Ah, publishing. As an Indie Author. In a saturated genre. In 2025.

Why does it seem easier to actually write the book?

While there are certainly benefits to undertaking this task myself, there are a lot of things that a traditional publishing house does for its authors. Cover art, marketing, strategizing, even some editing, or so I hear.

So if I’m doing all this myself, I’m not ashamed to admit that I have no clue where to start. I’m what you might call social-media challenged.

Write a 125K book in a month? I can probably do that. Building a following? Uh… I understand what those words mean separately, but together like that?

Enter…. chatGPT, believe it or not. I asked for a condensed checklist and marketing recommendations from our dear new AI soon-to-be overlords and I plan to document my publishing journey as I take steps. It will certainly help me, and maybe it’ll help you, too.

Step 1: Write the book

Check. And because I’m a wishy-washy writer type, I waited until I finished the second in the series to consider publishing the first. Mostly because starting things is easy and finishing them is hard, but also because I was concerned I’d come up with something amazing and want to go back and change something.

But after working on book 2 of the Ulysses series for over a year, I’m fatigued by the mere thought of changing something about the first book that’s working just fine.

Step 2: Edit and Format

This is where I’ll be for the next few days. It’s been a year since I really looked at book 1 so I get to do it now with fresh eyes. I use Scrivener to write, and in my limited experience so far the export function cannot be taken wholesale and used for the ebook.

Plus, there’s other things to consider: a table of contents, an end note, maybe something that links back to amazon for easy reviewing?

And formatting the cover art for a physical book vs ebook is different, too, which brings me to step 3…

Step 3: Cover art

Did I go out of order? A little bit. But I got excited and accidentally clicked “Upgrade” on my Canva account. So… now I’ve got pretty good mock ups for all 3 books and something to float out to Facebook groups to gauge interest.

So that’s where I’m at. Today I’m also going to create some content to post places, get my socials in order and cross my fingers that I don’t mess everything up.

I’m proud of myself and what I’ve accomplished, and I believe I’ve written something pretty damn good.

Hopefully others agree!