📑 Self-Publishing

Cory Doctorow reflects upon the monopolisation of the book publishing industry and the perils associated with self-publishing. He shares some of the lessons that he has learnt along the way:

I’ve evolved a checklist for would-be self-publishers that makes success more than a matter of pure luck.

1. Observe the publishing fortunes of books whose audiences you imagine to be similar to your book’s audience;
2. From these observations, formulate a falsifiable hypothesis about how you will reach a similar audience;
3. Based on this hypothesis, formulate a plan to get your book to that audience;
4. Execute your plan, and measure its progress by comparing your book’s performance to your hypothesized performance;
5. As new data comes in about where your hypothesis was mistaken, revise your hypothesis and make a new plan, and execute that;
6. Go to step 4. and repeat.

This won’t guarantee that you succeed, but without something like this, you will almost certainly fail.

I am intrigued to how this differs in Australia or if it is the same all over the world.

Doctorow also shared a reading of the piece on his podcast: