Awakening the Power of Self-Publishing by Rudo Muchoko

Having self-published several books now through Lulu and Amazon, I was very interested to read this guide and see if I could pick up any tips. It’s a small book of around sixty pages, but contains a lot of information.

There are both advantages and disadvantages of the book and in the spirit of offering a fair review, I will list some of each.

Advantages

One of the good things to say about this book is that the author writes in a clear way which is easily accessible and understandable. The book is presented well and it’s easy to see which topic is covered by each chapter, so you could skip to a particular section if you were looking for something specific.

It’s also good to have everything written in one handy little guide. Buying this book might inspire you to finally finish that book you’re writing, or, if you have finished the writing stage, to get on and publish it.

You are bound to find something in this book that you didn’t already know, or an aspect of self-publishing that you hadn’t considered. I found the chapter on book covers particularly interesting. (Though I suspect it’s not “specific GENES [that] are associated with particular fonts” but GENRES.)

There are some good points in the text. I certainly agree with the idea that you should use your social media platforms to make friends, rather than just sell, as people tend to buy from those they have made a connection with. No-one wants to follow someone whose Twitter feed is just full of adverts for their own products and nothing else.

Disadvantages

One the downsides of the book is that it needed a good proof-read and the little errors annoyed me. For example, you will find both “bestselling” and “best-selling” in the pages.

Another is that a lot of information in the book is obvious, things you will already have thought of. I’m sure no-one would try to self-publish a book they didn’t think was finished to a high standard.

The book is published by the author’s own publishing company, RMPublishers, and at times, this reads like an advert for their services. (“… here at RMPublishers … our packages come with editing and proofreading as standard.”)

Many of the tips involve spending money – get a professional editor, for example. I think the author should be explaining the pros and cons of each suggestion and offer low-budget ideas alongside those which cost a lot.

She rightly states that one of the best things about self-publishing is the control the author has over their book. Yet she then says that books go through six processes of development. Now even when I have had my books traditionally published, they only went through three of these six stages.

Sometimes she states something, without explaining it enough. For example, she says that audiobooks are a great way to earn money from your book. But how do you do that? How do you make an audiobook without a team behind you to finance it, find voice actors, record it to a high standard, etc.? Telling the reader that the “audio format is one of the most important tools for digitisation” is fine, but how is that achieved? One of my traditionally published books was made into an audiobook, but I had very little say in its production and wouldn’t know where to start to do one myself!

One of the author’s ways to “stay relevant after publishing your book” is to “turn your book into a film.” Yes, I’m sure we’d all love to do that, but it doesn’t seem quite so simple as the author suggests.

In Summary

This is a well-meaning book with some good advice amongst its pages.