Well, if you equate self-publishing with uploading files to CreateSpace, yeah, that’s easy.
For reference, here’s my process. Less easy, I’d say:
- Start your marketing program: a regularly written blog, and meaningful generous comments on the blogs you believe your readers frequent.
- Write the book. (Shortest word count for one of these steps; longest hardest process in real life.)
- Developmental editing and rewrites, possibly many.
- Line editing and proofreading. Steps 3 and 4 aren’t necessarily strictly separate or sequential.
- Interior design, including paying attention to Dave Bricker’s notes on good typography, headers and footers, table of contents, index if necessary (more than one of my books has a good index) etc.
- Cover design including barcode for ISBN and price
- Now, upload the files to CreateSpace
- Start coordinating your launch: virtual blog tour, real life presentations, sharing with all your online and offline friends.
- Reformat for Smashwords’ criteria. As anyone who’s done it will tell you, getting into their premium catalog requires some pretty strict attention to detail and rigorously proper formatting.
- Reformat for Kindle. Yes, you can just shove the files up there, but if you want a usable TOC and other user features, it takes time and a little understanding of how Kindle works.
- Have you been doing your marketing all along? Continue it, while you . . .
- Write your next book.
Every step is vital to a quality book. It’s fun, but it’s still a lot of hard work.
It’s that step 12 that’s got me spinning right now…
Spinning . . . your wheels?
Spinning . . . a web?
Spinning . . . with ideas?
Well, shoot, if I can get past steps 2 and 3, I still have a ways to go, but I think the rest of the steps are the easy parts.
For someone like you who has the skills, you’re absolutely right.