kitchen remodel“I can’t believe you’re so calm about your kitchen remodel!” a friend emailed last week. My response was:

“Remodeling a kitchen is just like self-publishing. You start from zero, jump in, and just keep going.”

A pause, and then she fired back, “You should blog about that!” In fact, remodeling a kitchen and self-publishing a book have more in common than I realized when I sent that rather flip email.

APPLES AND APPLES
Here’s what these two activities have in common:

  1. They are largely unknown and daunting. Both self-publishing and kitchen remodeling seem like enormous undertakings. Very few people know much about either of them, and so we tend to shy away.
  2. Both are either “Do It Yourself” or “Pay Through the Nose.” You can turn over the whole project and the umpteen choices about countertops, cabinets, and faucets to a contractor, but your kids may not go to college. You can turn your book over to a vanity press or one of the many “book shepherds” who have set up for business recently— but some of these are less reliable and less thoroughly vetted than kitchen contractors. In both cases, you’re taking a chance and paying dearly for the opportunity.
  3. You can learn to do either activity yourself if you’re willing to invest a little time and energy. I knew nothing about kitchen remodels. I come from a family in which the “handy” people are those who can screw in light bulbs. Yet after a couple weeks of running around on the internet and to home improvement stores, I could make good decisions with some degree of confidence. Despite working in the book biz for forty years, I knew nothing about putting a book together physically or marketing it. When I finished with the copy, it disappeared for a year and came back as a successful book. (That was Old World Publishing, with the traditional houses that are no longer viable alternatives for most writers.) Yet I jumped into self-publishing, learned each new thing as it was needed, and wound up publishing four books. Each one was easier than the last, because my skill set grew exponentially each time I did it.
  4. Both kitchen remodels and self-publishing have to be done eventually in most cases—so it may be best to jump in now, deal with whatever comes up, and just keep going.

JUST DO IT!
When it comes to kitchens and books, I think that Nike got it right. Self-publishing will never look easy from the outside, before you jump in. But honestly, it gets easier and more accessible by the day. Maybe by the hour.

People in the business of helping authors self-publish—Smashwords, CreateSpace, and Lightning Source, to name a few—are making their services easier to find and use. Bloggers, consultants, and others have created a mini-industry of supporting people in publishing their books. If you’re willing to delve into this information, you can get an extraordinary education in self-publishing for little or no money.

My advice: No more standing atop the high diving board, shivering and wondering! Jump! There are a lot of us in the pool, and we’re holding one another up.

Any questions or thoughts about self publishing?

 

SELF-PUBLISHING as KITCHEN REMODEL

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