The Quick Glance At Independent Publishing:
The road to publication is fraught with double standards, slow moving processes, scams, inspiration, and grit. It's just that easy.
Advertisements focused on independent publishing love to say how quick and easy it is to start your writing career. It's just a couple clicks, and if you used AI to help you write, you'll be churning out best sellers in no time. Except, it's not actually that easy. Sure, you can whip something up with or without AI, create an account with an indie publishing platform and publish, but creating that account is more than just a couple clicks, and then there's the quality of the final product.
Indie publishing offers authors control of every decision every step of the way and that, is as liberating as it is burdensome. Even if you decide to skip over having any editing done, you still, at the very least, have to ensure your product - be it an ebook, physical book, or both - is the right format for the platform and that it has a cover. These things can be accomplished fairly easily and with no cost other than time and account creation, but what that gets you is a cheap product in a sea of other products that are at the same level or better. Unless you have a super niche category that is popular, the likelihood of people finding your work is low. With how enormous the book market is, being discovered by readers is a concern shared by everyone.
But let me back up. There are more decisions that have to be made in regards to choosing the publishing platform. Different platforms have different requirements for cover files. Some have a limit to how many pages a physical book can be and whether hardcover and paperback are both options or just one. There's the matter of the ISBN. Individual platforms offer their own ISBN, but that is only good for that platform, so if you want to switch platforms or use more than one, see your book in a store or sell on your own website, you might be more limited. And what of the formatting? Will you trust the in-house technology to convert your file to be Ebook ready? Will you look for professional help? Maybe you'll look into what softwares other authors use to do it themselves?
But before considering the potential cost of formatting, editing needs to be addressed. Editing is a hard cost to avoid unless you don't do it. Realistically, no matter how meticulous you are, you won't catch every mistake in your own work. I speak from experience when I say it doesn't matter how many breaks you take or how many times you pour over the pages, obvious mistakes will escape your notice. This is why it is in an indie author's best interest to subject the work to editing before publishing and I will certainly talk more about that later but for now, let me address some pros and cons of indie publishing.
Independent (self) publishing grants authors the freedom and responsibility to make every decision about the piece that gets published. It stands to be a much shorter path to publication day than traditional publishing and can be completely free however, realistically there will be a greater monetary cost to compensate for a lesser time cost when comparing independent and traditional publishing paths.