Everything I've learned about self-publishing

Thank you to Shopify for sponsoring this video. Something weird is happening in self-publishing. Five, maybe 10 years ago, self-publishing was this really great alternative, and it took down the gatekeepers to publishing books. You no longer had to go through a traditional publisher and, you know, have a literary agent or an editor representing you. Taking down some of those gatekeepers did allow a lot of new voices to enter the space and a lot of people to publish their works and share their thoughts that wouldn't have otherwise been able to. The most common way was to publish books on demand such as on Amazon where readers could buy a book, it would be printed out and shipped to them directly. You didn't have to store any stock in a warehouse and it was all pretty easy and straightforward. Lots of self-published authors have had careers this way and still do. Seems like it worked pretty well, but right now I think things are getting weird. And that method of self-publishing no longer to me seems like the best way to be doing things. One reason is what's going on with Amazon. — Amazon. com's catalog has 2 and a half million different titles in it. — Amazon is the most popular place that people buy books from. It owns about 50% of the physical book market and 80% of the ebook market. That makes it kind of a monopoly in this space. But when browsing for books on Amazon, I've seen some really weird things lately. It has been flooded with a lot of AI lowquality slop books. Certain genres are way more susceptible to this than others. For example, I searched for recent travel books published on Amazon in the last 30 days, and this is an example of what I see. It's basically this classic what looks like maybe chat GBT generated cover art with names like top things to do when traveling to Rome or New Zealand or Australia or any other country. In fact, if you look at the author of these books, you can see that they've published potentially hundreds of books in the last 30 days, all with the same formula. This doesn't seem like the kind of thing a human author would be producing. And you might think that, well, these probably don't make any money. Probably no one buys these. But I actually think that people probably do buy these because they have kind of optimized for things that people would be wanting to buy a short oneoff book, maybe a gift for someone who's going on a trip to one of these places, maybe something they just want for the trip. It doesn't need to be a literary masterpiece, but these probably do serve their purpose in a way. And it's not just travel, it's also science books. There's this one, how to use an oscilloscope in 2026. Look, I don't want to accuse this of being AI in the chance that it's not. The book cover is giving that vibe, though. There's actually no end to the amount of these sort of examples I've found under science. There's ones about conquering science exams or exam summaries, course summaries. I encountered this really interesting YouTube short from the comedian Reese James who recently published a biography and said that Amazon was flooded with AI copies trying to trick people into buying their version of the biography instead of his. And for instances like that where it's sort of clear copyright infringement, I do think Amazon is probably trying to combat that and stop that from happening. But for some of these other cases that I showed, they're probably seen as fine by Amazon. There's coloring books and all sorts that fall under the same sort of style that's happening. And I don't think that these books threaten authors in terms of their quality, but I do think that they threaten authors in terms of discoverability. When platforms are flooded with so much content being uploaded on a daily basis, it becomes harder and harder for a self-published or smaller author to be found or to be discovered. And discoverability on Amazon, I think, used to be one of the best offerings that it had for self-published authors. They could be seen by an audience that didn't know about them, but maybe saw them in rankings or suggestions. And actually, it's the exact same thing that's happening on YouTube with YouTube videos flooded by AI generated slop videos, shorts, and long form. Now, it's harder and harder for a small beginning YouTube channel to be noticed. I fear that this phenomenon alone might actually kill the self-publishing industry. If most self-published, self-uploaded books to these platforms can't be trusted for quality, people might rightfully turn towards more trusted sources or traditional publishers who have taken a stance about the kind of quality they're willing to publish. We don't want to waste our time reading books that we can't trust. And so why take the risk if we're in a landscape like this? In that sense, if big publishers are willing to

take a stand against slop, they might be the winners in all of this. But where does that leave self-published authors? Is it still possible? AI is not the only problem. Some of these platforms are offering bad deals for authors in terms of royalty share. They're keeping most of the royalties in some cases depending on if you're exclusive or not to the platform. And with a place like Amazon being a monopoly in self-publishing, authors don't really have a lot of other options. But I wanted to see if it's possible to self-publish a book without these marketplaces. And the rest of this video is my story on doing that. Self-publishing offers control, including how the book looks. For my book, I hired an illustrator, a cover designer, an editor, a proofreader, and an internal designer. It was expensive to put the book together, but I was also able to keep it how I wanted it. I wanted to make a book that was a bit weird, a bit of a weird maths book for people who like that. But control is about more than just what the book looks like. It's also about owning your connection with your audience and having a direct line to them. A lot of established publishers are struggling. There's lots of closures and merges in the space. In a recent blog post, Kevin Kelly, who was one of the founding editors of Wide Magazine, wrote that traditional book publishers have lost their audience, which was bookstores, not readers. Publishers do not have a database with the names and contacts of the people who buy their books. Instead, they sell to bookstores, which are disappearing. Many of the key decisions in publishing today come down to whether you own your audience or not. This is a summary diagram from Kevin's article. I took a path that looks like this. I've got an audience wanted many copies, color printing, and a mix of ways to store them. Print on demand comes under wanting some copies with plain text or no complicated design aspects. Amazon KDP comes under the label easy. Traditional publishing is under slow or for people with an agent but not their own audience. I made lots of mistakes along the way in this process and because I was in control, those mistakes were mine to deal with. I'll save those for the mistakes section coming later, but I'll also give you now a summary of how I actually did this logistically. These are the actual steps and details that I took to publish my book. It might sound like a lot when I lay them all out, but I actually think this process is pretty achievable for authors who do want to invest serious time in their books and do really value that direct connection with their audience. First is finding a printer. Printing in bulk means that it's a cheaper price per book to print a copy compared to print on demand. But it also offers other benefits often overlooked, which is that you can customize the books in ways that print on demand doesn't allow. You can do sprayed edges, fancy foldout pages. You can do what I did, which is I signed a bunch of tip-in sheets, had them sent to the printer, and bound into the front of every copy. You can basically do whatever you want. Have the book whatever size you want when you're working directly with the manufacturer. I printed books in two places. Most of them I printed in the US and had them shipped to a US warehouse in Pennsylvania. and I printed a small number in China that I then got shipped directly to Australia where I handled sending out orders to Australia New Zealand customers. The China and US copies also ended up looking slightly different. I used a shiny coated paper for the US copies, but it also made the book thinner as that paper was thinner. I actually still don't know which of the two copies I prefer. They're both good in different ways. To sell my books, I created a store on Shopify. I promoted it on YouTube videos, Tik Toks. I even resurrected my Instagram from a 5-year hiatus. And I made lots of videos about the book. Orders came in through Shopify, and that data was forwarded onto the warehouse who packed and shipped the orders and then charged me for how much it cost to send them out, plus a little bit for storage. But I actually found the storage is not that much. Because I genuinely use Shopify, I actually did something that I don't usually do with sponsors, which is I reached out to them and asked if they'd be interested in sponsoring this video because I knew I'd already be talking a lot about them and how I run my store. And they actually agreed to sponsor this video. So, thank you to Shopify. And I'll now tell you a little bit more of the details about how I run my store using them. I set up my book, the paperback, and the ebook version as two variants of a product. And this is the site that I was able to make myself from a template. I just put in all of my own assets and photos. I actually think I did a pretty good job of it and I'm happy with the way that it looks and how it functions. Shopify made

collecting emails easy. For anyone who ticks yes in the box at checkout, they get added to the email list, which I can then through Shopify send out any promotional messages about future books or updates, things like that. If you're an author or someone who wants to share something with an audience, you can go to shopify. com/tibies to have a go with setting up your own store and selling things directly. I actually think it's a lot of fun. What I've seen is that one person can run a small business. The internet has changed how we can market and reach people. It's no longer essential to try and get your book into bookstores. And in fact, I think it's often a bad deal for most small authors because a bookstore themsself will take about 50% of the sale price and then if you had a distributor helping you reach that bookstore, they might take another 30%. And so as an author, you might end up with about 20% of the sale price if you're lucky. And with that 20%, you will have needed to pay for the printing of the book. Sometimes that's not even feasible if the book was expensive to print. This is what traditional publishers do and is the reason why an author with a traditional publisher might get 10% or less as the royalty on each sale of their book. So, I had to reconsider how important is it for me to be in bookstores. I reached out to a bunch of them directly and most rejected me because I didn't have a distributor. But some did agree to stock my book and for them I'm grateful. Here's a few shoutouts to places that you can buy the book. For the most part though, I've become my own bookstore. And that's fine. Actually, it means that I keep 100% of the sale of each book. And then from that, I subtract the printing cost and the shipping and warehouse costs and also a few other administrative and logistical costs that come with running a business. So, I've got my little bookstore up and running. But to get to this point, I did make a lot of mistakes. And these are the kind of mistakes that wouldn't be worth it if I was only doing this once. If I only was ever going to have one book and one thing to sell, it probably wouldn't be worth it to even learn these lessons. But for me, I wanted this to be something bigger, to continue writing books and releasing new ones every year. I wanted this to grow into something bigger. So, I do consider these mistakes or lessons I've learned to be worth it in my situation. I'll keep it to maybe three main mistakes and won't even bother to mention all the smaller ones. The first was warehouse from hell. In the last two weeks, actually, I finally removed all of my books from the original warehouse they were at in Pennsylvania and moved them to a new warehouse in Texas. This was me breaking free from a warehouse that was constantly letting me down. And I'm very excited about the change. The thing is, I actually think picking a bad warehouse for your first time doing this is almost inevitable. You don't know what you're looking for and what values you really have when it's your first time going through this process. And these big warehouses with all the marketing, they're all kind of as bad as each other in my opinion. And so, it's hard to really tell the difference. But eventually, and as I have, you might find a smaller or local, even familyowned warehouse that is a better fit. Major mistake number two is international taxes. I have unfortunately become an expert on international taxes and import rules. This is not something I wanted to become an expert on, but at some point I became one. Selling stuff means registering for sales tax in states or places where you have enough sales volume to reach Nexus, which for me isn't actually that many places, but it's harder because I'm not based in the US. Some countries, but not all, charge duties on products that arrive at their borders. And the mistake that I made here is that I registered and prepaid all of the duties that would apply for books sent from the US into the UK or the EU so that those would be handled. And I did that during the pre-orders process. But then when it became time to actually send out the books, the earlier mentioned warehouse told me on the last possible day, the day we were sending our orders, that I couldn't use my own tax registration and I had to use their third party one. And it actually meant I ended up double paying all of the import duties on all of those European orders for that period, which was quite a lot and definitely a lesson I learned. But honestly, it doesn't need to be that hard. Now, I think I've got a pretty seamless system. And this leads into mistake number three, which is essentially trying to do too much too soon. When I initially announced pre-orders of the book, some people emailed in and said, "Hey, can you add my country to the list of places you ship to and I just said yes and basically added them all and so was

accepting orders from all over the world. This should be fine in theory. The warehouse says that they ship there and, you know, I've figured out the system to manage all the international taxes. But what I noticed is that some countries are much more likely to have lost parcels than other countries. And often it's places where I would send the parcel to the country with one carrier and then at the border it would be given over to a different local carrier where it then became really hard for me to track. I resent a whole bunch of parcels mostly to countries like this where it was handed off to secondary carriers. But I also had to go in and restrict the number of countries that I'm actually able to send the book to. So I'm sorry if your country is no longer on that list. Things like US mail foring services might be an option if you do still really want to buy a physical copy. A highly commended mistake would be communication around what a pre-order means because about a week after I announced pre-orders, people were emailing me saying, "Where's my book? I haven't received it yet. " when the books hadn't been printed yet, the pre-orders period is like, you know, you can support this book and then when it's ready, your copy will be one of the first sent out. Having a long pre-orders period was also tricky because people will change their address in that time. And so, it was an additional challenge to try and be confident that I had everyone's up to-date shipping address before sending out the books. In the future, I might rethink how I do pre-orders or maybe do a much shorter period or just make that communication clearer that the book is not actually ready to be shipped. But having pre-orders was really useful in being able to afford the printing cost and having an estimate on how many books to actually print. So, you may be wondering, what if you don't have a YouTube audience? I know that is a huge advantage that I already had going into this, but I still think publishing this way can be worth it if you're then willing to invest in marketing your own book rather than just hoping to be found in the algae bloom of Amazon. On Kevin's flowchart, the first question asked, "Do you have an audience? " and no takes you on a loop back to the start saying you should find one or find an agent to help you break into traditional audiences. I haven't done any paid marketing for my book, but I did make a lot of videos about it and every time I do talk about it, I see a little spike in the number of orders. And if I haven't spoken about it online for a while, that dries up. This has been super useful information for me, which really motivates me to keep talking about the book and keep making videos about it because I know that has an impact. I think if I didn't have that direct feedback on my efforts, I would definitely lose momentum in that marketing. But I don't think you need to be a big YouTuber already to take advantage of, you know, talking about your book on Tik Tok or short videos, things like this. I think it can be really helpful for discovery, but doing it this way has also really affected my psychology when it comes to thinking about what books I would want to write and publish in the future. If I can't think of at least 50 little short video ideas or 50 ways to talk about the themes and topics in the book, then I know that I'm unlikely to have the energy and momentum to be able to do a good job at marketing it. With my dimensions book, I could think of 5,000 different videos to make and ways to talk about those ideas. And so for that, I do feel lucky. But it's also given me a good perspective into not what's marketable, but how to find continuously different angles into an idea and different ways to create intrigue about an idea and you know establish different little rivers flowing into it. There's also a huge theme in here of trading convenience for ownership. I think if you only have one book, then putting it on a marketplace and doing it in the most convenient way possible is probably the right idea. But if you don't mind becoming obsessed about this book thing, then the ownership of your audience and the way you're doing this might be more important to you. And I think that ownership will become more important as the internet continues to change how we reach audiences. Thank you to my Patreon supporters for making these videos possible. And a special shout out to today's Patreon cat of the day, Luca.