Boost Your Imagination › How to publish a book yourself

How to publish a book yourself

Publishing used to be a door someone else opened. Now the manuscript you finished can be on sale in a week. The work has not disappeared, though — it has moved onto your desk. Here is what actually has to happen, in order.

1. Finish the manuscript properly

Publishing a draft is the most common self-publishing mistake, and reviews are unforgiving about it. Before anything else: a structural pass, a character-consistency pass, a line pass and a proofread — in that order.

If you cannot afford a professional editor, at minimum get an outside reader and run a systematic grammar and quality check over the whole book. Never publish text no one but you has read.

2. Get the formats right

Every platform wants specific files, and the wrong ones are the most common reason an upload is rejected:

• EPUB — the standard for ebooks, and what most stores prefer. Reflowable: the reader chooses the font size.
• PDF — for print-on-demand interiors, at the exact trim size, with correct margins and bleed.
• DOCX — accepted as a manuscript upload by several platforms and by editors and proofreaders.

Common trim sizes for print are 6×9 inches (fiction), 5.5×8.5 (novellas and poetry) and 5×8 (compact paperbacks). Decide before you format — it changes the page count and therefore the price.

3. Front matter and back matter

A book that opens straight into chapter one looks self-published in the bad way. You need a title page, a copyright page, ideally a dedication, and a table of contents that actually links. At the back: an author note, a call to review, and what to read next.

4. The cover

The cover is the whole marketing budget of a self-published book. It must be legible as a thumbnail two centimetres tall, and it must look like the genre it belongs to — readers browse by visual convention, and an original cover that ignores the convention reads as amateur.

Print needs a full wrap: back cover, spine and front, at the exact size for your page count. Ebooks need only the front, typically 1600×2560.

5. Metadata — the part everyone underestimates

Your title, subtitle, categories, keywords and blurb are how readers find you. This is the search engine optimisation of publishing:

1. Pick categories that are specific rather than huge — being visible in a small category beats being invisible in a big one.
2. Use the keyword slots for phrases readers actually type, not adjectives about your book.
3. Write the blurb as ad copy, not a synopsis. First line hooks, middle raises the stakes, last line makes them click.

6. Choose where to publish

Amazon KDP has the largest English reach; going exclusive gets you into Kindle Unlimited, and not going exclusive lets you sell everywhere else. Apple Books, Kobo and Google Play can be reached directly or through an aggregator. Litres is the main route into the Russian market. Print on demand handles paperbacks with no inventory.

You cannot easily undo exclusivity, so decide before you upload.

7. Publish, then keep going

Launch is a beginning, not an ending. Reviews, a mailing list, an author page and a second book do more for the first book's sales than anything you can do to the first book.

Preparing the files in Boost Your Imagination

The studio previews your book at real trim sizes, builds front matter and a table of contents, holds your front and back covers, and exports EPUB, PDF and DOCX with the illustrations in place — so the file you upload is the book you saw on screen.