Pictured above: zero copies of my book.

I’ve wanted to write and publish a book since I was eight years old (at the time, a thrilling story about a man who ventures inside a dormant volcano and discovers a society of sentient creatures made of organic igneous rock and obsidian). I’m now thirty-one, and that dream has become a reality. The book exists. I can hold it!

(See? I’m holding it! It’s got pages and everything!)

So to anyone who might be considering putting out a book of their own, this is for you. Note that this is not about the process of writing said book, because as someone who’s written one I can divulge that the process is messy and highly individualized and also pretty boring to talk about in execution.

Okay, fine, I’ll give you my secret writing technique: basically I just get an idea and decide what I want to write, and then I sit down and write it until it’s done, and then I keep rewriting it until I feel like the words on the page are close enough to the words in my head that I won’t be horribly embarrassed if someone reads them. Truly an arcane art!

But then the book is done. Say you either don’t want to jump on the roller coaster that is traditional publishing, or that you’ve queried a bunch of agents and publishers and they say you’ve written a book that isn’t quite where the market is at, but you’d still like other people to read it. What do you do? Well, if you want my exact journey, here’s a quick list:

1. Look up how you want to put out your ebook. In my case, Amazon KDP offers the most competitive rates in terms of royalties if you start out exclusive with them, so I went with them.
2. Learn your formatting guidelines for your paperback copies. This means deciding what size you want your book to be (Rapscallion is 6″ x 9″, for reference), what fonts and font sizes you want to use, and then figuring out where to set the margins depending on the length of your book, putting the title and your name at the top of each alternating page, putting the page numbers at the bottom, and all that jazz. Luckily, KDP has a step by step guide for basic formatting in MS Word, which means this will take an hour of your life and not cause an emotional breakdown.
3. Change all your chapter titles to headings so the formatting will work for ebook and each chapter will be guaranteed to start on a new page (as well as ensure you have a functional table of contents)
4. Add front and endpapers (title page, dedication, author’s note), which then will force you to tweak the formatting again.
5. Write a blurb.
6. Realize you’re bad at selling yourself (remember those rejected queries?) and experience crippling self-doubt.
7. Write the blurb again, this time pretending it’s someone else’s book and reminding yourself you put a lot of time and effort into the thing you wrote and you’re proud of it, actually.
8. Pay someone to design a cover. This will take longer than it should because you haven’t designed a cover before and aren’t good at describing what you want, but eventually, you’ll end up with a cover that looks like what you had in your head, one which sells the general tone of the book.
9. Jump up and down a bunch in excitement once you see the mock-up of your cover. Show all your friends. Talk about it incessantly. This step isn’t required, but it definitely will happen. Suddenly, your book will feel real in a way it hasn’t before.
10. Buy ISBNs. This will probably be the most expensive part of the process if you’re like me and buy a pack of 10, but you need them, and now you have some for future books! You need a different ISBN for each format.
11. Start submitting the paperback file to KDP, but don’t finalize the submission yet! This means deciding what kind of finish you want the cover to have (I recommend matte).
12. Start submitting the paperback file to IngramSpark. Remember, you’re not exclusive to Amazon for your paperback! This allows you to set a retailer discount and sell directly to your local bookstore. Side note: this will also make your book available via print on demand on places like the Barnes & Noble website! You won’t get quite as much per physical copy sold this way, but you’ve also opened up a whole new batch of doors in terms of visibility.
13. Finish submitting the paperback file to both Amazon KDP and IngramSpark. You need to submit to both simultaneously this way, because if you submit to one first, the other will say your ISBN is already in use and you’ll have to waste another one (and by extension, about $30).
14. Submit the ebook file to KDP. This part is super easy.
15. Check back with IngramSpark and realize there’s a font issue with the paperback file because of the presence of Times New Roman.
16. Freak out because you only used Times New Roman while drafting the manuscript, and you’ve changed all the text to different fonts.
17. Go through the file one page at a time, then realize that for some inexplicable reason, the page numbers on three pages, none of which are near each other, remained 12-point Times New Roman, despite the fact that you formatted the whole manuscript at once before submitting it for publication. Should this formatting issue have happened? No, but now you’ve spent an hour trying to fix this and you’re just relieved that it’s over.
18. Set a publication date. This should be at least a week out if you’re impatient, but if you can set one slightly further out, you can get some pre-orders in.
19. Wait. Every day will feel like an eternity, but now you can’t change anything. The manuscript is submitted. The cover is submitted. All you can do is wait.
20. Aaaaand make sure you’ve got all your other ducks in a row.
21. Set up some dedicated social media accounts: a Facebook author page that nobody looks at, Bluesky account that very few people look at (except holy crap, Tad Williams just followed you back after you posted about enjoying his newest book!), a website that nobody visits (except you, hi!) which exists mostly so that no one can buy your name as a domain name on the off-off-off-chance that you get enough sales and attention somewhere down the line that someone else might want to do just that.
22. Keep waiting. Did they suddenly add a 25th hour to the day now?
23. It’s publication day! Shout it to the rooftops on every platform where you have a presence. Tell your friends and those family members you don’t speak to all that often anymore. If they don’t like it, what, is Thanksgiving going to be more awkward?
24. Order author copies, but also order a bonus copy to be delivered faster, because you want to hold it, dammit!
25. Watch as your friends’ copies all arrive before yours, even though you pre-ordered this one copy the same time as everyone else.
26. Become increasingly manic about waiting on your copy.
27. When your copy of your book arrives, cradle it. Smell it. Feel the breeze from the riffling pages across your face. This moment is for you. You made this happen. Now your book exists.
28. Oh god, that means all the people you convinced to get a copy are reading it now, and they’ll have OPINIONS.
29. Maybe this was a mistake.
30. Hold the book again. You’ll never be mad at your precious child.

And that’s basically it.

Rapscallion is available now.