Many of you have asked me, “What does publishing a book yourself involve?” As far as I can tell, for many people the process looks like this:

Step 1: Write a book.
Step 2: Publish the book.
Step 3: Profit.

Honestly. It is possible to write a book in a week, slap together some cover art, and e-publish it on Amazon in a single evening. Some people do this. They churn out stories like Willy Wonka pumping out bizarre confections.

However! For other writers, there is Much More To It Than That. So, my good person, let me break it down for you. (You’re lucky this isn’t a podcast, otherwise I would take this opportunity to break into a ‘90s-style rap about e-pub versus POD.) I’ve used first-person plural so it feels like we’re really in this together—because as far as I’m concerned, we are!

1. Write a book. Have we done that? Oh, good. Phew! God, okay, that’s a relief. I panicked for a minute, there. Like when you have one of those nightmares about a test you didn’t study for—what do you mean I spent seven years on this book and it isn’t actually written?! So, that’s…whew. That’s good. Let us proceed.

2. Have the thing edited. Because we have a dreadful desire to seem like we know what we’re doing, we have hired a professional editor. She’s great, but mysterious. Our contract states we aren’t allowed to reveal her full name anywhere except in the acknowledgments of our book. She is a shadowy figure, which is part of the reason we hired her. That, and she described our sample pages as “wry” and knows her way around a hyphen. So.

3. Do some research. I mean, we’re gonna have to research all SORTS of things, so get ready. What price points are comparative novels selling at? What’s the best subgenre to categorize our book under? Is it really a hard-and-fast rule that a preposition is something you shouldn’t end a sentence with? So much to learn!

4. Write front and back cover copy. Did you think we were finished writing once we reached “The End” on our manuscript? Fools! We are never finished! There will always be more to write! This copy may include a tagline, blurb, acknowledgments, dedication, About the Author page, maps, and so on. It’s the Boring Stuff, and the Difficult Stuff, so we must make sure to reward ourselves with little treats when we’ve been a good child and finished our tedious work.

5. Format. Once the book is entirely edited—which includes several rounds of tearily clicking through the thousands of suggested revisions from our mysterious editor, then pausing to gaze out the window and wonder if there has ever been a soul as downtrodden as ours—we can whip this baby into shape. Page numbers! Headings! Uh…I don’t know what else. We’re entering territory I haven’t experienced yet. Chapter…breaks…?

6. Design the cover. Or, rather, have a professional design it for us. We don’t want the book to look like those report covers we “designed” in 1998 using Microsoft WordArt.

• Do all sorts of Official Stuff. Like purchase ourselves an ISBN number. And copyright our book. And, if we’re writing under a pen name, we must register our Fictitious Business Name. This all sounds like a bit of a slog, but it may also make us feel Very Fancy, as if we have made an Agreement to purchase a Fine Art for a Hefty Sum. “Speak to my secretary!” we will say. “I must away to an important Business Meeting! Time is money! Adieu!”

• Did you notice we switched from a numbered list to bullet points? Just checking if you’re paying attention.

• Decide which distribution company/companies to use. KDP? IngramSpark? Smashwords? BookBaby? Kobo? Plimby? Fortunato? WordBuffs? I’m just making up nonsense now.

• Get all our marketing ducks in a row. Nothing worse than disorganized ducks. This will entail sorting out our social media profiles, sending Advanced Reader Copies to reviewers, sprucing up our website and adding a landing page, setting up author accounts all over the place, and planning fun things like giveaways and special guest appearances on the talk show your cat films on weekday mornings.

• Commission an audiobook. Bitches love audiobooks.

• Launch the thing! This is the exciting part! This is the culmination of everything we’ve worked for! We can finally upload our book to our sales platform(s) of choice and enjoy the lavish party we’ve planned to celebrate our achievement! (Read: Eating an enormous piece of funfetti cake and going to sleep for a full week.)

• Continue to analyze and shift marketing strategy. This last step will continue for the rest of our lives. And when it comes down to it, isn’t this why we became a writer in the first place? To study market trends and adjust keywords based on performance? What could be more fulfilling?

• Write the next book. No time to waste! Call my secretary! Wait till my shareholders hear about this!

There you have it! Easy peasy! Admittedly, we skipped about seventeen steps of proofreading and re-proofreading and panic-proofreading the night before we launch, but all that started to sound repetitive and neurotic, so I took it out. And I tried to make this sound as fun as possible, because the truth is I feel overwhelmed and terrified all day, every day. What if I miss something? my wily brain says. Am I a failure if I’m not about that rise-and-grind hustle4lyfe and aim only for a moderate career? What if I don’t do everything right and the authors of the internet rise up as one and laugh at me and I bring dishonor on all my friends and family?

So that’s why I try to make this process sound fun, at least. You might think it’s for the reader’s entertainment, but really it’s a coping mechanism. See? I coo at myself. It’s not so scary. It’s only thirteen-ish easy steps! And you know what? Nobody’s really watching you, anyway, so who cares if you mess up? Nobody. You are irrelevant. I cannot overstate how little people care about the things you do. Now, doesn’t that feel better?

It does.

And with that, it’s time for me to get back to work.