How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017
zhubert.com

For my use case (self-publishing a digital-only book):

I wrote "Learn Java the Hard Way" using Leanpub and I was pleased with the experience, but their build tools are closed-source and sort-of creaky and the tweak-compile-preview cycle is WAY too slow for my workflow.

I intend to use Softcover for my next one.

Recently I switched to Gumroad for fulfillment and I have been incredibly happy with them. Highly recommended.

Show your piece to a number of people—ten, let us say. Listen carefully to what they tell you. Smile and nod a lot. Then review what was said very carefully. If your critics are all telling you the same thing about some facet of your story—a plot twist that doesn’t work, a character who rings false, stilted narrative, or half a dozen other possibles—change that facet.

It doesn’t matter if you really liked that twist of that character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with your piece, it is. If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I’d still suggest changing it. But if everyone—or even most everyone—is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.

In the same piece, King advises “if it’s bad, kill it.” (“When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.”)

1. http://www.jerryjenkins.com/guest-blog-from-stephen-king/

I know this isn't very DIY, but it's probably worth knowing it's an option: I simply hired someone who works at a book publishing company to edit and typeset the book for me on the side. The person I hired does it for a living and is incredibly good at it. Let's just say it's not the most lucrative career choice, so I had the entire book (198 pages) edited and typeset by a professional for about $400.

This also had the added benefit of letting me write and get feedback from early readers using google docs, which was incredibly important.

I ended up paying her a pretty big bonus on top of that (as we pre-sold $110,000 worth and since publishing a couple days ago have brought in another $2,000 - all straight profit since we're ebook only so far and not on Amazon) but for my time and sanity it was very, very worth it.