You may have noticed that my artist butt has been blathering a lot about stuff like “Kindle” and “Publishing” and “Mothman erotica” lately. (Not that last one? Scrub it from your eyes.) I apologize if all that seems like a big ol’ pivot.

It ain’t, though.

I’ve been writing my own comics and blog posts this whole time. And a novel, and some other things. It’s no coincidence that my favorite people to work with are authors. I’ve been writing as much as I’ve been drawing, pretty much forever. And shall continue to do so. But these days, I figured I should also probably PUT IT SOMEWHERE.

Once I made this decision, I had to decide the following things:

1. When should I use a pen name?
2. Chase traditional publishers, or self publish?
3. Where should I publish first?
4. How do I publish something on that platform?
5. How do I tell people about it?
6. Do I stick to one place or go wide?
7. How does this work for different book types (eBook, paperback, comic book)

This is going to be a monster post. If you’re not morbidly curious about all things publishing, TURN BACK NOW.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s go through each point.

Pen names

I recently figured out pen names. At first I didn’t think these would be particularly relevant to me, but then I noticed they were an extremely useful way to sort your books by genre. If your genres vary wildly, pen names are one good way to make sure readers can find your stories more quickly. So why is this?

It’s kind of the same principle of approaching print on demand shops, where you kill your artist-ego and assume they’re looking for a cute shirt with a cat, and not looking for you as an artist. If you do have any hardcore fans of your Self, sweet! They’ll be looking for your stuff anyway though, and your goal here is to help all those other guys.

Hence, if you’re writing whatever you want for fun without trying to build A LEGEND around your legal name, same deal applies. It’s going to be easier for your readers if you let them find you by looking for romance or horror or cooking, instead of expecting them to be looking for YOU and then read any genre you write no matter how widely you write. Ain’t nobody got time for that, so give them a break.

That said, it was a hoot and a holler figuring out how to label and streamline my different genres into pen names (at least in Kindle) so if anyone needs any help with that, let me know.

Traditional or Self Publish?

This is a huge decision and can end up being a relatively permanent one, either from publisher prejudice and convention or from you not wanting to go back once you find your groove. I personally waffled on this decision in particular for the better part of two decades.

My journey with the Cradle of the Worm novel went like this:

1. Traditional publishers. After being on The Lovecraft eZine Podcast for a few episodes, I fell in love with Ellen Datlow. She’s just really cool. She happens to collect stuff for Tor, and I had always loved the old Tor fantasy paperbacks. So naturally I tried the 2021 round of Tor Nightfire Submissions. It took them almost two years to get to my book, but they did get to it! …and said no. (But real nicely!)
2. Indie publishers. Since I’ve known some really cool and sweet indie publishers, I’ve approached them over the years with The killing of Dreams and Cradle of the Worm. They ALSO said no, but even nicelier.
3. POINT OF NO RETURN: THE DECISION TO SELF PUBLISH. Guess what I just found out? Most traditional publishers/agents will not take your stuff if it was published online before, EVEN IF NO ONE SAW IT. In some cases, call to entries may be for never-before published authors. Some say that you can use pen names to get around this, but either way, BEWARE.
4. Shoving it on Tapas Comics for a novel writing contest. This was particularly cool because I got to interact with the people who read my chapters. The discussion was far and away my favorite part. But, without winning the contest or getting the attention of the Tapas Powers That Be, I still didn’t have a path to selling the novel. I wanted to have my comics forever free online, but I had other plans for my novel.
5. KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) When I first did this 9 years ago, it was a nightmare. And it’s still pretty complicated now. But I’m learning!
6. Kindle Vella. This is where I am right now. Kindle Vella has its own rules, like not having your Vella writing available anywhere for free online, and they prefer you to publish with them first if you’re going to cross-publish to another serial publishing platform like Radish. You can also put your Vella chapters onto KDP as a novel, provided it is at least 10 chapters long, you state it was previously on Vella as “chapters X through Y of Z series,” and you wait until 30 days after you publish your last chapter.

As you can see, my final decision was to self publish, starting with Kindle. I’m gathering most authors have to deal with Kindle in some capacity or other, since I think it’s something like 80% of the market. There are a couple of basic things to keep in mind with Kindle before we dig into it deeper:

PRICING FLEXIBILITY On Kindle, you can’t charge less than $0.99 for your book. I doubt most people would want to price their hard work lower than that anyway, but there may be a day you want to run some sort of promotion or giveaway. There is actually a way to have a free book on there. Thank you Written Word Media! I’ll be referencing them below as well.

DIFFICULTY As we all know by now, Kindle Direct Publishing drives me insane. Brace yourself. I’ve heard anecdotally that Kindle is supposed to be one of the easiest and most user-friendly publishers to use, if not the easiest. (I’ll come back and tell you all if that’s horse hockey once I go wide.)

ARBITRARY ROBOT SHENANIGANS Amazon’s robots and algorithms are infamous for their caprice and some would say, malevolence. Every once in awhile, an author may get banned or see their earnings plummet because of some opaque and un-announced change, and customer support is often unable to give them context or explanations.

Always have all of your writing backed up locally and be ready to pivot to another platform, or publish widely to begin with.

trial and error

My approach here has been to study each platform and then break down what each publishing method was best suited for. When I had working lists of what I could do best in each one, I then determined which of those things I wanted to do with each book in particular. That enabled me to match up each book to the platform(s) I should put them on.

I immediately noticed problems with traditional publishing.

After a lot of lost sleep studying queries and agents and elevator pitches, trying my hand at these things, and striking out every time, I noticed three things:

The first was that traditional publishing takes an extremely long time. Every time I waited for a book to get rejected, my wait was around 400 days. Since publishers often prefer you don’t pitch to multiple people at a time and I try to honor their wishes, this was consecutive blocks of 400 days of my life where the book was tied up. Years and years and years. And even when I’ve been traditionally published as an illustrator, that took years from start to finish as well.

Hence many authors say, “pitch to everyone, that’s an impossible ask,” and I agree! Please don’t feel bad about valuing your precious time on this earth. Also remember that self-publishing is instantaneous by comparison. You upload it and after a period that is typically 72 hours or much less…there it is. Published.

Secondly I noticed how horrific the odds are. Between the vast amount of submissions a publisher gets and their business obligation to never risk money on anything that doesn’t fit into their narrow criteria of what has already been successful, almost no one gets published through them. There’s an unsettling little statistic that around 1 to 2% of authors who submit to traditional publishing houses will be published, while 100% of authors who self-publish, are…well…published!

Lastly, I noticed that you sign your rights over to them. Famous authors often didn’t make too much on their first couple of books because they didn’t have a good contract yet. With a publishing house, an author constantly has to get legal help to avoid exploitative contracts. And even then, they will likely have to make changes to the book they never would have made, and have no say over the cover art or other such matters.

A bonus problem: you are still generally expected to handle most or all of your marketing. Unless you’re a very small percentage of that tiny percentage of traditionally published authors, you’ll still be expected to do a ton of the marketing yourself. Which begs the question, why did you even bother?

So much for publishing houses.

benefits of different self publishing platforms

You can self-publish serials, eBooks, and printed books. Most of my advice will be centered around serials and eBooks, since they are usually free to upload to a selling platform and with serials and eBooks you don’t have to struggle with ISBNS. You also have a more leeway to change around details of the book, pen-names, and covers and internals. (Ask me how I know.)

I’ve delved into Kindle Vella, KDP Select, and Wide Distribution in terms of which of my goals aligns with which approach.

Kindle Vella

Kindle Vella publishing is best suited for books where:

1. I’m experimenting with this story, writing as I go and still taking feedback into account and making changes.
2. I like the serial/episode format for this story.
3. I want to run polls, leave author notes and get comments.
4. I want to offer my first 3 10 chapters for free. (That change ruffled some feathers, I can tell you.)
5. I want to try something new, whether it be a new format or a new genre.
6. I want to save on cover art. This doesn’t apply to me because I do all my own art, but it’s very handy for other authors who have to pay cover artists. Even a 300 episode story just needs one 1600×1600 image without text.
7. I want to use a pen name. Vella is by far the easiest place to use a pen name that I’ve found so far.
8. I don’t need to do anything else with it for 30-60 days. (You can publish as an eBook 30 days after the series concludes. You may also unpublish it, but this may take up to 60 days.)

Kindle Unlimited/KDP Select

KDP Select is best suited for books where:

1. I want tons of eyes on my book. People can read stuff on KU with no pressure.
2. I want to release a ton of books in this series. (Supposedly that increases your KU monthly payout.)
3. I want to introduce my book to people on Kindle Unlimited and take it to wide distribution afterwards.
4. I don’t need to have it on any other platforms for 90+ days.
5. I want to write to market/write for fun and don’t care about painstakingly crafting a single book for decades at a time.
6. Instead of having one stand-out book, I want to be an author known for a certain type of story.

WIDE DISTRIBUTION

Wide Distribution is best suited for books where:

1. I want to change the world with this particular book.
2. I need absolute freedom over the price, including being able to offer it free if I want.
3. I need freedom to run kickstarters, collaborate with other authors, make infinite changes, make illustrated editions, use any tags or words I want, etc.
4. I need people to be able to get the book ANYWHERE, ie. Nook, Kindle, Apple Books, Google Play, Kobo, etc. [these links take you to articles by Written Word Media about how to publish on each one of these platforms]
5. I want to see this book in brick and mortar stores, or at least in their online shops.
6. Amazon is a company like any other, capable of making bad decisions, and I don’t want to tie this book to them without any backup method of delivering it to people.

Now that you have a story in mind and you know what you want to do with it, that should tell you which approach you want to take.

You might have noticed that you can combine all three approaches. I plan to do that myself with many of my books! If do you combine each approach, or still want to try traditional publishing, you’ll need to follow a certain order dictated by the exclusivity and first-printing requirements of traditional and indie publishers, Kindle Vella and KDP Select. Which brings us to:

Order of operations

I will do my very best to simplify this for you all without breaking anyone’s head (aside from my own). Per everybody’s rules:

1. Traditional publishing First. If you want to try it at all, you’ll have to sit on allllll your work until it gets picked, which could take thousands of days or never happen. Good luck? If you go this route, you probably won’t do any of the steps below with that particular book, because traditional publishers BUY THE RIGHTS to your book and you are now locked in with them.
2. Kindle Vella First for serial self-publishing. If you want to use Kindle Vella, you have to publish a book on there first (as episodes of 600-5000 words each) before it becomes an eBook. You can have your stories on other sites behind a paywall, but I don’t advise this if you plan to do KDP Select. You’d have to take them all down again.
3. KDP Select Next (or FIRST for typical self-publishing). You may format your story into an eBook and put it on Kindle 30 days after the last chapter is published on Vella. At that time, you can enroll your book in KDP Select, known to readers as Kindle Unlimited. You will have to keep it exclusive to Amazon for 90 days. You can set that to auto-renew, or let it lapse. You can also buy Amazon ads for your eBook at this time. Vellas do not have that option.
4. Nook/Apple/Google/Kobo after you let your exclusivity lapse. Now it’s time to put your book everywhere else. You can buy ads on each platform you have an account on, or create free or paid ads on social media. More on that below.
5. Draft2Digital is what’s called an “aggregator” and will make your eBook available to most of the above, and others on top of that. You do still have to go in and put your eBook on Google yourself though, and authors often like to have their own accounts with Apple or Barnes and Noble or others for the same reasons they like to have a separate Kindle account: the additional marketing perks offered by each platform to account holders, and full royalties without giving a 10% cut to aggregators.
6. You can also put the serial version of your book on Ream. The easiest way I can describe Ream is “Patreon for authors.” Your readers can read free chapters and then see the rest of your content by subscribing to you. There are also subscription tiers, too. You can do this with Patreon too, but Ream is completely fiction oriented and has its own e-reader, so writers (and readers) might prefer it and think of it before they’d think of looking for fiction on Patreon.
7. Radish on the Wait-to-Unlock pricing model. [Author Craig Tuch did a deep-dive on submitting to Radish, which is what I’ve linked here.] This is best if you have your books still for sale and they’re not free anywhere online. If you do have a book in a series free though, it has to also be free on Radish. This can even be done on the Wait-to-Unlock model, but as Craig explains, it’s tricky. Possible, though.

The reason Radish is the very last stop here, is readers who are patient enough will get almost all of your book for free on the Wait-to-Unlock model, or the entire book for free on the Freemium model. You could always do the Premium pay model if your book isn’t free anywhere, but it’s usually a much tougher sell to readers.

For more reading on the pros and cons of TONS of different eBook publishers and aggregators, check out Reedsy’s eBook Distribution: The Complete Guide for New Authors.

how do I tell people about my book? (marketing)

Marketing is unavoidable unless you’re doing this purely for fun. I’m a bit of a hybrid here since I’m currently writing for fun, but think it might be nice to try my hand at marketing later on down the line. Here are some ways we can tell people about our work:

1. Well before your book launches, apply for your author profile on GoodReads. Fill out your Amazon Author Page as well. As soon as your books launch, add the book to both of these profiles.
2. Authors will often promote an eBook well before its launch date since the first two weeks of an eBook’s performance on Amazon will factor into how much the website will reward your book in the rankings thereafter. One way to do this is to advertise pre-orders. This can be done through your KDP dashboard. If you’re releasing the book widely, other aggregators like Draft2Digital might also let you offer pre-orders.
3. You can also make facebook and tiktok ads as early in the book or serial’s life as you wish, including before your serial or book launches on the website(s) you’re putting it on. In the case of kindle vella stories, there isn’t a way to buy Amazon ads for them period, necessitating offsite ads if you wish to do any promotion.
4. How to make free social media ads: These will be posts you make normally, rather than going through your ad dashboard. You can make simple videos for facebook, instagram, and/or tiktok that feature a small excerpt of your writing. Tag your post in the comments with genre words, tropes, and marketing tags like “booktok” and “author.” You can make a pretty card of your writing set to music, have the text overlaid on top of an eye-catching video or image, or read the excerpt yourself…or some combination of these approaches. Kindle typically wants you to limit excerpts to 5000 words from a book TOTAL, so this would be across all your ads for that book or serial.
5. Authors also like to make book magnets, offer copies of their book to mailing list subscribers, and participate in cross promotions. A lot of them use Book Funnel for these things because offering a .pdf or .mobi or other eBook file straight to the reader doesn’t always result in them understanding how to open it or side load it onto their eReader.
6. Offering Advance Review Copies of your book in return for an honest review is another free way to get eyes on your book and potentially increase its rankings in the first couple of weeks after the book launches. Bethany Atazadeh talks about advance review copies in her video here.
7. All of these approaches can still be used as long after the book has launched as you like. Maybe people put themselves on a tight deadline and put in tons of work before the book ever goes live, but that doesn’t mean you have to do the same. Many authors say the best thing you can do to promote your book is to write your next book. I’ve also heard “it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Other places to offer your SERIALS AND EBOOKS

People also like to use Royal Road and Wattpad to publish their serial fiction or books by the chapter. Wattpad is free unless you get a contract with them, and Royal Road is free but hooks up to Patreon to encourage readers to support you that way. And you can also offer .pdfs of your books on places like ko-fi, Gumroad, Patreon and even Etsy. Books in Ko-Fi and Gumroad shops can be free or have a price attached, but you have to charge something for your Etsy digital files.

So, all of the above advice is about eBooks. But…what if you want to make…

PAPERBACK/PRINTED BOOKS

Here’s where you start having to spend some money. A printed book needs an ISBN. It’s like your book’s social security number. When I was setting up a book recently for paperback printing on Amazon KDP, I noticed there’s a free Amazon ISBN.

READ THIS BEFORE YOU GET THE FREE ISBN!

I almost clicked it, but then I wondered if there was ever a reason to NOT get one and looked on the internet. There is indeed!! If you get the free Amazon ISBN and then want to “go wide” and publish the paperback elsewhere with aggregators like IngramSpark or Draft2Digital, the Amazon ISBN will not work there and you’ll have to either use their free ISBN or your own.

This means that none of your Amazon sales and reviews follow that book, and you also have to make a new edition for each ISBN so it should have a new cover or size, bonus material, or something of that sort. Author and Youtuber M. K. Williams explains the downsides of free ISBNs in this video.

more about “AGGREGATORS”

Unlike Amazon, IngramSpark and Draft2Digital actually put your books in bookstores and Wal-Mart, Target, etc. They will even put them on Amazon. They take a cut of your royalties though, so authors usually still have a separate Kindle account so they’ll get the higher royalties and so they can market their books using Amazon’s different ad, presale, and promotion options.

Therefore: the only way to have your PRINTED book up anywhere you like while making sure you’re getting the widest distribution and the highest royalties every time, and have all your sales and reviews follow your book from day one, is to buy your ISBN.

In the USA, the only place to buy an ISBN is Bowker and…sit down first…one single solitary ISBN is $125USD at the time of this writing. One hundred and twenty-five dollars, for a number. Even more fun, this ISBN is ONLY for that edition of your book. Hence, an eBook, a paperback, and a hardback all require a separate ISBN.

HOWEVER. According to Mandi Lynn at Stonebrook Publishing, you don’t have to worry about getting an ISBN for eBooks. She talks about her experiences in this video. (I checked in KDP and it didn’t require my eBooks to have an ISBN, sure enough!)

She also sells printed books, though, and like Ms. Williams she finds it best to have your own ISBN from the start on paperbacks and hardback editions. Her solution was to buy 10 ISBNS to start and 100 ISBNS when she got more prolific, since they become cheaper as you buy more.

comic books

All of this made me wonder if I had inadvertently done something wrong in not having an ISBN for my printed comic books. Thankfully, this does not seem to be the case. As serials, comics do not have an ISBN. This would also explain why vellas do not.

PHEW. But it also means you may choose not to print your comics through Amazon, since Amazon will require an ISBN just as they would for any paperback you self-publish through them.

It might make more sense to keep printing and selling printed comics through Ka-Blam and its storefront IndyPlanet or other specific comic book printing companies. A middle route would be to use Amazon’s free ISBN on comic books and hope it doesn’t cause an issue later. If I try offering my comics for print on Amazon under free Amazon ISBNS, I’ll let you all know if it backfires horribly.

Clear as mud? Fabulous! I just have one more question for you.

Just kidding. My real question is:

Do you want to be told whenever I write and draw more things? (God knows why) Okay cool, subscribe to my blog then if you would.