My First Self-Publishing Experience

For the past six months I’ve been doing the one thing every writer absolutely despises.

Publishing my work.

After nearly five years of writing seriously and well over ten years enjoying it as a hobby, I’ve started to put some of my creative efforts towards actually getting my work out into the world.

I chose to publish The Archman for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it was one of the only completed manuscripts I had which could be edited and turned into a finished product. Secondly, it received a decent amount of attention on Wattpad over the past few years, so I figured there would be an audience for this kind of story. And lastly, it’s a romance novel, which is the ideal choice for self-publishing. 

The story as a whole was much too large to publish as a single novel, so I broke it up into a trilogy of about 40 000 words each. This had the added benefit of being a much more traditional length for romance novels, which tend to be around novella length to be easily digestible and bingeable.

I chose the self-publishing route because I wanted as much creative control over the process as possible, and because if the book did achieve some level of popularity then I would make significantly more from the royalties (I believe in art for the sake of art, but I’m not enough of a bleeding-heart creative type to turn down an opportunity at profits).

This wouldn’t be a solo venture, however. I had many people helping me through the process. My freelance editor Stephanie Wilson was an absolute godsend, combing through the unkempt locks of my dandruff-riddled manuscript and shampooing out all the horrid grammar mistakes, syntax errors, and other inconsistencies. This completely transformed the book into something actually publishable.

I hired the services of cover designer Ira-Rebeca and formatter Brady Moller on Fiverr, and received not only their amazing professional-grade work, but also some really helpful information on the publishing process for Amazon KDP.

After some fumbling over the course of two weeks trying to get my book to adhere to all the proper formatting and styling needed to be approved by the absolute juggernaut of the Amazon publishing system, The Archman: Book One - Nameless Legend was officially published in late January.

With all the elements finally together, I assembled a team of people who helped me with the launch (mostly friends and family who I’d been rallying for the past few months). They purchased some paperback copies, left reviews, and shared it forward.

It was a long, highly irregular road, but I’m glad to have taken the journey. I’ve been invigorated to take my career as a writer much more seriously now, and am already getting the same crew of people together to work on publishing Book 2 of The Archman.

Stay tuned for an update six months from now!