If you read all the blog posts, writing columns and general good advice floating out there, they’ll all tell you that in today’s world, self-publishing is free. Technically, that is true and you can put your book up on Amazon and Createspace with nary a dime leaving your pocket. The whole process is free if you’re willing to discount your time as worthless. What is your time worth to you?

If you decide to do it all yourself, you have to be willing to go the distance in order to get your novel print ready. The amount of time it takes you to create a complete polished manuscript and get it to your target audience all depends on you and how fast you can get it done or how many of your friends and family you can rope into helping you. Tasks to consider after the writing is done:

Editing
Rewriting
Beta Reads
Formatting for your Publishing Platform
Cover Creation
Drafting Jacket Blurbs and Synopses
Banking/Administrative Tasks
Contest Entries
Market Research
Advertising
Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
Blogging
Creating and Updating Author Pages

The self-publishing beast will eat up hours of your time every week. We are lucky. There are three of us to split the work load which eases the burden on each of us and allows us to concentrate on the fun stuff like plotting and writing.

Would we have a better product if we paid for professional services? Probably. Is it worth it to do it yourself? We think so. It all depends on how much you want to pay and with what currency ~ money or time or a combination of both. If you have a spare $500 or $600 or so lying around, you can save yourself a lot of time by paying for professional editing or a professional cover or Createspace formatting. You name it, you can probably outsource it but it’s going to cost you.

Work on our new projects continues. We hope to have our Renna Olsen novel, Holly Virginia, ready for publishing sometime in May. We’re shooting for summer for the second in our New Mother Earth series, Return to Gaia. It all depends on how fast we can get it done.

Hope you’ll stick with us!
Anne, Nancy and Eric