I self-published my first book (all you need are seeds…) in December 2012, not knowing a thing about self-publishing. Time has shown that I didn’t know much about creative writing, either. But over the course of a few months, I’d assembled 235 pages of words and wanted to get them out to the world, so did what I thought I had to do. And while it remains debatable whether I know anything about self-publishing or creative writing now, I did learn a few things in the process.

I taught myself how to use Scrivener to outline, write, and format my book in various formats – Word for editing, PDF for formatting, and epub and MOBI for publishing. I learned about ISBNs and why I needed a different one for different versions of the book. I learned how to get my book on all of the major self-publishing platforms. It was a time! And most of all, I learned (accepted) that I had to do it all alone. Outside of the artist I hired to make my homegrown Photoshop cover look more professional, I had no help. Nobody to help with development, no editors, no beta readers. And my money was of the laughable kind.

Still, I was determined to put my words out into the world. I’d quit my DC staff attorney job the year before, traveled around Latin America, believed that I had changed my life, and had the blueprint for doing it. I took the lessons learned from my time on a Patagonian estancia, where I became certified in permaculture design and decided to apply its principles to my life. While I can admit that a few changes did come from the first round of work, I was in no place, personally or spiritually, to go about telling somebody else how to fix their stuff. But I did it anyway.

With no marketing plan, no real social media following or campaign, or like I admit above, no real understanding of the self-publishing industry, I uploaded my book and hawked it to social media friends, connections, and the occasional fellow traveler along the way.

I didn’t realize that once I put my book on several self-publishing sites, I’d have very little control over it. I didn’t realize that despite setting the price I wanted for my words, the sites could change it whenever they wanted. A corporation, who had nothing to do with the aforementioned learning, typing, editing, and designing, had free reign to decide when my book would go on sale and when it would return to its regular price and there was not a thing I could do about it. Because, like most people, despite checking the box that said I did, I did not read not one term nor condition which would have told me who could do what and when. I also did not pay the slightest attention to the royalties chart, which would have let me know that the sites would retain a bigger cut of those prices, reduced or not, than I would. I didn’t believe I had much of a choice, so I didn’t.

Over the next decade, I’d receive a few coins here and there, whenever some sweet soul out there saw my book and decided to fork out whatever amount the self-publishing sites set that day. I kept traveling, kept writing, kept unraveling but hadn’t taken the time to learn what I needed to know about the self-publishing industry.

Covid-19 changed all of that.

While home alone, I assembled a fresh set of words into what has become my first novel. I decided to go to school to learn how to better assemble those fresh set of words. I also began looking deeper into the world of self-publishing and realized that it didn’t have to be as it was. I’m still in the process of reworking those words, but this time, I’m much better prepared when it comes to self-publishing and the $1.25+ billion dollar industry it has become. I know that it is extractive, that the corporations retain the bulk of those dollars. I know that the industry is pretty much take-it-or-leave-it. I no longer believe that self-publishing has to mean no help without a big budget. Or that the big self-publishing sites are the only way. Or that taking-it-or-leaving-it could ever be a reasonable deal.

Around the same time that I received the message that self-publishing could be cooperative instead of extractive (2022), I pulled my first book from all of the major self-publishing sites. I am re-releasing all you need are seeds… on trunkofmycar.org, this time, giving control of its price to readers, a feature we’ve added to the platform.

Because we believe that community and/or individual readers should have a bigger say in our pricing scheme. And that creators should retain the bulk of their earnings. And that self-publishing is best done in community and that no one should have to do it alone.