Self-Publishing is Like Wedding Planning

The following is an excerpt from Untangling the Self-Publishing Process: A Practical Guide to Creating and Marketing a Professional-Quality Book by Julia Soplop, Hill Press founder.

Assembling a high-quality book is like planning a wedding. Ideally, you have a large budget to hire out all the services necessary to host an elegant wedding: a fancy venue, high-end linens, gourmet catering, a unique florist, a professional photographer, live musical entertainment. You identify your preferred vendors, write them checks, and show up on your wedding day ready to celebrate.

But if your actual budget doesn’t allow you to hire professionals to provide every service, you need to prioritize. You think about which elements you and your family and friends might realistically be able to contribute—looking at both time and talents—without impacting the quality of the event. You also think about which services you most want professionals to provide. Maybe your parents can cut and arrange flowers from their wildflower garden to avoid hiring a florist. Perhaps you can set up an iPod in lieu of hiring an expensive band. Maybe your best friend, a professional chef, offers to donate the catering as a wedding gift. If you have a clear vision for the venue, and photography is an important part of your life, you might spend your budget booking a chic venue and hiring a professional photographer. The event may not be the fanciest wedding people have ever attended, but that doesn’t prevent it from being a sophisticated and meaningful celebration of your marriage.

When you’re self-publishing your work, it’s ideal to hire professionals to handle most of the steps required to transform your manuscript into the highest-quality book possible. If you have a large budget, you can finish your draft manuscript, identify the best editorial and publishing support vendors available, write them checks to handle much of the publishing process, and set a launch date.

But if you don’t have the budget to hire professionals to manage every detail of the publishing process, you need to prioritize. You look at the skills and time you have. You identify people in your life who might have the time and talents to help, either for free or as trades for services you could provide for them, such as reading their manuscript drafts in the future. You think about which aspects—editing, book interior design, cover design, ebook conversion, marketing support—you don’t have the skills or time to handle or that you most want to appear professional, and you hire out what your budget allows.

If you want to put your book into the world, you should do so regardless of the level of professional publishing services you can afford to hire. I won’t pretend the polish and packaging of a book doesn’t matter. It does. But your budget shouldn’t preclude you from publishing the highest-quality book you can.

Untangling the Self-Publishing Process discusses the steps required to elevate your book to its full potential. It also gives the ideal scenarios of the professional services you could hire if you had the budget to hire everything out. But you’ll need to prioritize the services you’re able to hire.

When you’re making these decisions, it’s important to remember you might not make the money back through book sales. (But you might!) If you never see that cash again, what can you afford—and what do you feel is worth spending—to create a professional-quality book?