s really only a handful of nonnegotiable things you need to get your manuscript off your hard drive and onto your bookshelf.

Ready for the scoop? When it comes down to it, you’re basically just going to need:

• Your finished manuscript

• An editor

• A designer

• An ISBN

• A barcode

• A cover template

• A printer

• A way to sell your finished copies

That’s it!

Let’s dive in to what this looks like in practice.

Your Finished Manuscript

Completing your manuscript may, of course, take the most time of any of these steps, depending on the kind of story you’re telling and how much time you’re able to devote to writing and revising it. Needing several years to get it done may not be out of the question! But you really do need to have everything pretty well finished before you move into the editing and production phases of the self-publishing process. That doesn’t mean it has to be perfect, but it should be complete.

A professional Editor

Not an LLM. Not a friend who reads a lot. Not even an English teacher. I’m telling you that you’re going to need to hire an actual professional editor who has experience in book publishing. (Even this is distinct from newspaper or magazine journalists, who have their own editorial norms and conventions that don’t necessarily overlap with book editing.)

I always tell my own clients that my work as an editor is never meant to make a reader say, “Wow, this book was really well edited.” It’s just to clean up the text enough so that your own voice as an author shines through as clearly as possible without the avoidable distractions of any typos or grammatical errors. 

A professional Designer

I repeat: not an LLM. Not your friend who likes to make infographics for her Instagram account. Not your nephew who lays out whitepapers at a marketing agency. You need a professional designer who has experience with publishing industry layout conventions. 

Ideally you’d be working with someone who can design both your full cover and your interior pages, but you can certainly work with two different people if you choose (as long as you’re OK with the fact that you might have to coordinate some details between them).

One of the biggest giveaways that a book has been self-published is when the book layout looks wonky. Maybe the colors on the cover aren’t cohesive. Or maybe the margins in the interior are too small or the fonts are difficult on the eye. Or maybe your project features my own biggest personal pet peeve: line spaces inserted between each paragraph of text. 

(No! Don’t do this! While this kind of layout may be perfectly acceptable for something written to be read on a screen – like the very blog post you’re reading right now – it is emphatically not the kind of layout that works best on a printed page.)

Much like a professional editor can make your manuscript read smoothly so that your message comes through with clarity and precision, a design pro is going to bring an elegance to your book project that should ultimately be kind of invisible. The less noticeable any given design decision is, the more safe the reader is going to feel in your hands as the author. 

An expert design ultimately puts the focus back on your writing and message – but it takes a real pro trained in the conventions of the industry to do that for you.

An ISBN

OK, first of all, what even is an ISBN? 

The letters stand for “International Standard Book Number,” and in the publishing industry, we say it like this: “eye ess bee en.” (I have also heard people say “iz-bin,” though that always sounds kind of bonkers and wrong to me. But whatevs.)

An ISBN is a string of numbers that is unique to not just your book but each format of your book. So, if you’re going to release your book as a hardcover, and a paperback, and an ebook, and an audiobook, you will need four ISBNs total.

The ISBN should be included both on your copyright page and somewhere on the cover of the book (usually on the back cover, usually embedded in the barcode – more on barcodes below). 

If you’re in the United States, you’ll want to buy your ISBN from an agency called Bowker. If you live elsewhere in the world, you can do a search for the organization that provides ISBNs in and for your country via the International ISBN Agency.

Just a word of warning, if you’re planning to publish through Amazon’s KDP system, they will offer to provide you a number for free, which seems like a great deal up front – but just know that the number they give you completely locks you into their system. You wouldn’t be able to print and sell your book in any other store, and if you ever decide to remove your book from Amazon, you’d need to buy a new ISBN even if you don’t change anything else about the content of your book. So your best course of action is to just pay the money to buy your ISBN from the agency in your country up front. 

When you buy your ISBNs from Bowker, they will also offer you the add-on option of receiving a barcode along with your purchase for an extra charge. Before you say yes to this, check with your cover designer to see if they’ll be able to create the barcodes for you as part of the layout work you’re contracting them to do.

A Barcode

OK, since ISBNs and barcodes are so inextricably tied to each other, let’s go ahead and talk a bit more about barcodes now.

If you’re just planning to hand-sell copies of your book at local, in-person events, you don’t necessarily need a barcode. But if you’re planning to print on demand through Amazon, Ingram, or Books.by, you will need one for sure. 

As mentioned above, your cover designer will probably already have a barcode creation program, especially if they’re a book-industry pro with experience like I’ve been recommending. But if they don’t, you can pay the additional fee for Bowker to create one for each of your ISBNs, or you can even splash out the money to download a program like Barcode Producer. (Hey, then you can make all your own barcodes for your current project as well as any future books you may decide to write! And you can make them for your friends’ books too!) 

I always recommend including the price of the book on your barcode, but this is not strictly necessary. The main requirement is just for the book’s unique ISBN to appear on it. So, you’ll need to create separate barcodes for your separate physical editions – your paperback edition will need its own barcode with its associated ISBN on it, as will your hardcover edition. 

Depending on who is creating the barcodes for you, just be sure that your cover designer has digital copies of them whenever they’re preparing the full cover layout. Usually the designer will put it on the back cover, in the lower right-hand corner.

A Cover Template

If you’re planning to print physical copies of your book (that is, if you’re not just releasing an ebook), you will need a cover template from the printer that’s going to produce the copies. 

What is a cover template? It’s a basic schematic that shows the exact dimensions of your book – height, width, and depth. 

You and your designer have probably already figured out the trim size of our book when you first started working on the interior layout together. The most common sizes are 5.5 x 8.5 and 6 x 9 (in portrait orientation). Once your typesetting is mostly complete, you’ll also know how long the book is going to be – 224 pages or 336 pages or whatever. (The final page count should always be an even number – there are two sides to each sheet of paper, after all!)

In order to prepare a cover template for you, the printer you’re working with – whether that’s a local printer or a POD service like Amazon or Ingram – will need to know your book’s trim size and page count. They will also need to know what kind of interior paper you want to print on.

If you’re publishing a straight-text book in black and white, you’ll probably want a 50# or 60# sheet in a white or cream color. (These are pretty standard options.) What you’re really figuring out here is the interplay of the bulk of the paper itself and the total number of pages in your book – the measurement of that bulk is going to determine how thick the spine of your book will be.

As with the barcode, you’ll share this cover template with your designer when you receive it. These measurements will help your designer set up your full cover layout visually so that everything is centered and so that none of the art or text gets cut off or pushed too far toward the edge when it’s finally printed.

A Printer

If you’re only planning to hand sell your books at local events, you’ll most likely want to produce your books at a printer near your city or state. That way, you can pick up the books at the facility or have them shipped directly to your home. (Just make sure you have somewhere to store all the boxes! There may be quite a stack of them depending on how many copies of the book you’re planning to print.)

But, assuming that you’re going to rely on a print-on-demand service to produce the copies as orders are received, your book will most likely be printed by Amazon or Ingram. Once you create your account with the service of your choice, you’ll be able to figure out how much it will cost to print one copy of the book (which is based on the trim size, the page count, and the kind of paper you’re printing on). 

Knowing the print cost will then help you figure out what price you should sell the book for. You’ll want to make sure that you’re not losing money on each copy that’s printed; ideally, you’d even be making a bit of money per copy so that you can start to pay yourself back for all the upfront costs of self-publishing (like hiring your pro editor and designer and so forth).

A Way To Sell Your Finished Copies

Again, if you’re part of a DIY community where you’re going to be selling your book at local festivals or at other in-person events, you can totally do these exchanges by hand, in cash. But if you’re wading into the wild world of online sales and promotion, you’re most likely going to be selling the book via the same service that printed it – you guessed it, Ingram or Amazon. 

That way, when you start telling friends and coworkers that the book is available, they’ll be able to order a copy without your needing to necessarily be part of the exchange. Just give them the link and bam! Plus, when people you don’t even know start searching for a book on the subject matter you’re an expert in, you’re going to start getting sales that way too. That’s the big, big benefit of making your book available online via these common book-discovery platforms; you’ll be able to connect with readers who are looking for the information that you’re sharing.

However, if you do want to make your book available for sale online but do not want to use Ingram or Amazon specifically, you can consider printing copies at your local printer but then using a platform like Gumroad or Bigcartel to collect orders. Again, you’ll be responsible for storing the printed books and then shipping out copies when someone buys one. But selling your work this way is certainly an option if you’d like to retain a bit of control over that aspect of the process.

You’re On Your Way to Being a Published Author!

And there you have it! Those are the bare bones essentials that you need to self-publish your book: your finished manuscript, an editor, a designer, an ISBN, a barcode, a cover template, a printer, and a way to sell your finished copies.

Are there other finesse-level things that it’s good and nice and helpful to have on your self-publishing journey? Yes, of course. The rabbit hole is truly endless when it comes to ways you can optimize your sales, visibility, author platform, and so on.

But to truly just lock down the essentials – especially if you’re still in the early stages of figuring all this stuff out – these eight must-haves are going to put you in a really good position to hit the ground running.

Good luck! I believe in you!

And, if you’re interested in hiring me to walk you through all these details and more, check out my Screen to Shelf program for bespoke self-publishing concierge services tailored to your unique book project and your unique author journey.