Self-Publishing Workflows: Business Mini-Lesson #2

The major difference between a self-publishing author and a traditional author is the amount of work that has to be done on the business side. Self-publishing workflows can help.

The traditional author doesn’t have to worry about filing for copyright, advertising campaigns, discount promotions, editing your book and getting a cover for it. That’s the publisher’s job.

The self-publishing author, however, does all those jobs, plus more. The more part varies from author to author, depending on their personal circumstances, their inclinations, and their ideas for promoting their books. It could mean visiting schools to talk about writing, offering classes online, attending cat shows to sell their cat-themed books, offering editorial and consulting services, or visiting bookstores and secretly inserting their books on the shelves (don’t do this, by the way).

Handling the business side of your self-publishing empire demands developing a new set of skills to perform those tasks efficiently. Even if you have an obliging spouse, child, or personal assistant, it’s still important to develop procedures to perform these tasks. These are jobs that will be done regularly, so it’s important to do them consistently, correctly, and leave behind enough data to judge the success of that task and figure out how to do it more efficiently next time.

This is best accomplished using workflows.

What are self-publishing workflows?

In the business world, there are processes and workflows. Processes or procedures defines a particular task that you want to accomplish. Workflows are the steps that you take to perform that task. It’s that simple.

So a process can be mail the monthly newsletter. The workflow for that process can be:

1. Write the newsletter in Word. List art you need between “***”.
2. Create the art, no larger than 700 pixels and 96 dots per inch.
3. Open MailerLite.
4. Use the saved template to create the newsletter.
5. Test-send the newsletter to your publishing partner for comments.
6. If approved, schedule the newsletter to run at 9 a.m. EST the next day.
7. Save newsletter in Business / Newsletter / 2021 folder.
8. Go to website, schedule publishing newsletter for next month.
9. Revise page “Newsletter Archive” with URL for next month’s newsletter. Scheduling updating for same time as newsletter post next month.
Now, I’m not saying that you should do it this way, but it is the way we do it at Peschel Press in a truncated form.

That’s It?

If this is so simple, you may ask, why do it at all? Why take the trouble to laboriously type it out?

It is a simple process, but your business is made up of many simple processes. Rather than keep all of them in your head, write them down and you won’t have to try to remember the details of this process. If you know you won’t have to remember the details of the process, your brain will be able to focus on remembering the things that are really important to you, such as that important plot twist you want to introduce in the next chapter. Or the names of your children. Whatever is important to you.

Does every process need a self-publishing workflow?

No. Only the ones that you feel need a workflow.

I don’t use one for publishing books online. The forms are easy to find and fill out.

I do use a metadata form for each book. This form, one for each book, is my central storehouse of information about that books life online. It contains all the metadata needed to fill out the forms: title, subtitle, series name, series number, book description, keywords, price, cost of book, etc. It also keeps track of where and when we publish that book, and any problems we encountered.

As you work on your business from day-to-day, you’ll see when you need to work up a workflow and when not to. Generally, any process that you use regularly will end up needing a self-publishing workflow.

(Ad alert: In our book Career Indie Author, we provide a metadata form that you can modify and use.)