Awesome very helpful post.

Since Oct of 2009 I’ve sold over 15,000 copies of my ebook. Some authors have done much, much better. I think it’s a great option.

~ Jenna

I talk through some of my thinking about self publishing in my post Thinking about Self Publishing, but I’ll summarize a few things here.

I went ahead and decided to self publish for a couple of reasons, any of which could have kept me from doing so if I was in a different situation. The main one is that my career is not dependent on my publishing record, so I don’t need the equivalent of a peer review process that agents and publishers provide.

The first rule of publishing is that money always flows to the author, never from the author. The only thing I spent money on were a few things that weren’t required for publishing: a laptop with which to write and format the manuscript, and a wonderful book that I’ve used as a textbook in my creative writing class: Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print.

The second rule (if there can be one) is that you want as polished a manuscript as possible. This means working through all of the chapters in the Self-Editing book, rereading the manuscript aloud, viewing the ebook in the free readers and tweaking everything until it’s just right, and so on. Having a bit of a type A personality helps. If you need to, find someone else who can read for you. I probably spent a good 40-80 hours of my time just on producing the ebook files.

Hope that helps. Feel free to ask more questions!