My Publishing Journey

Recently I had a comment on my YouTube channel asking me to share my journey on how I self-published my first book. I would love to help any other aspiring authors reach their goals, so I was more than happy to tell the process of how I published Diamond in the Rough. This is a brief overview of how I got there!

The first step to publishing a book is to actually write the book! I started writing at 15 years old with vague intentions of becoming a published author one day. Most of what I did back then was creative writing, jumping back and forth between a slew of projects. Eventually I realized I wanted to get serious about finishing a project. I have dozens of ideas, most of which I had written on to some degree, but I made myself just pick one to focus on until it was finished. I picked a futuristic dystopian story (a different one that DITR) and actually finished it, but wasn’t satisfied with the end result so I set it aside and started working on another project while I figured out a rewrite.

I guess writing that book put me in a mood for writing dystopians, because in the end I decided to pick up writing Diamond in the Rough (which at the time was two slopped-together chapters on a Google doc titled “Virus Story Idea”). I wrote DITR in a month. By that I mean I wrote the first draft—there were a lot of things I wanted to improve on, but overall I was happy with the story. The first thing I did was go back and rewrite the first two chapters, which I was unhappy with from the beginning but unsure of how to redo. Once I’d done some basic editing, I set the manuscript aside for two months. This allowed me to come back to it with fresh eyes and pick out any mistakes.

The next step was EDITING. I did a lot of research (and I mean a LOT) on publishing books. Everything from formatting to cover design to advertising to editing. And as it turns out, professional publishing is an expensive process! My plan was to always self publish (the main reason being so that I could retain full rights to my work) but I initially wanted to pay for professional editing (which is a separate deal). But getting DITR edited was going to cost around $2,000, so I eventually decided to try my hand at it and see if I could do it myself. So I started editing. I’ve found it’s helpful to print out the manuscript and use pens and highlighters to find mistakes rather than doing it all online. The different format allows me to read it in a different way and catch more mistakes.

While editing I started searching out beta readers, which are CRITICAL if you’re editing on your own. Wattpad isn’t a bad place to find a beta reader or two, there’s all kinds of editing/reviewing shops that usually only require you to follow them for them to look at your book. Any writer/reader friends are also top choices. Booktubers aren’t bad either (two of my beta readers for Stars in the Sky were booktubers who read and loved DITR). For DITR I also asked a couple family members to read it. Out of all my beta readers, it was my mom who was the most helpful. She pointed out a plot hole that required rewriting half the manuscript to fix, but it greatly improved the overall story.

Editing took forever, but then I got to the fun part: Design. I formatted the book using Microsoft word after hours of research on industry standards on font and margin size and all that. (Moral of the story, do your research!) It took a lot of going back and forth to get everything looking right. I had to order a lot of proof copies and study everything but the final product made it worth it. The cover design was fun. I’ve always loved playing around on Canva and was able to come up with a great cover for DITR using just the free version. I’ve actually uploaded a video where you can see the process!

My research had told me that Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing was the cheapest option for self publishing, as it was completely free. KDP is fairly self explanatory on how to do everything and what needs to be done to get the book published. I had to write a blurb for my book (surprisingly difficult) and play around with the size of the spine on the cover (it still ain’t quite right) and I had to order a lotttt of proof copies. DO NOT skip that step. Proof copies let you see mistakes in the book before it’s published. The release day of DITR was delayed by two weeks because of me underestimating the amount of fixes my book needed.

I also started my YouTube channel when I was in the editing process (during that two month gap where I took a break). The main purpose of the channel was to find like-minded readers to build a following so that I could have readers for my book. Social media is free advertising. If you’re wanting to be an author I would 100% recommend hopping into booktube or bokstagram and start building up a following early.

And that’s it! I glossed over a lot of parts there, but that’s the basis of how I published my book. The entire process cost me under a hundred dollars—the only things I paid for was printing off the manuscripts at the local library and ordering the proof copies. The rest I found ways to do it for free (Microsoft word is paid but the computer I used for formatting already had it on there). I definitely plan on doing more content aimed towards helping writers in the future, so please let me know what parts of the process you would like to know more about! I have made videos in the past on what resources I used to do this, and have made several cover design-related videos. I hope this helped!