Self-publishing your book: You won’t believe how easy it is!

I recently received my ISBN! For people who self-publish books, this was like a little pre-Christmas. Like the start of the advent calendar that will culminate with me collecting a small shrink-wrapped bundle of books from a printing company. And perhaps a beer at Xai-Xai in Melville after that.

Okay six beers, but that’s not the point. I will have published a book, and it will be all the more authentic for having a barcode with an ISBN number on the back of it.

We should each have many ISBNs to our name – International Standard Book numbers. We all have entire libraries of life experience and insight inside us, and we can all be publishing books without too much hassle.

I am of course a million years old, and I began my career in publishing in the distant 1990s. I printed and published several books of my own before a couple of established publishers saw something they liked and published some of my subsequent attempts.

This was a lovely ego boost and certainly helped expand the number of people one could reach with these things. However, the publishing industry is a brutish and unforgiving one, and one cannot expect people to publish everything you type on your laptop.

So although I still manage to occupy the shelves of major bookshops in some capacity, I have found myself re-entering the self-publishing field. I believe a lot more of us should be using this avenue to express ourselves, to spread our ideas and to legitimise our various undertakings.

We can all publish books.

Books can be a powerful tool. They disseminate wisdom and insight, sure. But the internet does that. Also, hardly any published books make any money. But still, books are useful.

It makes sense not to think of a book as a product, something you will sell and be paid for. Think of it as a brand extension of yourself. Something you can use to promote whatever else you do. Perhaps you’re a counsellor, an artist, a business person, a public figure, a pastor in your church, an elder in your family. Each of these roles can be enriched by you putting down what you have learned in your field, publishing it, and sharing it with your people.

For better or worse, people take you more seriously if you’ve published a book.

It’s not an insurmountable lot of typing. For instance, the NaNoWriMo (National November Writing Month) project encourages you to write 1500 words a day and boom – your book is written in a month. More realistically, it might take three months to write and edit your thoughts.

Novels are accepted to be 60 000 words or longer, but non-fiction books can literally be any length, and if we’re honest, people are more interested in non-fiction these days. You can type up your thoughts in Word, save it as a pdf, email it and have it printed.

Thanks to the miracle of print-on-demand, you can privately print small print runs quite affordably. I recently got a quote from printondemand.co.za for R5 000 to print 100 books. That’s achievable.

The ISBN is a bit of a credibility conceit, but it is necessary if you want your book to be stocked in stores. A visit to the national library website at nlsa.ac.za and you can apply for an ISBN. Then, once they’ve got back to you with the number, you visit a free website that can render that ISBN as a barcode, which you then drop into the back cover artwork of your book.

Modern printers can fire off a short run in a matter of hours. So don’t let the mystery of the process stop you. Publishing is for everybody, and it has been beautifully democratised.

I’m a bit of an evangelist about self-publishing, and I believe we should all consider it. If you need any further tips, look me up.

And let’s get those books out!

Hagen Engler. Picture: Supplied

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