The majority of my work, though not all, is self published, there are reasons I chose to publish this way, I have discussed them many times on different posts so I am not going to waffle on about the whys in this one. Instead I am going to give a little insight into the iceberg of self publishing, and how the one major downfall of doing this all in house as it were, is doing it all in ones own house, as opposed to working with a publishing house.

For perspective, I have recently finished writing a commissioned book on old tentacle hugger and his work. The experience of working with a traditional publisher has been a great one. As has been just being responsible for the writing, and checking proofs etc. As it was commissioned work with a one off payment none royalty deal, I have no further responsibility to the book, I don’t need to do promotion work and help to sell it. I have no skin in the game, beyond my name on the cover.

Now of course I will do some promotion stuff for the book, I’ll talk of it here when it is released and/or I have a publication date. I’ll do all the normal posting on social media, and general background publicity, because it does have my name on the cover and I would like it to be successful. But my relationship with the book as far as its publication is concerned came to an end with the final proofs. And to an extent that is the one major advantage of doing a book for a traditional publishing house.

In the world of self-publishing on the other hand, your relationship with your publisher and the books they publish ends only in death… A terminal end to the contract that is pest avoided as long as possible. This is not to say you can’t just publish a book then leave it alone for ever, you certainly can do that. You can just publish a book and never touch it again, just send it out into the world with nothing but hopes and prayers to the divinity of your choice. But you won’t…

There are endless reasons you may go back to a published book and change something, the list below is just a few of them…

• Fixing that typo
• A new imprint name
• A new cover
• New books in the also by list
• New editions

So to take them one at a time, and I will keep this brief

Fixing that typo… Even traditional publishers books have typos, despite all the additional resources they have at their disposal. If you have spent anytime proof reading for yourself or others, then pick up a mainstream book, you will start to notice them. Despite the several stages each of my books has gone though the odd typo still slips through. I keep a list for each book and fix them in blocks once I have a long enough list (more than 1 per 10000 words)

A new Imprint name… My imprint is my publishing house. Literally my publishing house as it is the ‘publisher’ of my self-published books. Why have an imprint, why not just list yourself as publisher? Because self-publishing has certain stigma’s attached. An imprint reduces some of that, by giving the perception of a small independent publishing house, which is what you are i any regard.

When I published Cider Lane over ten years ago I used the name of the nature reserve behind my house and street I live on, and created an imprint called Saltholme Books. It served me well enough for the next several years but a few years back I changed the imprint to Steampowered Books, because it worked better for a writer who spends much of his writing time in the 19th century. Also it worked better for the publishing house website/blog which I own. Don’t bother looking up the Steampowered Books website as there is just a holding page right now , but I have owned the name a few years and it is one of the things I will get around to sorting it all out at some point.

Long term, the imprint may include a book or two by other people. There is one in particular I want to publish under the Steampowered Books banner but that will be a while I suspect.

In any regard when I revisit the files for an old saltholme book I change the imprint and publisher details.

A new cover… No matter how much you love your cover, at some point you might decide to change it. In the case of Paperbacks and hardback you might want to include the new logo for the publishing house on the back as well…. There may be other reasons too…

New Books in the also by list... You keep writing books, you want to add them to the ‘also by’ list. Otherwise why have an also by list if it is missing half your books.

New Editions… Back in around 2023 Amazon started printing hardbacks. I like Amazon hardbacks editions, they are very nice books. Novels previous to 2023 did not have Hardback editions, every book I have published since has. So when I have the time I and working through the back catalogue.

Hardbacks are bigger books , they require different dimensions in the covers, this requires some paid software to resolve… As for audio…. Here in lays a tale.

My fellow author and friend Kate Baucherel recently surprised me with a full set of audio files for the Lucifer Mandrake novel. I had not asked her to record 10 hours worth of audio book, and she didn’t tell me she was doing so. I am very very grateful and sent her a lot of expensive designer rum (from Villains of York , whom’s rum I can highly recommend)

She did however cause me some unexpected work. I needed to make an audio cover which as you may know is square rather than the tradition vertical oblong of book covers. the easy way to do this is with Canva, which I use to design covers and has the original Mandrake cover with all the various aspects that went together to make it. Resizing the kindle/paperback cover requires the professional version which I rent whenever I need to do a fair bit of work of this kind. I am quite pleased with the results…

Now as I have Canva pro for a while it made since to do some other work, which took me to Maybe, the last of my major works to not have a hardback edition ( aside the three Hannibal Smyth novels but the compendium edition is in hardback so they are not high on the list of jobs). Hardbacks need bigger cover, increasing the size means the relative places for titles change, its a whole thing… But Canva does it just fine with the pro edition so good time to sort that out.

However, here is an odd thing. Maybe is arguably my most successful book on line, but on the table at events it merges into the background. The cover, which works fine on line, is too dark on a black table cloth. It does not ‘pop’, to use a terrible phrase. So if I was making a hardback cover I may as well go the whole hog and try to ‘brighten’ it a little. Canva has the perfect tools for this, it was just a case of faffing about till I got it right. But if I was changing the cover for the Hardback, I needed to redo the Paperback and kindle edition overs too. So I played with the original, then resized for hardback. So new covers all round…

Okay, now HB internals are different too, at the very least you need to change the ISBN number in the legal bit at the front, but it occurred to me if I was fiddling with HD internals I may as well do the PB internals as well at the same time and update the ‘also by’ pages and the imprint page. Which mean is need to do that withe the kindle too…

Okay… and if I am changing the imprint I should really get around to making the imprint logo I keep telling myself to do for Steampowered books, and if I do that I can put the logo on the back cover as well as the internal cover. So I should make them… Luckily I have Canva right now so now is a good time to do so…

Soi I did that… Colour and monochrome , cover and internals. Don’t they look great…

This all ended up as two days work, more or less, at which point, after all the new files were sent and done I realized the following, I had spelt Steampowered Books in the logo ‘Steampowereded’ So now I have to wait on amazon approving the files which take 24 hours as a rule, so I can go back in, fix a frankly ridiculous typo, and submit them again….

Yes, I managed to make a typo while making in my imprint logo. This is so ridiculously on point I can not help but laugh… And incase your wondering when I spotted that, well after typing the words Don’t that look great about six lines ago and wondering where to wrap this post up…

Self-publishing is an iceberg, there is much the reader never sees, and always more of it below the waterline, ho hum, off to Canva to fix those logo files.