In his blog on Huffington Post, author and publisher David Kudler offered some heretical advice for would-be indie authors, extracted from an interview done for Inkspokes.

The first is that self-publishing doesn’t mean that you have do everything yourself — or that you should. The chairman of Penguin/Random House doesn’t copyedit every book, nor does he try to design his own covers. He’s your competition. Budget in the time and (if you can) the money to outsource the parts of the work of publishing that you really can’t (or as I said shouldn’t) handle yourself.

The places where you will really serve yourself best by finding someone else to help out? Highly technical processes like print layout and cover design. It’s possible to create your own ebooks if your work is narrative and doesn’t include much in the way of complicated formatting or images.

You should absolutely have editors at each of the three stages of editing — development (before the ‘final’ draft is finished), copyediting (after you’re done developing the book but before you’ve had it laid out) and proofreading (after layout/conversion and just before publication).

As a side note, even though Inkspokes does a lot of the same things we do, we believe their site (and ours) helps build the credibility and reality of independent publishing and we acknowledge their contributions to community building. There’s a healthy, thriving dynamic at play in this sector and in the spirit of friendly competition, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out the great resources available to help guide your independent epublishing pursuits. While cruising, we also recommend you visit Stillpoint Digital Press, where you can find many useful tips on moving from a simple idea to an epublished work.

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