The Ultimate Self-Publishing Checklist for 2025: Set Yourself Up for Success

You've done the hard part. You've written a book. Maybe it's even a book so good that James Clear's 137,000Amazon reviewers would sit up and take notice. I mean, seriously, that guy has so many reviews he should share them with us. But to the point, you've written a great book, your editors have polished the book to perfection, and you have a cover designer that is so good they should be working for Apple designing products. But then it hits you. What's next? Well, that's where this checklist comes in. Your step by step guide to Self publishing success in 2025 and beyond. If you're wondering what steps you need to take to actually self publish your book, well, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, a self publishing services company that helps nonfiction authors write, publish and promote a nonfiction book for more income and impact. Self publishing, it's not an easy thing. It's why so many authors just hire us to figure it all out for them. And if you decide that you want to talk with us about it, well, go ahead. Fill out this form book launchers.com apply and we'll chat with you about your goals and plans and let you know how we can help you if we think we can. If you're doing it all alone, well, here's what you need to know. I'm going to break it up into four sections. Section one Your Reader and Metadata first, make sure before you publish your book, who's your reader and and I don't mean demographically, I mean who are they and more importantly, how will they find your book and why will they buy it? For your sake, I hope you figured this out before you started writing, because it's vital to the positioning of your book. But it's also really important now that you're ready to upload your book to distributors for sale, that you know the answers to this. So who's your ideal reader and what problem does your book solve for them? If you're not clear on this, your marketing efforts will be scattered and your metadata will be off. So focus in on this one for your messaging. Now, my favorite story of focusing in and being clear was from a book we worked on many years ago called Tactical Lock Picking. It's all about how to get through locked obstacles in emergencies. And yes, the book sold really well in the first responders market and that is where our marketing efforts were focused in the beginning. But not too long after we started marketing the book, a crime Writers conference organizer reached out and wanted the author to come and speak because guess what? Crime writers want to get the details right on how a burglar might be doing the same thing as the first responders to get into a building or a property. So when you focus on a single reader, it doesn't mean other readers won't find your book. It just means you have a clear market that will buy your book to begin with. So metadata is a big part of this. That's your title, your subtitle, your keywords, and your bisect codes. That's your digital fingerprint for your book. So picking a precise and specific bisect code and increases your chances of landing in the right categories, which makes you more discoverable. Your keywords must align with terms your audience is searching for. Your metadata is what makes your book discoverable. My favorite tool for this is Publisher Rocket. You can get your copy@booklaunchers.com Rocket Now, Rocket doesn't help you directly with discovering or figuring out bisect codes, but you can use a reverse ASIN lookup to see what a book that you consider similar to yours, how it's selling and where it's selling as far as categories go. Using James Clear as my example, I can use the reverse ASIN to look up his book and see what keywords are selling his book and at what volume. I mean, wow, who else wants to write a book like this? James is doing well. Then you can click on the competition analyzer and now you can dig into the categories here and see what categories are trending and how many sales you need to top that category. Phew. I'm staying away from competing with James in these categories, but you can see how this is going to help you, right? So, so spend some time in the metadata research. So you have the right Amazon categories. You choose the bisect code that's appropriate for your book. I'll link to a video at the end that will help you with that and get your keywords right. Section 2 Distribution Decisions and my recommendation is more than just Amazon. Before you go for distribution setup, let's make sure you've purchased your ISBN or ISBNs one for each format and you've filed for copyright with the US Copyright Office. Make sure you've also created a simple copyright page that goes inside of your book and then you're ready for uploading your book for distribution. Now, you can choose to upload only on Amazon and you'll save by not buying an ISBN, but I strongly advise against it. Yes, Amazon dominates, but should you rely solely on them. I don't think you should. The power of wide distribution should not be underestimated. Platforms like IngramSpark will reach the bookstores Draft2Digital can get your book into libraries. Global ebook platforms like Kobo and Apple Books. I don't recommend you put all your eggs in the Amazon basket because there are days when Amazon bots decide something's wrong with your book and suspend your account. Or you just might be missing out on great readers who won't use or don't use Amazon. Beyond Amazon and bookstores and libraries, consider direct sales for control and profit selling from your own website. You can use tools like Shopify+ Lulu or Shopify+ Book Vault or or other systems. If you're only doing digital, you could use Book Funnel or Story Origin for secure delivery. But doing this lets you keep more revenue and gets you the buyer data. It's more work that's more control. For audiobook distribution beyond Audible, I recommend platforms like Findaway Voices or Authors Republic. They can get your audiobook into international markets and libraries and audiobooks are booming. I highly recommend this by the way. If you want help with distribution setup, we've recently added that to an add on service we offer. You can just email us@teamoklaunchers.com or visit our website book launchers.com for the details. The accounts and files will all be yours. My team will just manage all the distribution upload for you and help troubleshoot issues for two weeks afterwards. Because oh my gosh, can it be challenging? Pre Launch Plans for Review and Marketing Honestly, pre launch can be a long period of time or a short period of time. It depends on what kind of a launch strategy you're executing. But whether you're doing two days, two weeks or two months, and I do hope it's closer to two months than two days, your pre launch phase can make or break your book's debut. And there's literally dozens of things that you should be doing during pre launch. But here's whatever every author should be doing to set yourself up for pre launch success. Number one sort out catalog problems. Use platforms like IngramSpark to sell your print book for a six week pre sale to work out technical glitches and build buzz. But check where it's listed because we find Barnes and Noble often needs a nudge to populate correctly. What I mean by that is sometimes the cover's not there, sometimes it's not the right cover, and other platforms are just slow to load. If you're international, it often takes eight weeks for the catalogs to populate. Like at Chapters Indigo, every catalog updates on its own schedule, so the pre sale period is your time to get everything in working order for launch. And while you're doing that, start collecting some sales. If you're using Amazon, take advantage of their pre order feature for ebook early reviews. This is also something you can be working on. Recruit your book army. Those early readers who are going to leave verified reviews on day one. Consider offering discounted copies or exclusive perks to incentivize them. Submit for editorial and other book reviews during this time too. This is also the time to ask for more or just some endorsements and more. Don't know where to go for reviews? I'll put another video at the end for you on that. Also, this is where you should be Building marketing momentum. Tease your book on social media. Share behind the scenes moments. Pitch yourself for podcasts. Plan an author launch event, whether in person or virtual. If you have a newsletter, share it there. If you have friends or influencers, this is the time to give them a copy so they can post it and share it too. If you want to know all the things to do, go ahead and grab, self promote and succeed. You can buy it or you can download the audio version free@selfpromoteandsucceed.com Audio all right, Section 4 launch Getting your book noticed Even the best book won't sell itself, and it's definitely not going to sell if nobody knows about it. We've already made sure that your book was discoverable, but now maximize some of Amazon tools. Make sure your book is available in the Look Inside program. If you're not using kdp, you'll want to make sure you submit. For that, you can set up an Amazon Author Central page to improve your book's visibility. Leverage social proof. Post screenshots of your first reviews, share testimonials or showcase reader generated content on your social media or in your newsletter. Explore niche marketing, whether it's pitching to podcasts, running guest blogs, going live with a fellow author. Think outside the box and keep talking about your book. The best wins, you'll uncover, will happen years after your book is out, but only if you keep marketing your book. All right, that's a compact checklist to make the idea of self publishing simpler. If you've hired a company to help you and they aren't book launchers. My Tips My really important tips for you are to make sure you get the source files from that company. Buy your ISBN file, your own copyright, and please make sure you're getting access to the distribution accounts. There's nothing more frustrating for an author than not being able to see if their book is selling or their promotional efforts are yielding results. If you have your KDP account login or you can access your Draft2Digital account or IngramSpark account, you can log in every darn day if you want and see if books are selling. If you've left the distribution accounts in the hands of someone else, not only are you at their mercy to get paid, but you also don't have data. And data is an author's best friend when it comes to not only your emotional energy management, but your financial resources and where they should be spent. So now, if you're not already subscribed to this channel with those notifications on, that's your first to do because you want to catch all the fun and content from this channel. So you're successful as an indie author, but then you're going to want to see this video on BICEP codes and this one on the review sites to submit your book to. I guarantee they're a great watch. So head on over and I'll see you there. If you're on mobile, check the links in the description.