It’s entirely possible to get your book finished and published yourself, without spending more than a few hundred dollars.
That’s how we got started.
(If you’ve got exceptional skills you could probably do it for free).
Once we published our first book, everyone said “ooh” and “aah” and, mostly, “I wish I could do that someday”.
Life tends to go on, and someday just never comes.
Over the years we’ve had to learn how to work with cover designers, printers, distributors, advertisers, and so on, as well as figure out which ones are reliable.
You can absolutely do all that yourself and spend hardly any money at all to get your book onto websites and start selling it.
The truth is, if you’ve got enough gumption to do all that, you probably WILL sell enough copies to cover your costs.
As long as life or the spouse or the kids or the dog don’t intervene.
One of the advantages of working with us is you can tell these significant others: “I’m sorry, honey, but now that I’ve got a book contract, I have to get this update done if I want to get paid someday”. We’re there for you, helping you move the work along.
So, if you really do want to do-it-yourself, then we wish you all the best. The sea is plenty big enough for all us smaller fish to get along. We’ve worked with several publishing coaches who will give you more free advice than you will be able to follow faithfully (you’ll regret skipping those steps later, but nobody can do everything) and then you’ll probably find it worth while to take on one of their paid offerings. Unfortunately, they tend to move out of the market and move on to other interests (podcasts, AI, whatever the flavor of the month is) because after a while they stop being functionally-specific coaches and start becoming marketing agencies.
One that has been really generous with information and is still around (as of 2025) is Chandler Bolt’s “Self-Publishing School“.
Otherwise, just Google “get my book published” and you’ll have thousands of options.
Just know up front that almost every one of them will charge you several thousand dollars. Most will require a couple of thousand up front to get the book ready to go, and a couple more to run a launch campaign that will provide you between one and thirty-six hours as “Amazon #1 Best Seller” in your niche. Within a few days, you’ll be back into obscurity, and Amazon will boot most of the reviews because they are not verified purchases and they are pretty much lifted from a script. That’s not to say you shouldn’t ever do this; for instance, you need that book as a business confidence booster.
If it works, let us know, we’ll do a link to your book on a “Ones that got away” page or something. No hard feelings! If you took our advice and did it yourself, at least you took our advice!
For everyone else, we can work with you to give you the tools and the push to get the book out the door, onto the web and into the hands of readers. Here’s how it works.