I've resisted the idea of self-publishing a book-length manuscript for many years. Not out of any sense that traditional publishing is “better”—it's more that the process of self-publishing has always felt a bit overwhelming. What I've realized recently, though, is that I already use a lot of the same skills for my other projects, like producing the issues for After Happy Hour and publishing the prompt journals for Scribble House. This has brought me around to a new outlook on self-publishing my fiction. Yes, the process is a lot of work, but I'm slowly gaining confidence in my ability to do it, and am tentatively building toward self-publishing a book in the first half of 2026.
With this new goal on my radar, I've been doing a lot of research lately into all of those skills beyond just writing well that you need to be a successful self-published author, and figured it might be helpful for other folks contemplating this question. As I see it, there are four big-picture steps beyond the writing stage that each require their own sets of skills.
“Don't judge a book by its cover” is a nice thought, especially as it's applicable to, say, other people. When it comes to actual books, though, readers absolutely do judge books by their cover, and while this might be a hot take, I don't think that's a problem. I would argue it's the whole reason the cover exists in the first place. Not just to entice readers (though that's part of it) but also to inform them about the kind of story they're getting into and help them decide if it's something they'd enjoy reading.
This has become especially important in the modern era of publishing. It's a great thing that self-publishing has taken down some barriers that used to stop writers from sharing their work. That said, it also means readers can't count on a book being well-written or telling a complete, interesting story just because it's been put out into the world. These days, readers can't be sure whether a human even wrote the damn thing. If your book's cover is pixelated and grainy, or looks obviously AI generated, that doesn't inspire confidence in readers that what's inside will be worth their time.
I always find it ironic that professional editing—an industry solely devoted to words and language—has so much confusing niche terminology. I say this as someone who edits professionally, both as a freelancer and through Scribble House. One person’s content editing might be another’s structural edits, and whether these are interchangeable or mean slightly different things usually depends on who you’re asking, too.
Part of the problem is that these terms aren’t standardized, and slightly different ones are often used depending on the context. What a fiction editor calls “line editing”, the editor of online news articles might call “copy editing”, and there’s similar overlap between terms like content editing, structural editing, and developmental editing.
I just wrapped up my first experience at the In Your Write Mind conference hosted by Seton Hill University’s popular fiction program—quite literally, in fact; I’m on the train back to Pittsburgh as I write this.
You might think, given how many writing conferences and such I go to in a typical year, that the experience would be predictable by this point, but the truth is that past experience has just taught me not to assume anything. Conferences and conventions vary wildly in just about every respect. I’ve been to some that last a single day and others that last 4-5, conventions with 10,000+ attendees and others with less than a hundred. Most have book fairs or exhibit halls, but not all; some are mostly panels, some mostly workshops, some mostly readings, some a mix of all three—and the value I’ve gotten from going to those activities has been just as wide-ranging.
I have a few manuscripts I’ve been shopping around to agents and presses: A linked short story collection, a speculative micro-fiction chapbook, a 200,000-word sci-fi novel—in short, not the types of projects most publishers are look for.
This has, naturally, gotten me thinking about self-publishing. Especially since I know a good number of people who have done it successfully: My partner self-published his novel, Hungry, through Amazon; a member of my writing group released his comic book series, Theme of Thieves, with funding from Kickstarter; another workshop colleague serialized his novel on the now-defunct platform JukePop, leading to its eventual publication by Spaceboy Books as Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space.
