Our 10-year adventure in self publishing

Self publishing is an adventure, especially when sharing the ride with a coauthor! Having a coauthor means having someone to depend on, someone to finish what you cannot, someone to push you along, and someone to come up with fresh ideas. And we think our collaboration has truly been ideal. We recently realized that it’s been ten years for us, so we decided to commemorate the anniversary with an online conversation.

Fiona: When you first got in touch with me about book design in 2008, I was so impressed that you were designing and typesetting textbooks for large publishers! Wow! I never felt like I knew enough about typesetting, and now suddenly here you were. I’m sure I peppered you with questions almost immediately. I think a lot of freelance book designers felt that we were all in competition with each other, whereas I wanted to collaborate whenever possible because that’s how I grew my skills and my business. So I was really glad that you reached out and introduced yourself!

Glenna: When you answered that first email, I was thrilled. You were working with self-publishing authors, something I had never considered doing. But then suddenly in 2008, all the big publishers dropped all of us freelancers, and I was floundering. Your site came up first in a web search, so I figured you were probably successful.

And then we got to chatting online. You had such good advice for me as I set up my website. You talked a lot about SEO, so I had to find out what that even was! Computers were not my thing. After 20 years of happily working just with paper and pens, I’d made the difficult transition to PageMaker, Quark XPress, and then InDesign on my own.

So we were pen pals for a couple of years, then you started sending me some layout assignments, and that’s how we found out how well we could work together.

In the meantime, you’d started Book Design Made Simple, and I admired it greatly.

Fiona: Yes, but what you didn’t know was that I was totally stuck writing it! I wanted to explain each step of book design clearly, but there is SO much to explain. I got completely bogged down.

The original outline for Book Design Made Simple. I originally thought one chapter for each item would work, but we ended up with one part for each item (plus a few more)!

That was right around the time you planned to visit the west coast and suggested we meet. What fun! I felt like I knew you already from all our online chats and collaborating together. I remember meeting you at the train station, and it was like greeting an old friend.

Glenna: I remember that special moment, too. You showed me around your world, and we agreed completely on how to spend the weekend (hike, picnic, hang out in parks and near the water). Immediate connection.

And boy, look at that chart of yours! No wonder you were stuck. (By the time we finished the book, the items were completely scrambled at least once more.)

So, skipping a couple of years, we get to 2013. That’s when you invited me to be your coauthor. It must have taken a huge dose of courage to do that. I was impressed again with your determination to get this book out into the world, even if it meant inviting someone to help you (and share in the profits).

But at my end, I was shocked, frankly. What?!?! I think I started shaking! But after considering it overnight, I decided to take the life-changing leap and say yes.

Fiona: I thought you were SO much more qualified to write the book than me, and you probably thought the same about me lol. You started by writing the glossary (which was awesome, as that was my absolute last choice to write!) and we went from there. It was so handy to be able to work on different sections and email them to each other, knowing that we could use InDesign’s Book feature to put all the parts together later on. Plus we have different strengths so were happy to each do the chapters we knew best.

I remember we “finished” the book, having written about half of what’s there now. Then our first beta tester gave us feedback and asked, “But how do I create the front and back matter? Table of contents? Index?” That’s when we realized that we needed to explain everything in minute detail, step by step, so that nothing was left unsaid.

Glenna: Yes, it was discouraging, but he was so right. We had to spell out every single detail. At that point, we realized that nobody else in their right mind would put this much thought and effort into self publishing a book like this, so we’d pretty much have this little corner of the book market to ourselves. (And we still do.)

The first carton of books arrives at my house.

So we reorganized the whole thing and dug in. But, as you said, we each wrote the bits we were most comfortable with, and somehow we covered all the topics. And after we self published, we continued to discuss more topics as they occurred to us, or as readers’ questions came in, or as InDesign changed. Our blog is stuffed with it all.

Speaking of the blog, I’ve found that it’s been rewarding and has kept us on our toes. You are especially good at writing super clear and accurate instructions, illustrated with screen shots. I’m always impressed. And I learn something every time, too.

So the blog is probably our main book marketing tool, but we’ve come up with so many others! At first our heads were bursting with ideas. Many of them didn’t work out at all. We discovered, for instance, that 99% of hopeful writers have no interest in self publishing or (especially) designing their own books. So advertising at writers’ conferences was a waste of time and money. Ditto with university library acquisitions people. One of them mercifully explained to us that they purchase only books requested by professors, so we switched to writing to professors instead. (That worked!)

But oh, let’s not forget our book launch in 2015!

A poster for our book launch at the VPL.

Fiona:  Yes, the book launch. I thought it would be so successful because 1) it was at the large and welcoming Vancouver Public Library, 2) we’d just taught classes there on designing an ebook cover, and 3) it was well publicized. But after you traveled 4,000 km to get here, the book launch ended up on a cold, wet, November night and only around 15 people showed up. I think we sold one book to my brother’s girlfriend (a pity purchase lol).

We really did try a lot of different marketing ideas, and ultimately found that the best way to promote our book is by providing info on our blog. When someone is stuck with a book design or self publishing problem and finds a workable solution by searching online, they are usually thrilled and happy to support the book. We also have an email list of subscribers (sign up below!), and that allows us to put new blog posts in front of an interested self publishing / book design audience.

Glenna: We didn’t have much time to smooth out the marketing wrinkles before we decided to produce a second edition! It seemed awfully soon (only a year after the first edition), but Adobe made some changes that we knew we had to cover. So back to our computers. I remember redoing almost all of the 200 screen shots so the book would match InDesign’s new menu options and appearance. And rewriting lots of sections. It was something of a grind.

Remember these ideas for a second edition cover?

Sticking with the original cover design, with a small addition.

In the end we stuck close to our original design.

And as soon as we got that off to the printer, I thought of making some InDesign how-to videos for folks. It seemed w-a-a-a-a-y outside of my comfort zone, but once I got started, I discovered it was kind of fun.

Then, guess what? We decided to make an epub edition—an ebook. I never read ebooks myself and figured nobody would want one, but I was very wrong. We hired someone to produce it for us because this was beyond our capabilities. You’d made a few ebooks but they were simpler, and even those involved a LOT of fussy work, right?

Much to my continued amazement, half of all the books we sell now are ebooks!

Fiona: Ebooks are definitely here to stay. And now we have three: fixed layout epub, Kindle (flowable epub), and ePDF. The conversion for the fixed layout epub was expensive and complicated. You and I had to create hyperlinks to about 4,000 items (contents, index, “see page xx”), and we also decided to add color, plus links to our blog posts. Another boatload of work!

The second ebook, the Kindle, was easier, as we could start with the PDFs from the fixed layout epub. Seeing the book as flowable text was a bit disconcerting, but the big benefit of a Kindle edition is that it shows up on our Amazon product page alongside the print book. That’s reaching a huge audience! We also added A+ content on our Amazon page, and this has made a difference to our sales too.

The ePDF edition came about when our distributor, IPG, recommended it. Finally the technology became available to add digital rights management to ePDFs, so we went for it.

Who would’ve thought we’d eventually have four editions of the book selling?

Receiving our gold medals at the IPPY Awards in Chicago.

Glenna: And a bunch of book awards, too. The last time we met in person was in 2016 in Chicago for Book Expo America plus a couple of award ceremonies. My friends find it hard to believe that you and I have met in person only three times.

Time passes. And now it’s ten whole years since we started this book adventure together. We’ve had each other to lean on, and I’m grateful to have had such an excellent experience. We continue the journey.

Who knows what we’ll think of next?

Fiona:  Yes, who knows? We’re still on a roll. Just a couple of months ago we introduced our book design template and added even more videos to our YouTube channel.

When you first introduced yourself to me by email as a fellow book designer 15 years ago, I had NO idea that we would become book design colleagues, coauthors, self publishers, bloggers, and (save the best for last) FRIENDS! What an amazing adventure it’s been!

Read more: Publishing associations to join » because you might meet your future coauthor (or editor, designer, etc.) there!
And more: How much does it cost to self-publish? » because it’s good to know what you’re getting into.

Book Design Made Simple. You can do it yourself.