3 Lessons Learned from a Self-Publishing Experience

In 1992, I and four others self-published the Tales from the Emperor’s Kitchen: An Anthology of Poetry, Short Stories, and Essays. None of us expected the book to confer upon us literary greatness (it didn’t), or ensure our financial security for life (it lost money). The book has long gone out of print, my co-authors have tossed their extra copies of the book, and my storage closet has a box with a few copies.

However, the experience of writing and self-publishing the book provided some valuable lessons.

1. You must define your audience before you start writing.

When we decided to create the anthology, everyone was excited about what it would be like to be a published author. That excitement propelled each of us to write what we did. Yet what we prepared, in many cases, were things that we as writers were interested in, and not necessarily what our readers would be interested in.

It gets worse. We never defined our audience until the book was off the press.

In the end, our audience was comprised of relatives and friends who purchased the book not for its literary merit, but because they knew someone who had written in it.

2. You must define what your audience will buy and read.

In some cases, publishing a book only for your relatives and friends might be enough to proceed. There’s something to be said for visiting your grandparents’ home and finding several copies of your book on their bookshelf. (Of course, there’s more to be said when those books are being read by and shared among others, things you don’t always get to see first-hand.)

But back to the audience analysis. Just what would our audience actually purchase (and better still, read)? The five co-authors came from very different backgrounds, and therefore felt comfortable writing different things. (In my case, I was more comfortable with essays than short stories.)

If we were clear about our audience and what it wanted, we would have found a model book to help us visualize, design, and prepare our book. Readers in a particular genre have expectations for how a book must look and how the content will be organized.

In our case, we had no model book for what we were trying to accomplish. We just did it. The good news was that we produced a book. The bad news was that it didn’t necessarily meet the reader’s needs.

3. You must pay attention to the business side of things.

My group entered the project knowing that we’d lose money. We did. We figured it was our tuition for learning about self-publishing and actually producing a book.

You don’t need to pay that sort of tuition today, thanks to e-books and print-on-demand technology that prints only when an order is actually placed.

It’s easier to self-publish today than at any time previously. If you’re self-publishing your work through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Lulu, Smashwords, or some other service, you’ve got advantages when it comes to producing your book and tracking sales, because these vendors can help you.

Learn all you can about these vendors before going with them, so you can give your book—and your pocketbook—the best chance for success.

Another business lesson involved naming our press. We called ourselves Brookfield Press, because our group would meet in Brookfield, Wisconsin, to review our manuscripts before going to lunch at a Chinese restaurant, the Emperor’s Kitchen (which, obviously, inspired the book title). What we didn’t know at the time was there was another Brookfield Press. This press was in Australia, and it had published a textbook called Physics of the Earth. We had to deal with many queries about that book, and not ours.

Make sure your business name is original.