10 Lessons We Learned From Self-Publishing a Book

If you have interest in publishing a book anytime soon or in the future, you may want to read this to the end. If you live in an African country or planning to publish a book targeting African audience, this is for you. Even if you don’t, you are non-Africa, you’ll also learn something from reading this post.

If you have been following After School Africa for a while now, you probably know or have even got our book, The Scholarship Digest. We published this book in August last year. And so far have learnt a few lessons about self publishing.

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Today, we want to share with you some of the lessons we have learned. By the way, if you are new here consider subscribing to After School Africa on Youtube to keep exploring opportunities and seeing videos like this one below:

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Why Self-Publishing?

Before the age of the internet, the only way a writer could get their book in front of people was to send a book proposal and a query letter to a traditional publisher or agent. The writer hopes that the gatekeeper wakes up on the right side of the bed and actually gives your letter and proposal more than a 10-second glance; which 95 percent of the time is not likely. As a result, brilliant people are denied the opportunity to share their experiences, stories, and knowledge with the world.

Thankfully, this industry is changing for the better – at least for those who are savvy in self-publishing. With the development of online marketplaces like Amazon, and easy online shopping setup, the content publishing process has changed. You can distribute your book to everyone, without the restriction that comes with traditional publishing.

Here are some lessons we learn from self publishing our book.

• Amazon is not enough

Yes, authors and readers around the world are happy to have platforms like Amazon to publish and find books. But this is not yet so for people in some other parts of the world like most countries in Africa. Since our target audience for the book was mostly Africans, most of our readers are not able to purchase books from Amazon. This is either because, Amazon does not allow people from most African countries to purchase kindle books or because, they prefer a quicker way to get the paperback version.

As a result, we made sure to publish our book using different medium including Amazon, but we barely sold a few copies from Amazon. As a matter of fact sales from Amazon were just about 4 percent of total sales. So as an author, while you are fantasizing the idea of having your book published on Amazon, make sure to have other alternatives for people to get your book.

• Self publishing a book takes a lot of work and time

If you decide to go the traditional publishing route, your publisher takes care of formatting, designing book cover, editing and publishing your book. But if you are self publishing, you’ll have to do these yourself or pay someone to do it for you. In addition, you have to publish on different formats, for different platforms; you have to create a website for your book; marketing the book, do the customer service, fix the technical issues and so on. While these may seem like a lot of work, it is well worth it. you will end up gaining new knowledge and skills in the process.

• Physical books are not dead yet

We discovered that people still read physical books as much as eBooks. Despite that the physical book was more expensive and that the only option to get the paperback was either through Amazon or a local ecommerce platform. There was still substantial demand for the physical book. When publishing your book, do not limit your option to eBook. Give your readers the option of a physical book.

• You’ll only regret what you never did

Before publishing our book, at first we were skeptical of the kind of reception it would have with our audience. We put in a lot of work reaching out and interviewing previous scholarship winners and then compiling over 1,400 funding opportunities around the world. But we were still skeptical. At some point we wanted to abort the whole thing. But we look back today and are glad we went ahead to publish the book. I have a feeling we would have regretted it, if we didn’t try. So don’t give up on that dream of publishing your book.

• When you create something of value people are willing to get on it

Most authors often have this fear of “is my work good enough?” “Is it valuable enough?” This fear is healthy because it compels you put in extra effort to offer your best work. But if you are not careful, this fear will hinder you from finishing what you start. Once you have made the effort to create something of value, people will appreciate it. So create your best work and put it out there.

• But you have to convince them

We’ve been on this space for over 10 years now. We reach a fairly sizable audience. But that in itself was not enough. People still want to know how your work will be useful to them. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because you reach a large number of people, they are going to jump on whatever you throw at them. You still have to convince them that your book is worth reading. In other words, you still have to sell and market it.

• Never expect everyone to appreciate what you do

One of the most important realizations that will set you on a path to freedom is that you cannot please everyone. You may have done your best to write your best book, or give your best at what you do. But there will always be people who won’t appreciate what you do. That okay. Don’t take it personal. Once you have done your best part, just focus on, and learn from the positive feedback and the constructive criticism.

• Payment system in Africa has come a long way

The first time we published a book was in 2010. That book practically sold just one copy before we decided to give it away for free. We reach people around the world who were interested to get a copy. But because there was no functional online payment system that allowed people from Africa to use their service, we were not able to sell the book.

With our recent book, we set up a shopping cart on the book’s website, so that our audience could order the PDF version of the book. People from different parts of the continent were able to order from the book’s website using PayStack online payment service. The process is automatic; readers order successfully, the digital copy is delivered to their email. Indeed, as far as online payment in Africa is concerned, we have come a long way. You should take advantage of this.

• But we still have a long way to go

While payment system in Africa has come a long way, there is more work to be done. For example, many people in some countries like Ethiopia, Liberia and so on still complain that they are not able to use the payment service from their country. In fact, we suspect that almost half of the potential sales were lost due to difficulty for people to order. This is an opportunity for fin-tech entrepreneurs to bridge this gap.

• The Lesson continues

If we are to rate our success from how much money we made from the sales of the book, we would consider it a failure. It may be substantial amount for a student trying to raise money to pay some bills but considering the time and effort we invested interviewing, putting the book together and publishing it, it would have been more profitable if we invested that time to some other part of our work.

But for us, the victory is in starting and getting it done. It’s in being able to create something that people validate with positive feedback. That for us is success. If you are going to publish your book, you will do a lot better if you don’t measure success by how much money the book makes. Rather use more intrinsic values to measure your success. If the money pours in, that should be fine and well; if it trickles in, still all good.

Have you published a book before? Share your experience with us in the comment section. Do you plan on publishing a book soon and have any question? Let us know in the comment section. If you are yet to subscribe to our channel, this is likely a good time to subscribe. Until next time, YOUR SUCCESS MATTERS!