Let’s establish a goal for your self-publishing project: you want to create a quality book package for your content. Well, creating such a package requires quite a bit of work and contradicts the contention that it is easy.

Actually, self-publishing a book can be easy and many authors do self-publish with what I call the lazy way. Under the lazy way, the author finishes the manuscript on Monday (an early or even a first draft), gets a generic cover on Tuesday (or hand-draws one) and uploads the manuscript on Wednesday. Hooray! The author is now a published author. Except the book is a piece of junk and is as far away from a quality book package as it can get.

The issue here is the author is the publisher. As such, the author has to do all the work a publishing company would do if the author had sold the book to the publisher.

So, the reality of self-publishing is this: it requires time, work and money. It also requires the self-publishing author recruit other people to work on the project.

Another issue that confuses the newbie self-publishing author is the interval. How long is the time between the finishing the manuscript and launching the book? Six months is an adequate interval. Your initial reaction to this statement is probably disbelieve because it is so counter to the stuff you read on the web.

I’ve self-published over twenty-five books and the absolute minimum time I allocate for the interval between competing the manuscript and launching the book is four months. Most times, my interval is five or six months and sometimes longer.

Inexperienced self-publishing authors will naturally look to the internet for answers to questions or issues. This is where another problem can crop up: scammers. The internet swarms with scam artists looking for inexperienced authors who are searching for publishing assistance. These scammers have slick web sites and mention all the pain points self-publishers run into. It is quite natural for the author to gravitate toward these sites because they seemingly offer solutions. Unfortunately, these sites offer little or no actual assistance and they charge premium prices for it.

One way to avoid these scammers is to be suspicious of all offers you come across on the web. Investigate before committing money. It is especially important to read all the fine print on the site, on every page. Another useful method is to type the site’s address into a search box and look through the results. Take note of negative comments and articles. Only after completing the site examination and the search results should you make your decision about using the site.

Another factor inexperienced self-publishing authors overlook is book marketing. Marketing has to be an integral part of the publishing project. Without marketing, no one will know about the book and no will care. The purpose of the marketing piece of the project is to tell the world that your book exists (or will exist).

This article was originally published in Medium