Choose The Best Self-Publishing Services: ALLi's Guide To Assembling Your Tools And Team

By Alliance of Independent Authors and John Doppler

Authors: Want to know how to assemble the perfect self-publishing team for you, which services are reputable and which to avoid? This guide has the answers.

Choose the Best Self-Publishing Services is a comprehensive guide to hiring services across the seven stages of the publishing process: editorial, design, production, distribution, marketing, promotion and rights licensing.

Drawing on the experience of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi)’s watchdog desk, it sources industry data from a thousands-strong community of professional authors working every day on the publishing front line.

The book assesses companies that sell publishing tools and services against a code of standards for ethics and excellence. It takes an individualist and creative approach, encouraging you to think critically and choose the best self-publishing partners for your business, covering everyone from large players like Amazon KDP and Apple Books to your local freelance editors and designers.

In easy-to-understand chunks, you will learn:

• What collaborators you need to produce high-quality books
• When and what to outsource, and how much it should cost
• Processes to assess any tool or service before you pay
• The criteria you need to assess any service for yourself
• The steps you can take to recover if you’ve fallen for a scam

The principles and practices outlined in this book work across all genres—fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—and will empower you to build a strong publishing team, produce better books, and sell more copies around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Font Publications
• Release date: Nov 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913588793

Book preview

CHOOSE THE BEST SELF-PUBLISHING SERVICES

CHOOSE THE BEST SELF-PUBLISHING SERVICES

ALLI’S GUIDE TO ASSEMBLING YOUR TOOLS AND TEAM

ALLIANCE OF INDEPENDENT AUTHORS

JOHN DOPPLER

Series Editor

ORNA A. ROSS

Font Publications, London, UK

CHOOSE THE BEST SELF-PUBLISHING SERVICES

ALLi’s Guide to Assembling Your Tools and Your Team

5th edition

© 2022 John Doppler, Orna Ross

Alliance of Independent Authors

E-BOOK: 978-1-913588-79-3

PAPERBACK: 978-1-913588-61-8

LARGE PRINT: 978-1-913588-62-5

HB: 978-1-913588-63-2

AUDIO: 978-1-913349-05-9

Editorial: Daisy Editorial, Dan Parsons, Denise Cowle, Lauren Johnson

Cover Design: Jane Dixon Smith

The authors’ moral rights have been asserted. All rights reserved. Enquiries: [e-mail]

Orna Ross Publications Logo

Vellum flower icon Created with Vellum

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to many people for the creation of this book. For book production, thanks to Margaret Hunter at Daisy Editorial for editorial and formatting of previous editions, to Lauren Johnson for this edition, and to Dan Parsons and Sarah Begley for publishing production. Thanks also to the fine folks at Scrivener for their writing software and Vellum for their formatting app.

In gathering information about self-publishing services, we owe a debt of thanks to author community activists like David Gaughran, Dan Holloway, Giacomo (Jim) Giammatteo, Joanna Penn, Mick Rooney, Helen Sedwick, Victoria Strauss, and Mark Williams and many others, for their unfailing work on behalf of authors.

And, as ever, our thanks to the members of the Alliance of Independent Authors—Author and Partner Members—whose experiences and feedback form the backbone of this book and all ALLi services.

CONTENTS

I. Introduction

Protection & Proactivity

How ALLi Can Help

Protection: Writer Beware®

Proactivity: The Value of Control

II. Publishers & Publishing Services

1. The Principle of Non-Exclusivity

2. Contracts & Agreements

III. Independent Self-Publishing

3. Going Indie

4. Writing Services

5. Editorial Services

6. Design Services

7. Production Services

8. Distribution Services

9. Marketing Services

10. Promotion Services

11. Publishing Rights Services

IV. Assisted Self-Publishing

12. Packaged Services

13. Hybrid Publishers

14. Vanity Presses

V. How to Evaluate Any Self-Publishing Service

15. Publishing Models: Risks and Advantages

16. ALLi’s Service Ratings

17. Evaluating a Service Yourself

18. Ten Questions To Ask A Self-Publishing Service

VI. When Things Go Wrong

19. How to Deal with an Unresponsive Service

20. Recovering from a Bad Service

VII. The Future

21. The Creator Economy

22. Emerging Technologies

Your Next Step

Glossary of Terms

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Other Guides

PART I

INTRODUCTION

BY ORNA A. ROSS, DAVID GAUGHRAN AND VICTORIA STRAUSS

This book defines the questions every author needs to ask about any services they’re considering for hire, whether they are a beginner, or are publishing a first book, or have many books in their backlist. Its aim is to enable you to choose the best self-publishing service for whatever point you’re at in your book publishing, right now.

In this section, three community activists explain the self-publishing services sector, through the lens of self-protection and proactivity, and the sorts of issues that arise.

PROTECTION & PROACTIVITY

BY ORNA A. ROSS

As self-publishers, we spend our lives grappling with questions. How do I make a better book? How do I reach more readers? What services and supports do I need? How much will it cost me? How much can I make?

At the beginning, many writers begin by typing self-publishing into a search engine and instantly find themselves drowning in jargon and in listings paid for by vanity services. The answers to their questions are there somewhere, but rarely on the first page, and framed in a hundred different ways by a hundred different companies and bloggers.

And answers only seem to lead to more questions. How much should an editor cost? How do I protect my copyright? Is it worth paying for promotion? Where do I find good services that won’t rip me off?

It’s not just beginners who need assistance in choosing the best services. Self-publishing is a fast-changing sector and we are all constantly learning and improving. The services we need change over time. Whatever stage we’re at, we must source our assistance in an environment where some services are run by people who are knowledgeable, innovative, and fair, while others are clueless, greedy, and callous. Where the same service can cost $500 or $15,000, depending on where you shop. Where many of the worst services dominate the information stream and search engines online, trapping unwary authors with slick advertising and bait-and-switch tactics. And where there is more and more choice every day.

Even experienced indie authors can feel overwhelmed by this unregulated market that is so creative, innovative, and exciting and so idiosyncratic, unregulated, and increasingly fragmented.

Our aim in this, the second guidebook in the Publishing Guides for Indie Authors series, is to outline all your service options so you can put together the best possible team to support your writing, and sustain a profitable publishing enterprise.

THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

The publishing industry today is made up of two sectors: self-publishing, where the writer of the book funds and oversees publication, with the assistance of self-publishing services, and third-party publishing, where individuals and companies license publishing rights from authors and undertake the tasks of publication on their behalf.

Third-party publishing is dominated by corporate publishing houses Penguin-Random House (PRH), Hachette Book Group (HBG), Harper Collins, and Macmillan, known as the Big Four, although the recent acquisition of Simon & Schuster by PRH is being contested. And a relative newcomer to the field is Amazon Publishing, a division of Amazon that offers a trade-publishing model, and not to be confused with Amazon’s self-publishing platforms, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX).

As well as these large corporations, there is also a vibrant independent publishing sector (indie publishers), third-party publishers with a variety of structures, sizes and business models. In third-party publishing, the publishing house and its business associates—editors, agents, librarians, booksellers, professional critics, other curators and gatekeepers—determine which authors succeed within their confines. The challenge for authors in this sector is breaking into this tight, hierarchical system, characterized by scarcity.

In the self-publishing sector, it’s the opposite. There, they must negotiate a loose, fragmented, unregulated publishing model, characterized by abundance. As they produce and promote their own books through their own websites, retail partners, social media, and other digital platforms, they face a confusing cornucopia of choice.

Thanks to digital tools and services, putting a book out is getting easier all the time. Publishing well, however, is more than book production, and means putting a book(s) through the seven processes outlined in the first book in this series: Creative Self-Publishing:

Editorial

Design

Production

Distribution

Marketing

Promotion

Rights licensing

That is the job for every publisher, from individual author to Penguin-Random House. It’s a lot of work, employing very different skill sets, and as an author, you might think it’s all too much for you, or that you don’t have enough hours in your day, or that you can have only a limited reach. By using the right self-publishing services, however, you compound your time and energy.

The Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes once said: Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. Good publishing tools and services are the indie author’s lever and fulcrum.

Publishers Don’t Ask for Payment

Before the internet unlocked literary doors, there was a simple divide in place. On the one hand, you had publishers and they paid you. On the other, you had vanity publishers and you paid them.

If you were taken on by the former, you were entitled to call yourself a published author and be proud that somebody besides your family and friends thought your book was worthwhile. If you were reaching for your wallet to hire the latter, you were thought to be vain and deluded. Even back then, though, there were determined and self-motivated authors who used self-publishing to break through to their readers. Writers like Jill Patton Walsh, whose self-published novel Knowledge of Angels was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, or Margaret Atwood whose self-published poetry book won the EJ Pratt Medal, or Wayne Dyer, whose put his self-published self-help guides in the back of his car and went from town to town across the United States, doing promotional talks, until they became bestsellers.

From classic self-publishers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Mark Twain to today’s JK Rowling, who self-publishes her e-books through her proprietary platform, Pottermore, there were always some enterprising writers who worked outside the third-party publishing system to reach readers directly. For most, though, paying for publication in the past was largely a vain effort, because book distribution was print based, through a tightly controlled supply chain. It was almost impossible for a writer with a garage full of books to break in.

And paying for publication carried a stigma. If an author hadn’t succeeded in finding a publisher who’d invest in their work, that assumption was that their work wasn’t good enough. That this assumption was wrong in countless cases has now been proven by the new self-publishing technologies. Manuscripts once relegated to rejection are now finding engaged readers and avid fans through self-publishing.

While the old distinction—a publisher pays you, a self-publishing service is paid by you—remains largely true today, the invention of digital publishing tools at the start of the 21st century changed everything. Varied business models and new approaches emerged, including companies attempting to straddle the line between both sectors, offering a traditional publishing framework (curation and some services), but charging the author upfront to offset the cost of production, rather than a percentage later.

SELF-PUBLISHING SERVICES

The self-publishing services sector is comprised of three service types: independent services, assisted services, and vanity services.

Independent Self-Publishing Services

For those authors who want to maximize their control and their return on investment. Individual companies and freelancers hired by independent, self-publishing indie authors, who upload their own books directly to self-publishing distributors and operate as the creative director of their book publishing and author business. Such services include individual, local freelance designers and editors and huge, global companies like Amazon KDP and Apple Books.

Assisted Self-Publishing Services

For those authors who want more support or who value time more than money. Companies and sole traders that bundle the seven processes of publishing into packages. Some offer hybrid publishing arrangements that adopt some of the practices of trade publishing, including curation and physical bookstore distribution. Assisted publishing is also referred to as subsidy publishing or joint publishing, and other names. There are legitimate hybrid publishers but the term has become popular among companies that wish to put a new, innovative face on an age-old activity: overcharging writers for book production while not engaging with the most challenging parts of the publishing process: marketing, promotion and rights licensing.

Authors shopping in this sector need to exercise caution as vanity presses often use this more acceptable term to cover up shoddy operations. (See Chapter 14 for more.)

Adding to the complexity is the confusion between hybrid publishers and hybrid authors. The latter term is used by some to describe authors who publish some of their books themselves and some with third-party publishers. At ALLi we think the term indie author is a less-confusing description as managing submissions to, or approaches from, publishers and other rights buyers is part of being an independent, empowered author-publisher, the creative director of your books and your publishing business.

Vanity Services, Unqualified Services

To be avoided. Today, the term vanity publisher or vanity press is generally used to describe self-publishing services that deliberately exploit authors’ publishing ambitions and engage in ineffective, sub-standard, misleading or, in the worst cases, outright deceptive practices with the intention to extract as much money as possible from the author.

To add even more murk to the mix, some corporate publishers, including Penguin-Random House and Simon and Schuster, have aligned with some of the worst vanity services in an attempt to cash in on the self-publishing boom.

No wonder authors are confused and chary.

CHOOSING A SERVICE

Choosing the best self-publishing service for you means by arming yourself with good information and being clear-sighted about what you want from a service, and also what a service can actually do for you. Your service needs will change as you become a more experienced publisher.

Whether you’re just starting out, or already have a book or two behind you, publishing is a complex skill set. If somebody is making success sound easy, beware.

Before making a hire, ask yourself why you are attracted to the particular form of assistance you’re considering. Maybe you want a service that will take away all the tasks you don’t want to do, leaving you free to just write. That’s an understandable desire, but is that actually what you’ll get? (Spoiler alert: there is no such service.)

Even the biggest publishing houses expect their authors to engage in book marketing and may or may not supplement those efforts. Few published authors get a decent marketing budget these days. Similarly, a self-publishing service that promises a soup-to-nuts service will expect you to contribute time and energy as well as money.

Choosing the best services for your next title requires a two-pronged approach. The first prong is protection. The second is proactivity.

1. The Protective Approach

Take a protective approach first, particularly if you’re a new and eager author, to save you from falling victim to a bad actor.

There are many ways an unscrupulous operator can leave you worse off than they found you, and not all are financial. Vanity presses will try to mystify you with jargon and offer bloated service packages to crowbar as much money from you as possible. The worst will also try to inveigle you into signing away your publishing rights.

By writing a book, you have automatically created intellectual property rights, for example:

audiobook rights

TV & film rights

board game rights

merchandising rights

The most significant advantage in being a self-publishing, independent author is that you keep these rights when you self-publish your books and can go on to license them…unless you sign a contract that hands them to another.

A discussion on this topic could fill a whole other book—and does! See How Authors Sell Publishing Rights (Book 6 in this series) for a detailed examination of the issues surrounding rights licensing. You don’t need that in-depth knowledge until you come to that stage, which is the final stage in the publishing process. All that’s important earlier on is to know these rights exist, and not to surrender them unknowingly.

Control of your book production, control of your metadata, control of your book’s positioning, marketing and promotion online and off are all rights that are not to be given up lightly, whether to a trade-publisher or a self-publishing service.

Some service or publishing contracts limit your opportunities and control. Some have clauses that sneakily grab your rights. Some include non-compete clauses that prohibit you from publishing anything in the future without their permission. Many of these companies pose as publishers and use flattery, bait-and-switch tactics, and anything that will pull you into their orbit.

This isn’t meant to scare you but to encourage you to look at all author service and publishing contracts with protection in mind first, and check terms and conditions carefully.

Don’t start out thinking the only way you can see your book published is by handing over a truckload of cash, or your publishing rights, to a third-party. Get help if needed. (ALLi will check any contract for any member). Armed with knowledge, you will be able to weigh risk and benefit, and won’t be susceptible to persuasion tactics.

The best service providers don’t want to take control of your work. They give you the tools, information, or labor you need to operate and the freedom to use them as you choose. They make money when you make money, or they add clear and significant value to one or more publishing process.

These are the people you want to work with.

2. The Proactive Approach

Once you’ve identified that a service poses no threat, that you are not being overcharged, that there is no rights grab, that the service you’re considering has industry approval and happy customers, you can begin to engage more proactively.

A proactive approach analyses a service company or publisher with your personal publishing goals and intentions in mind. It seeks the service that will maximize your revenue and optimise your overall success, as you define it, at this time.

In making proactive decisions, you are doing much more than simply choosing a service; you are adopting a method and a process and creating collaborations that may become lifetime partnerships.

On your first outing as a self-publisher the big choice you’re faced with is whether to take the independent route—directly hiring editors, designers, virtual assistants, and marketing services and directly uploading finished book files to one online retailers and distributors—or to hire an assisted service, that