Three Tells that Your Book is Self-Published

Welcome to Self-Publishing for the Broke Author, where I’m updating my 2018 book of the same title and posting the revised chapters as I go, along with additional tips and guidance to help you produce, publish and sell books like a pro, all without going broke in the process. Subscribe for free to get it all delivered to your inbox.

Long ago, before we were wed, my husband and I used to be really into Texas Hold-em. We played it some — never for real stakes — but we didn’t enjoy that nearly as much as we enjoyed watching the professional poker players on World Poker Tour.

In poker, it’s important to keep your “poker face” on — to avoid any ticks, movements or facial expressions that would give away whether you’ve got a good or a bad hand of cards. These unintentional giveaways are called “tells” in the poker world. Players who didn’t have mastery over their tells would go so far as to hide their eyes and faces behind sunglasses, scarves and hoodies.

What on earth does that have to do with self-published books?

They often have a tell. Sometimes more than one. While many self-published indie books look purely professional and the only way to discern that they’re self-published is to take a really close look at the meta data, a lot of them are easy to pick out at first glance, or as soon as you crack it open, or not long after you start reading.

Of course, the biggest tell is simply bad writing. How many of us have started to read a book that looked great, only to get a few sentences or paragraphs in and realize that no publisher would have green lit this book because the writing is just not good? I won’t belabor this one. The only thing that can fix bad writing is time, study and practice.

But there are three main tells I want to cover here that are in the author’s control, and often make it into a book due to either lack of knowledge or lack of resources. I’ll start with the most obvious and easy to spot:

There’s an art to good cover design, and it’s really easy to spot bad cover design. Of course, sometimes mainstream publishers choose gawd-awful cover art for their books, so this is not a foolproof way to spot an indie. But a lot of indie covers can be easily spotted for their overuse of decorative fonts and/or text effects, as well as bad typesetting, colors and sizing that makes the text barely legible. Composition is also a common issue, with images and text failing to balance each other out.

Another common problem is a cover that communicates nothing about the book’s genre, or that actually communicates a different genre than the story within. Glossy covers on paperbacks can also be a tell, especially on fiction. While non-fiction can often go either way, the trend with fiction paperbacks in the last decade or so has been a matte finish, although there are exceptions, such as when you’ve got a dark cover that just looks better glossy.

The simplest fix to all of this is to hire a professional cover designer. But being that this publication is called Self-Publishing for the Broke Author, we’re going to assume that’s not currently in the cards. But no worries — Canva’s got your back. They offer a wide selection of professional-looking ebook cover templates that can put you on the right path as far as composition and typesetting.

But I would caution you not to use their templates as is — because you’re probably not the only one using that template, and likely more than one user has done nothing more than change the title and author name (another clear cover tell? Spotting a cover you’ve seen in the template library on Canva). The template should be nothing more than a starting point. You can, and should, change out the image, and also change the fonts to something more closely resembling the best-selling books in your genre.

You could also study the Book Designer Blog, which is basically a free master class in cover design. And study the best-sellers in your genre, while you’re at it. Once you start to get a feel for what looks professional and what works, you’ll be ready to graduate to designing your own covers from scratch.

Pages that aren’t fully justified, large spaces between paragraphs, running headers on chapter heading pages and inconsistent punctuation formatting are just a few of the major formatting tells that make it apparent a book is self-published.

This tends to be more of an issue with physical books than with e-books, and formatting physical book can be tricky. It helps to have a mainstream book next to you to use as a guide as you format your book’s interior. I covered the best practices of book formatting in Chapter Two of my Broke Author book, which you can read right here.

I’m not talking about typos. I’m not sure how the presence of typos came to be associated with indie publishing, since as a reader I’ve found far more typos in traditionally published books than I have in indie novels.

But it’s all too common to read an indie book that simply hasn’t been polished. It’s distracting when it happens, and unedited books have led to many a bad review. What’s more, even indie books with professional, polished writing sometimes have glaring errors that make you wonder if a cat jumped on the keyboard when the proofreader looked away for a minute.

Editing is probably the one aspect of producing your own book that it’s really difficult to do by yourself and do it well. Fortunately, I already covered low-budget options for getting your book edited and proofread in Chapter One of the Broke Author book, which you can read here.

It’s entirely possible to make your book look as good and professional as the mainstream books surrounding it, whether on a virtual or a physical bookshelf. It simply takes an awareness of the conventions and expectations and practice and diligence in meeting those conventions. This can indeed be tedious and time-consuming, especially in the beginning when you’re still figuring all of this out. But it does get easier with practice.

And the best thing about self-publishing? You can always go back later to fix your mistakes and cover up your tells.

Thanks for reading! If you’re in need of a budget-friendly editor, look no further. I offer editing and proofreading services at affordable rates and I’m happy to do partial critiques and edits and work with you at a pace that suits your available budget.

If you enjoyed this free post or found it helpful, a like, comment, restack or share will go a long way towards boosting its visibility for others to find, as well as keeping the author motivated. And if you’re not actually broke, you could also consider buying me a coffee.

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