Self-Publishing Adventures
The road to publishing DESTINED TO BE NORMAL
Hi everyone!
I’m back again, and I’d like to share with you my experience self-publishing Destined to Be Normal. I had some interesting adventures where some unexpected things happened and I think it’d be fun to tell you.
Destined to Be Normal was written and revised pre-pandemic. I believe I finished the “final” draft in November or December 2019, at which point I decided to set it aside so I could look it over again in a few months’ time with fresh eyes and begin the publishing process.
Then, the pandemic happened.
Needless to say, it took me a lot longer than a “few months” to get back to it. I had some beta readers look over it midway through one of the lockdowns in the hopes that having others read it would inspire me to work on it some more, but it didn’t end up giving me the boost I needed. I think at that point I was just burning out and couldn’t focus on my professional writing career at all.
For a while, I tried to focus on “fun writing” instead. My goal was to just focus on enjoying the writing process without the extra weight of intending to publish what I was working on. I ended up writing lots of beginnings of things, some short stories, random scenes with no plot, and experiments in other genres. It was fun and very freeing, and I was able to rediscover my love for writing.
By the time I was ready to work on Destined to Be Normal again, over two years had passed. Since the book had been shelved for so long, I decided I didn’t want to try and go a more traditional route and find a publisher or agent. The book had already been waiting long enough to see the light of day. Not to mention, there are many aspects of self-publishing that I found attractive, and my experiences self-publishing my poetry gave me the confidence to consider this route.
When it comes to self-publishing, there can be many costs. Editing, cover design, and print and ebook formatting are the “big three” when it comes to prepping a work for publication. I considered my options and decided that the one area I shouldn’t scrimp on was editing. I had some knowledge of Photoshop-type programs thanks to a course in high school, and I found some tutorials on formatting books using Microsoft Word. So, there were some aspects of publishing I was confident I could do myself. I figured once I was finished doing the rounds of editing, the rest of the publishing journey should be smooth sailing.
Well. I was wrong.
While tutorials about formatting books using Microsoft Word make it look easy, the reality is Word has a ton of quirks I wasn’t expecting. Following the example of the tutorial, I made all my chapters in the heading style, but when I added page numbers to the document, the numbering would reset to 1 at the beginning of a new chapter. In addition, I had sectioned off my book into “parts” in addition to chapters, and that presented challenges as well.
When my frustration had reached an all-time high, I turned to my online writing communities for advice. I discovered that IngramSpark had a book-building tool with lots of template options, so I decided to try that out.
Once again, that presented its own challenges. At first, the book-building tool wasn’t recognizing the “parts” and was instead melding them with the chapters. No matter what I did, no matter how many page breaks I added on my original document, my chapter headings were messy. I couldn’t find a ton of information on how to use the book builder, as most support materials were for the general functions instead of the more specific ones I needed. I tried searching all kinds of things, but nothing was yielding the right result.
I was ready to throw my computer out the window.
After more trial and error, I figured out how to split sections and label them, but what ended up saving me in the end was literally removing all previous formatting and reuploading the document to the book builder. I was amazed and a bit annoyed at how simple the solution was. Now, I know for next time.
The book was finally all formatted and ready to be published! I eagerly wrapped up building my files and approved the final proofs.
It was only after doing so that I realized I had made a mistake in the copyright page.
I had looked at several copyright pages of published books and saw that many included the ISBN for the print and ebook version of the book. I wanted to do the same for Destined to Be Normal. But when I copy-pasted the ISBN from my account into the copyright page, I had missed a couple numbers. The print ISBN was all wrong. I couldn’t have that going out into the world!
I had to wait for Ingram to finish processing the book before I could make the changes. Then, I had to select that I needed to upload new files. Then, I had to wait for that request to be processed. By the time I was ready to chew on drywall from all the anxiety of waiting, nearly a week after I started the process of actually publishing the thing, Ingram asked me to approve my book for distribution.
Finally, more than two months since I got my final edits, I was ready to say YES! I was ready to publish! And now, it’s finally out there. I did it all myself!
Needless to say, this was an experience. I think maybe it’ll be a smoother experience next time.
Maybe.