cover design – Ridley Park

I hate to be the bearer of bad news – especially if you’re still slogging through a draft of your first manuscript. You know what some people say about writing a book is the hard part.

Lies. Damned lies. That’s the frothy, twinkly nonsense parroted by people who’ve never published anything beyond a social media post, probably only a comment.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Let me tell you the truth. The actual, bloodstained, coffee-fuelled truth:

Writing the book is the easy part.

It’s the visible tip of the iceberg, smugly floating above the surface, soaking up the praise and admiration. Meanwhile, everything else – the sleepless nights, the decimal-point royalty statements, the unpaid invoices to your own soul – is lurking beneath, waiting to sink your mental health like the HMS Delusion.

So here it is, for posterity and pity:

Post-Writing Gauntlet: The Real Job Begins

1. Editing (Five Times, If You’re Lucky)

Developmental editing – “Is your plot a plot or a pile of wet spaghetti?”
Line editing – Making your sentences less embarrassing.
Copyediting – Catching your consistent misuse of ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.
Proofreading – The last defence against the typo apocalypse.
Beta feedback – Friends who suddenly vanish when asked to read a draft.

2. Formatting and Typesetting

Print vs digital layouts. Word crimes meet paragraph crimes.
EPUBs that break for fun.
That one widow on page 243 you didn’t notice until the proof copy arrived.

3. Cover Design

DIY, Fiverr roulette, or mortgage your cat to hire a professional.
Matching tone, genre conventions, and market expectations.
Spelling your own name correctly. (Don’t laugh, it happens.)

4. ISBNs and Metadata Hell

ISBN purchases (if you’re not relying on Amazon’s identifiers).
Title, subtitle, BISAC categories, keywords, blurbs, author bio — all rewritten seventeen times.

5. Publishing Platform Setup

Kindle Direct Publishing, IngramSpark, Kobo, Draft2Digital, Smashwords — pick your poison.
Print proofs, bleed settings, trim sizes, the baffling difference between matte and gloss.

6. Marketing (a.k.a. Screaming Into the Void)

Author website & blog (SEO: your new religion).
Social media presence — the façade of charm over existential dread.
Newsletter with a totally non-spammy freebie opt-in.
Ads: Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Google. Burn money to test the water temperature.

7. Book Launch

ARCs, blog tours, launch events, or at least pretending you’re doing those things.
Coordinating reviews before anyone has read the damn thing.
Press kits and media outreach — basically shouting “LOOK AT ME” with tact.

8. Ongoing Sales Maintenance

Price promos, countdown deals, boxed sets, bundling — keep flogging the corpse.
Monitoring sales dashboards like a Victorian ghost watches the wallpaper peel.
Adjusting metadata because one reviewer didn’t understand it was satire.

9. Audiobook Production (If You Hate Money)

Narrator auditions, contracts, studio time.
Alternatively, read it yourself and discover your own voice is intolerable.
Or muddle through with an AI speech companion. Hullo, ElevenLabs.
Distribution through ACX or Findaway, both of which will pay you in dry leaves.

10. Accounting and Legal Fuss

Tracking royalties across platforms.
Filing taxes as an “author-publisher-entrepreneur-marketer-entity”.
Copyright registration, contracts, intellectual property trolls under the bridge.

11. Dealing With Readers

Responding to fan mail (both lovely and deranged).
Ignoring 1-star reviews that say “not what I expected, didn’t read it”.
Navigating book clubs who want a discount because they’re “doing you a favour”.

12. Mental Health and Motivation

Impostor syndrome, burnout, elation, despair — the writer’s buffet.
Rewriting your author bio weekly because you don’t know who you are anymore.

Optional Add-Ons (for masochists)

Translations and foreign rights – Because English isn’t the only language in which you can fail to sell books.
Merchandise – T-shirts nobody buys, mugs that mock your financial situation.
Public speaking / readings – Summon the courage to read your sex scenes aloud in a room of pensioners.

**Image**: *Publishing iceberg poster in all its glory*.

I, Ridley Park, am an independent author and publisher. Before this literary turn, I did time as an economist, business analyst, and management consultant – none of which prepared me for the peculiar economics of modern publishing.

Much like traditional music in the Digital Age, traditional publishing has lost a bit of its lustre. Its gatekeeping function remains, but the gates are now rusted, and half the guards have been made redundant.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

From a business standpoint, the Independent™ must ask: Is the distribution reach of a traditional publisher or third-party distributor worth the revenue share they demand? It’s tempting to cast them as parasites feeding off your creative lifeblood—but statistically, the average indie author sells only 60 copies of their book. Yes, that includes the five you bought yourself and the ten your mum distributed among reluctant neighbours.

Could you sell more than average? Possibly. Less? Almost certainly. Better to sell 100 copies and earn a pittance than to earn 100% of nothing. But if the publisher can’t move your book either, and if they’re not investing in you as an author, you may well find yourself in the red. Especially if you’re the one paying them for the privilege of being published. That’s not publishing – that’s vanity cosplay.

Publishers also offer (read: upsell) services like editing, formatting, and cover design. As an Independent™, you either pay for these à la carte or do them yourself. Or, if you’re like me, you cobble together a mixed strategy of DIY, AI, and professional outsourcing – whatever the project demands.

For Hemo Sapiens, I did everything except the typography for the title and byline on the cover. That part I outsourced; I know my limits. The rest – cover composition, layout, typesetting – I handled. I also brought in beta readers, who offered some valuable copyedits and corrections.

With Sustenance, I went end-to-end solo, with AI in the wings for flow and proofing support.

Propensity followed a similar path – except I made the rare (some might say perverse) choice of hiring a beta reader after release. Heretical, I know. But the feedback was so incisive I’m now considering a mid-edition revision, particularly in the middle third, where things get a bit heady.

As for Temporal Babel – still unreleased – I’ve done everything myself thus far, but I’m leaning toward bringing that same beta reader back for another round of bruising clarity.

Beta readers, it turns out, are worth their weight in snark and red ink. I’ll save my ruminations on them for another post, which I promise will be full of revelations and at least one semi-poetic lament.

I could say more here, but there are other things demanding my time – and no publisher breathing down my neck.

Bless MidJourney for the cover art based on this prompt:

beautiful woman wearing glasses and a sheer top, holding a red pen, reading a book, office setting

Tag: cover design

Writing is Just the Tip of the Iceberg