On the topic of self‑publishing, conversations tend to involve the same handful of outcomes. You might have heard how Andy Weir first posted chapters of his novel, The Martian, online, or how word‑of‑mouth turned Colleen Hoover into one of the most commercially successful modern authors. Success stories like these are fun to tell, but they’re also exceptions to the rule. Statistical outliers can warp your sense of what self‑publishing looks like for the vast majority of authors.
For most, the outcomes are quieter and more varied. If you’re curious about self‑publishing, it helps to have a clear idea of what you’re looking to achieve. After all, this process can look like anything from sharing pages online for your friends to starting and running your own small business.
In this article, I’ll go over different self‑publishing platforms, look at the logistics of self‑publishing as a career, explore some alternate approaches, and finally leave you with a Story Weapon on what the great success stories really have in common.
Before learning how to self-publish a book, gain clarity on the publishing paths available to you. Choosing a middle path can help you deepen your craft, build a body of work, and continue writing freely.
Self-publishing platforms
Here are some of the main avenues to self‑publishing, each with its own attributes and drawbacks.
- Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is perhaps the easiest route to self‑publication. Upload a manuscript, a book cover, and some metadata, and within a few days, there’s an ebook and a print‑on‑demand paperback sitting in the world’s largest marketplace for books.
- Apple Books is another major storefront beyond Amazon. To upload, you’ll need to sign up for Apple Books Publishing Portal, which is the interface used to manage your books and payments — similar to Amazon Author Central, but for Apple. Apple offers a 70% royalty on book sales regardless of price point.
- Barnes & Noble Press is a popular option for uploading your book and tying it to the Barnes & Noble brand. This route is especially popular for printing high-quality paperbacks and hardcovers using their internal system. Other perks include marketing opportunities through Barnes & Noble, such as applying for placement in their newsletters and special collections.
- Kobo Writing Life can help extend your international reach, especially to reach readers in Canada, Europe, and Australia. Their built‑in promotions tab lets authors apply for featured spots in themed sales and collections to boost their visibility further on the platform.
- Google Play Books offers a boost in terms of search engine visibility. To upload: create a Google Play Partner Center account and submit your book in EPUB or PDF format. From there, your book will be integrated by Google’s ecosystem, meaning that it can appear in general Google Search results even if a user doesn’t type in your exact title.
All of the above platforms are non‑exclusive (some under specific terms), meaning that you can publish your book on all of them if you aren’t sure which to pick. However, that also means managing several different dashboards, so it can be helpful to decide which combination will actually support your specific goals and bandwidth.
Self-publishing as a career
Self‑publishing is much more involved than just writing a great book. You also become the publisher, which means being in complete charge of the work on the page — and also the editing, the cover, the interior, pricing, copy, categories, advertising, and maintaining a relationship with your readers.
The financial aspect of self‑publishing is complicated, with most self‑published titles selling very few copies (fewer than 250). I’m not saying that turning a profit on self‑publishing is impossible. When excluding hobbyists, the median income of full‑time, self‑published authors was approximately $12,800 to $15,000 in 2022, according to The Authors Guild’s 2023 Author Income Survey.
For authors who had been publishing steadily for several years, that median climbed into the mid‑twenties, which represents a real, working wage. It also often beats what many traditionally‑published authors see in royalties.
Those “quietly making a living” writers share a few patterns. They tend to have a high output, as well as a large backlist of more than ten books. They will often publish books in a series, or stay writing within popular genres such as Romance, Thriller, and Sci‑Fi/Fantasy.
They also approach covers and packaging in a very unromantic way, asking: Does this look like the other books my readers have purchased? And they approach marketing with consistency, building up a system of repeatable habits.
Self‑publishing can absolutely turn into a lucrative career, but it will take as much time, passion, energy, and savvy as getting any other small business off the ground.
Self-publishing as a hobby
Many writers would rather avoid the work of selling their books, and spend that time and energy on creating the next one. For those writers, self‑publishing can be a way of gaining closure about a project: putting it up on a platform of your choosing, and being able to hold a bound copy in your hand.
This version of self‑publishing may not achieve strong book sales, but it can certainly pay dividends in other ways. If you decide later to query agents with a subsequent project, having a finished, self‑published book can make your query letter easier to assess.
A thoughtfully presented, self‑published title is one way of presenting yourself as a more serious writer, someone who has seen previous works to completion, and has a clear sense of the body of work they’re building. If you’ve sold a few hundred copies on your own, or built even a small mailing list around your work, those are concrete numbers you can include in a query letter to make a stronger case for yourself.
A middle path
The beauty of self‑publishing is in its flexibility. Between the careerists and the hobbyists are a variety of writers — and it’s okay not to know your exact place among them before you get started down this path.
You might decide to set aside a modest budget, work carefully with a freelance editor and book cover designer, and explore marketing options that fit your constraints. You could start small, and advertise your self‑published book through social media channels alone. Alternatively, you might experiment with the built‑in marketing options on your chosen platform.
This middle path can be a great way of testing the waters. Rather than investing an abundance of time, money, and energy into building your career at the beginning, you can go slowly, test different options, gauge the return on investment, and build toward a solid understanding of how self‑publishing can achieve your goals.
Along this gradual route, some of the strongest advice is to work on building an email list of readers who are interested in your work. These relationships are hard to build, but they can create an enduring foundation beyond clicks and impressions.
A simple form on your website, a short note in the back of your book inviting readers to sign up if they want to hear about the next one, and the occasional email with something worth reading can quietly build into a community of dedicated readers.
Your story weapon: Build a body of work
When looking into self‑publishing, it can be hard not to feel like you’re throwing your book into an ocean of other people’s work. Faced with that feeling, it’s easy to conclude that, in order to be successful, you’ll have to make that much more noise about yourself.
However, the great writers and storytellers, whose works touched the hearts of millions, didn’t all raise a ruckus. They did what you do: sat in a room with their thoughts and imaginations to quietly build their stories.
It is hard and noble work to build an audience. It is also the work best done by your story. Rather than getting loud, try going quiet: dig down into your writing, and trust that an audience will find you as it becomes truly worthwhile.
The successful voices are not the loudest, but the most persistent. They give the deepest commitment to the work itself. Andy Weir didn’t post chapters of The Martian because he had a strategy. He posted them because he couldn’t stop working on the story. Colleen Hoover didn’t build a readership by chasing trends. She wrote books that felt true, and readers passed them to their friends because the stories earned that kind of loyalty.
That is the through line. Not a platform or an algorithm. Your goal is to build a body of work.
This doesn’t mean you should ignore the practical side of self-publishing. The cover matters. The categories matter. The consistency matters. But all of those things need to be attached to a story worth reading. If that foundation isn’t solid, no amount of marketing will hold the structure up for long. If the story has earned its place, the marketing becomes easier. You are not trying to convince anyone of anything, you are just helping the right readers find something that already exists and is genuinely worth their time.
So before you think about platforms and price points and launch parties, ask yourself the more important question: is this the truest version of the story I set out to tell? If the answer is yes, you are already ahead. Everything else in self-publishing is just logistics.
Self-publishing asks writers to become both artist and steward of their work, balancing creative vision with practical decision-making. If you’re ready to deepen your understanding of craft, persistence, and the long-term process of building a body of work, join one of my next workshops: The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, Story Day.
