Self-publishing means you hold the publisher's job as well as the writer's. Nobody hands you a schedule, and nobody signs off the cover. You decide when the book is finished, what it looks like, what it costs and who hears about it. That is more work than sending queries to agents, and it is also the reason indie authors keep 50 to 70 per cent of the list price instead of the 10 to 15 per cent a trade contract tends to pay on print.
Here is what the job involves, roughly in the order you hit it.
Get the manuscript edited by someone who is not you
Every writer is blind to their own book by draft four. A developmental edit looks at structure, pacing and whether the story or argument holds. A copy edit fixes grammar, consistency and the sentence-level mess. A proofread catches typos in the final laid-out file. Most guides put professional editing somewhere between $300 and $2,000 depending on word count and depth, and it is usually the largest single line in the budget. If you can only pay for one pass, a copy edit on a manuscript that beta readers have already stress-tested tends to give you the most per pound.
Buy a cover that looks like its genre
Readers browse thumbnails. A cover's job is to tell a shopper, in about a second, what kind of book this is and whether it is for them. That means studying the current top 50 in your category and hiring a designer who works in it. Premade covers start around $200 and custom design typically runs from $300 to $800. Designing it yourself in Canva is possible, though it rarely survives comparison with the books sitting next to it in the store.
Decide about the ISBN
Amazon will give you a free ISBN for a paperback, and it works fine, but Amazon is listed as the publisher of record and the number cannot be used elsewhere. Buying your own means you are the publisher on the record and you can use the same ISBN across printers and distributors. In the UK, Nielsen is the only agency, and at 2026 prices a single ISBN costs around £93 while a block of ten is about £174. In the US, Bowker charges $125 for one and $295 for ten. Ebooks on Kindle need no ISBN at all.
Choose where the book sells
KDP Select gives Amazon exclusive rights to your ebook for 90-day terms in exchange for Kindle Unlimited page reads, Countdown Deals and free promo days. Going wide puts you on Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Play and library systems, usually through an aggregator like Draft2Digital. Genre fiction in series often earns more inside Kindle Unlimited because those readers borrow rather than buy. Non-fiction and books with a specific audience you can reach directly often do better wide. You can test both, one 90-day term at a time.
Price with the royalty bands in mind
Amazon pays 70 per cent on ebooks priced between $2.99 and $12.99 on Amazon.com, a ceiling raised from $9.99 on 7 July 2026, with equivalent bands in other marketplaces. Outside that range you get 35 per cent. The 70 per cent rate also carries a delivery fee based on file size, $0.15 per MB in the US, so an image-heavy book earns less than the headline rate suggests. On print, KDP pays 60 per cent minus printing cost at $9.99 and above, and 50 per cent minus printing cost below that, following the change on 10 June 2025. Run the arithmetic before you pick a price rather than after.
Build the part Amazon does not own
Amazon sells your book, and it does not tell you who bought it. No email addresses, no way to contact those readers when the next one lands. That is why most working indie authors run a mailing list, a site with a book page and a sign-up, an ARC team for launch reviews and, increasingly, direct ebook sales where the margin is closer to 90 per cent. Sales rank rises and falls. A list of readers who asked to hear from you is the asset that carries between books.
Cobbling that together from Squarespace, MailerLite, BookFunnel and a payments plugin works, and it also means five subscriptions and five logins. The •BulletPoint Toolchest puts the author website, mailing list, direct ebook store, ARC distribution and press kit under one flat monthly fee, so the publisher half of your job takes less of the week.