Self-Published Books Don't Need a Publisher to Look Real

This is how you self-publish a book without anyone ever knowing you self-published. I got off a call this morning with a guy I talked to about 9 months ago, and he didn't hire our company. He hired a fairly big-name hybrid publisher instead. Today he called to say, oh, they're not doing the marketing. They didn't do the positioning. And well, they just had their very first marketing conversation and his book's about to launch. So I said, well, why did you pick them? You know that we do this early on. And he said, well, I really didn't want my name as the publisher. That's it. That's the whole reason he chose the more expensive hybrid company over us, and they didn't do what we do, and he's coming back to us for the rest of what he needs. I was kicking myself because we have a fix for this. We make sure every book looks professionally published, and it's a problem you can solve for For less than $300. So if you're a nonfiction author who wants to self-publish without people knowing you self-published, this video is for you. Hi, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and your host here at booklaunchers.tv. Book Launchers' mission is to help 100,000 books be discovered by 2030. And that starts the minute you think you're going to write a book. Here's what I want you to understand about the call that I had, because I've been chewing on it every single second since I hung up. He is a smart professional who wanted his book to look legitimate, and he believed 2 things. One, that a publisher's name on the copyright page is what makes a book look real. 2, that if he self-published, people would be able to tell. Now, here's the reality: neither of those things are actually true, and there are lots of things that you can do to make sure your book doesn't look self-published. Every single one of them is essentially a production decision you make, not a publisher you hire. And once you make all of these decisions, there's no way for a reader, a bookstore buyer, a podcast producer, a conference organizer to tell that your book came from a hybrid or from a small indie publishing house or from your own publishing house. There's no secret list of self-published books, but there are tells. That will indicate that you self-published. So here's how you can make sure your book doesn't look self-published. Number 1, you create your own imprint. An imprint is a publishing company name, that's it. That's the entire thing my caller spent money to get and he could have done it himself. I have my own publishing imprint, Stick Horse Publishing. You don't need a corporation, you don't even need an LLC. Talk with your lawyer though. But you don't even need a lawyer to do this. You can create a DBA which is a doing business as or fictitious business. And you're done. In most places, it's a form to fill out with a small fee, maybe a trip to your local county filing location or courthouse. Pick a name that is not your name— Harbor Point Press, Sunrise Publishing, Big Toe Whatever. All right, then go get a logo. You can hire someone at Fiverr, but AI is genuinely good at creating simple logos. All you need is a clean, simple imprint logo for the spine and the copyright page, and you're done. It just needs to be simple. You don't need a website for your imprint. You don't need letterhead. You don't even need a phone number. Nobody is calling your publishing company. You need a name and a mark and the ability to call it your publishing imprint, which is created by filing the DBA or the fictitious business. That's it. Then you need to own your ISBNs. And this is the one that makes your imprint real. This is where I watch authors do all the work in step 1 and then not take the next step. So what you want to do is not take the free ISBN that Amazon KDP will hand you, 'cause that screams self-published. Amazon lists the publisher on your book detail page as independently published when you do that. So if you use Amazon's free one, it says right there in the product details where every person who is deciding whether to take you seriously is looking. Can't change it. It's baked into your free ISBN. So buy your own. It's in the US. You go to myidentifiers.com. One ISBN is $125, I think. 10 is under $300. Mm-hmm. So that works out to $30 each. And you will need more than one because you need one for each format, your paperback, your hardcover, your audiobook, and even your ebook. So 10 for under $300. Now, when you own the ISBN, you register it under your imprint. And then the publisher line on Amazon says your publishing company. Voilà, that's it. That's the big fix. So you can see why I was kicking myself because this guy went with that company instead of my company. And we could have fixed this for under $300. The solution was a DBA, a logo, and an ISBN. But I didn't tell him that. I should have been really clear. And that is why I am making this video. The next thing is the COVID Now we are on to the part that people will see and notice. And covers are where AI is doing real damage to authors. And I spoke with someone just last week who had a cover that people have told him they love. He said exactly to me, everyone loves it. I showed it to my neighbor, my sister, the guy at the car dealership. I'm not kidding, he said that. And they all told me it looks amazing. And I said to him, are any of those people buying your book? And I watched his face drop because he realized that he was asking for people's opinion on the COVID and not paying attention to what is going to make somebody actually buy the book. The test is not whether somebody likes your cover. The test is a stranger on Amazon scrolling on a category page comparing your cover to the other 10 bestsellers in that category. Not against nothing. Against the best-designed books in your space. And a lot of people are discounting AI covers because their brain is going, ooh, AI, even if they aren't consciously thinking it. And if you wrote a leadership book or a business memoir and your cover is AI-generated and it's sitting in a grid next to books that have professional designers and art directors, you're going to lose out every time. They can't always articulate what's wrong. They just know something is and don't click. A professional cover designer who works in books understands trim size, spine width, thumbnail legibility, fonts, and what your specific category needs to signal to a buyer. This is not an expense to skip, especially if you wanna look like you're traditionally published or published by one of the best hybrids. This is the single highest return production dollar you will spend. Number 4, the interior. When the COVID gets the click, the interior is what people check next. And that look inside feature on Amazon, the sample on Kindle, flipping those first 20 pages in a store, all of that is exposing your interior. And some of these template designs, well, look, they work great for fiction because fiction is just text. But for nonfiction, we need to design our books because a manuscript that was formatted in Word and exported to PDF, that Times New Roman, well, that's not working. No running heads at the top of the page, chapters that start on the wrong side of the spread. Widows and orphans, those single-stranded lines at the top or bottom of a page, page numbers in the wrong place. These are all things that scream you self-published. And nonfiction is just harder to design because again, fiction's running text, but your book, it will have headers, subheaders, pull quotes, callout boxes, bulleted lists, tables, charts, maybe even exercises with lines at the end of each chapter. Those need a designed space. Style that stays consistent for 200 pages and can be resized when someone plays with it on an ebook, on a Kindle, on whatever digital reader they're using. Hire a book interior designer, not a virtual assistant with a template. You need someone who typesets books. Number 5 is where the book can be purchased. A book that only exists on Amazon is very obviously self-published. You can't hide it. That's just one of the tells of a self-published book. Traditional distribution means a bookstore can special order your book. A library can order it. It shows up on Barnes& Noble's site and on bookshop.org. It exists in the Ingram catalog, which is the pipe every bookseller in North America actually orders through. Nobody is going to look up your ISBN registration, but a podcast booker, a conference organizer, or a corporate buyer who wants 100 copies will try to order your book somewhere other than Amazon in most cases. And when they can't, they will know you are self-published. Getting into the Ingram catalog is not hard and it's not expensive. It's a setup fee and a decision about returnability, which I've created other videos on this channel, and you can always discuss with us in our free Author Lab community at booklaunchers.com/authorlab. Being available in bookstores is not the same as selling in bookstores. Availability is a credibility signal. It is not necessarily a sales strategy, but it's a credibility signal you need, and it doesn't cost you much to have. So that's it. Get an imprint, ISBN, cover, interior, and distribution. And when you add it all up, well, guess what? Your book is indistinguishable from a top-quality published book. Well, okay, let's make sure you edited it, but that's a different conversation. And it brings me back to the guy on the phone this morning. He got all 5 of those right. His hybrid publisher handled every one of them, and he said his book looks great, but he's still unhappy because they aren't doing marketing, and he's about to launch and just had his first marketing conversation with him. And that's the part you can't buy your way out of with a logo. Positioning, discoverability, whether your book shows up when somebody's searching for you or for the problem you solve, whether AI tools cite you when someone asks a question. This is the hard part, and it's the part that publishers, hybrid or traditional, aren't that good at yet. So if your book is already out or it's coming out soon and you're wondering whether anyone can actually find it, well, there's 2 things you can do. One, if it's out, you can complete our audit. Booklaunchers.com/auditmybook. We will audit how discoverable your book is right now and show you where the gaps are. But if it's not out yet, why don't we chat about how we can help you create a discoverable book with podcast pitching, metadata, ads, and the whole thing? booklaunchers.com/apply. Now here's what I really want you to take out of this. Nobody is searching for their next read by a publisher. They're not going, hmm, I wonder what Wiley put out today. The logo on the spine does not matter. What matters is whether they can find it, and when they see it, Whether they believe that it's going to be a great read, whether it's trustworthy, whether it looks credible. That's what's going to matter.