5 Self-Publishing Mistakes

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Today, AuthorHouse presents five common self-publishing pitfalls—and how you can avoid them!

1. Handling your own cover design. Unless you have a background in design, this is definitely something you should leave to a professional. Find someone that has experience designing book covers (preferably someone who specializes in covers for your book’s genre.) Like it or not, many readers will judge your book by its cover. A good one can be had for a few hundred dollars, and is one of the best investments you can make in self-publishing.


2. Using “novelty” typefaces, either in the book or on the cover. While Comic Sans is fine for emails and birthday party invitations, you should keep it away from your book. It comes across as amateurish and unprofessional. You’re much better off sticking to the “classics,” like Garamond, Electra, Janson, or Bembo.


3. Reusing an ISBN. Maybe your first book didn’t sell very many copies, and you’re getting ready to publish your second. Well, why not just take the ISBN from the first book and use it for your new one? After all, it’ll save you a few bucks, right? The problem is, the ISBN identifies a unique book, as well as its edition and format. If your book had a hard cover version, softcopy version, and then a second edition of the latter, you’d actually need THREE different ISBN’s. The issue of ISBN’s for e-books is still being debated; stay tuned and do your research if you’re going the e-book route.


4. Assuming that images, either on the cover or interior illustrations, will look just as good in your book as they do on your monitor. Computers typically display images at 72 dpi (dots per inch) in the Red-Green-Blue (RGB) color space. Make sure that your images are prepared at a resolution and color space that’s appropriate for printing or e-book display. For printing, this is usually 300 dpi, using the Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black (CMYK) colors space.


5. Handling your own editing. Without a doubt, you should proofread and fact-check your book. There’s just no substitute, though, for having a second set of eyes go over it, especially a set of trained eyes. Have someone else, preferably someone with an editing background, review your book for spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as character development and content.

We hope you’ve found this useful and interesting!

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