Self-publishing means you're the writer, editor, marketer, accountant, and because the universe enjoys a joke, the graphic designer too.

And here's the kicker...I went to college for graphic design! I know the theory, the grids, the Pantone wheel. I can talk typography until your eyes glaze over. And still, I've found myself at 2 a.m. locked in a death match with two shades of red, convinced my entire career depends on choosing the "right" one.

The Hat Pile

Indie publishing is a hat pile that gets taller with each book. You'll draft 100,000 words like it's nothing, then collapse trying to align a subtitle on a cover. The work teaches you humility. It also teaches you how quickly "good enough" beats "perfect."

The Writing Part (The Easy Part)

Here's the joke...writing the book is the simplest part of this entire circus. You spend months, maybe years, building a world, characters, a story that actually works. You type "THE END" and feel like you've crossed the finish line.

You haven't. You've just arrived at the starting blocks.

Formatting: A Love Letter to Frustration

Your manuscript looks perfect in Word. Clean breaks, crisp italics, everything formatted exactly how you want it. Then you convert it to epub and suddenly your scene breaks are random page breaks, your italics have vanished into the void, and that carefully placed image is now floating somewhere in chapter seven for reasons nobody can explain.

You've got options. Vellum if you're on Mac and have money to burn. Atticus if you want cross-platform flexibility. Or you can do it manually in Word like someone who enjoys pain as a hobby.

I've done all three. They all make you want to throw your laptop out a window at some point. Pick your poison.

Platform Roulette: KDP, D2D, IngramSpark

Each platform has its own personality disorder.

Amazon's the 800-pound gorilla. KDP is where most of your sales will happen, which means you'll spend an unhealthy amount of time trying to decode its algorithm. It changes every Tuesday. Nobody knows how it works. People who claim they do are lying.

Draft2Digital is the friendly cousin. It makes wide distribution almost painless, handles your ISBNs if you want, and doesn't make you feel like you're defusing a bomb every time you upload a file. The interface actually makes sense. This is both refreshing and vaguely suspicious.

IngramSpark is the one that requires a blood sacrifice. Want to upload a cover? Better have your specs perfect, your ISBN registered, your printer's proof approved by three separate deities, and a backup plan for when it rejects your file for reasons it will not explain. But if you want bookstore distribution or international reach, you'll deal with it anyway.

Oh, and ISBNs. You'll need those. One per format, per edition. They cost money unless you let Amazon or D2D give you free ones, which locks you into their ecosystem. There's no right answer here. Just trade-offs that'll keep you up at night.

The Design Wars

Photoshop? Forget it. Too expensive, too bloated. Affinity Photo is my choice. It's powerful, it's affordable, and it still makes me feel like I'm one wrong click away from deleting the entire file.

Here's what I've learned: readers don't care about your secret war with the color wheel. They care about whether your covers, your site, and your promo graphics look like they belong to the same universe. Cohesion beats genius. A consistent font and a handful of colors can carry you farther than endless tweaking.

Marketing (Or: Screaming Into the Void)

You've written the book. Formatted it. Uploaded it. Designed a cover that doesn't look like a crime scene. You hit publish.

And then nothing happens.

Because nobody knows your book exists.

This is the part where you become a marketer. Social media posts. Newsletter swaps. ARC copies to reviewers who may or may not ever read it. Amazon ads with a learning curve steeper than Everest. BookBub ads that eat your budget and return crickets. Promo sites with submission windows that close before you remember they exist.

Some of it works. Most of it doesn't. You won't know which is which until you've burned through enough money and time to develop opinions.

The only universal truth: you can't just build it and assume they'll come. You have to drag them there, one reader at a time, while also writing the next book.

What Actually Matters

You'll never master all of it. That's fine. The goal isn't perfection. It's survival, coherence, momentum.

A perfect cover won't save a weak book. But a weak cover will bury a strong one. A brilliant marketing campaign can't fix a formatting disaster that makes your book unreadable on Kindle. Your metadata matters more than you think. Your blurb matters more than your cover. Your first page matters more than your blurb.

Everything matters. Nothing matters as much as you think it does in the moment.

You'll figure out what deserves your attention and what deserves "good enough." You'll learn which corners you can cut and which ones will bite you. Each book sharpens your eye. Each release is another round.

Learning in Public

The first covers won't be perfect. The first promos might look like they came from a haunted MySpace page. Your first upload to IngramSpark might require customer service and possibly a priest. That's fine.

Design is just another way of telling the story. Formatting is how you make sure people can actually read it. Marketing is how you get it in front of eyeballs. Platforms are the infrastructure holding the whole mess together.

If you're reading this years later, maybe you're better at it now. Maybe you've hired help, or maybe you've just made peace with the chaos. Either way, you kept going.

And that's the only part that actually matters.

#WritingCommunity #IndieAuthor #AmWriting #AmEditing #HorrorBooks #SciFiBooks #AuthorLife #MilesCarnegie