This is the final article in my Self Publishing 101 mini series, with the first two covering Formatting, ISBNs, and where to actually sell your book. This one will be covering the finally little things you need to do after (or just before) publication, namely legal deposit, adding it to goodreads (and other review sites), taxes and centrelink.
In most countries, you are required by law to submit a copy of your work to the National Library Archive. I live in Queensland, Australia, so if you live somewhere else, you will need to check what’s required by your country and state, as the laws differ. In Queensland, in addition to the National Library submission, we’re also required to submit a copy to the Queensland State Library and the Queensland Parliamentary Library.
Now thankfully, the National Library and the State Library are covered by the same system, and that and the Parliamentary Library accept (and prefer) ebook submissions over physical copies (though if you’re only doing physical, they of course, will accept that). This means it doesn’t cost anything; you just need to fill out a form for the Legal Deposit, upload your ebook version, and you’re done.
This needs to be done within a month of publication.
I added mine to both Goodreads and StoryGraph. This isn’t required, but it is recommended. As soon as your release date is set, or at the very least, as soon as you send out ARC copies, you should create a book listing on Goodreads. By you doing it yourself before a reader has the chance to do so, you can make sure all the data is correct and that there aren’t multiple versions of your book being uploaded, diluting your review scores.
First, you need to create an author account. This website (https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/How-Do-I-Join-the-Author-Program-1550590077774) tells you how, but it’s not as difficult as it seems. It’s mostly just making sure you have something to prove you are an author (like the publication or preorder of your book under your name).
Once your account is approved, do a search for your book. It shouldn’t appear (provided a reader hasn’t added it). To the right of the results is a little link that says “Manually add book”. Click that, fill it out, and you’ll be able to create an entry for your book.
Then, once your book has an entry, click on it, and there will be another link that says something along the lines of “Is this yours? Claim this title” (I can’t remember the exact wording, sorry). You can then claim it as yours, and the book will be linked to your author profile once it’s verified. Done!
As of next month, the Story Graph will be integrated to your kobo account in the same way that Goodreads is integrated into Amazon, but better. Once you link your accounts, reading anything on your Kobo will add it to your Story Graph account, automatically tracking it, and making it easy to post a review there once finished.
While Kobo isn’t as large in the US as the Kindle is, it is the main ebook reader in a number of other countries, so it’s definitely beneficial to add your book there as well. It’s even easier than Goodreads.
Go to https://thestorygraph.com/ and sign up or sign in. Then do a search for your book and clicke View All. Then there’s a little grey button at the top of the screen that says “Add a Book”. Then just fill in all the details.
Now for your author account. Unlike Goodreads, this isn’t automatic, so update your profile to be as professional as you can (use your pen name, and the same headshot you use on your website or other maketting/social media) and email their support. You then request for your account to be changed to an author account which will add an author flair to it and include links to prove you are the author of the book you just added (such as your website or other listings for it). StoryGraph will then upgrade your account on their end.
For me, they also emailed to ask if I wanted to add any tags and content warnings based on a very long list and to rate the severity, so I went through that and selected what was included in Salt and Ice.
Here’s what I selected for Salt and Ice if you’re interested:
Graphic
Cursing, Panic attacks/disorders, Mental illness (anxiety), Medical content, Injury/Injury detail (plane crash), Dementia
Minor
Hate crime (off-page), Death of parent (off-page), Cancer (off-page), Homophobia (off-page), Alcohol
And you’re done!
I know, I know, nobody loves taxes, but even if you’re not planning on making a career out of it, taxes are important, and it’s way easier if you stay on top of it now than to scramble at the end of the financial year.
I actually have a spreadsheet in Google Sheets that I use for this. The first page is for Expenses. This lists everything that I have paid for surrounding the publication of my book. That includes subscription fees, account set-up fees, postage supplies, author copies, event fees, even anything regarding research. Include the cost (in your local currency), the date, who you paid it to, and why you’re claiming it.
The next sheet is my Yearly Income. Here, I include every sale across all platforms. It includes the money I got, the date of the sale, where the sale came from, and what it was for (ebook, paperback etc).
I also keep receipts in a specific “Taxes” folder in my email clients so that I can easily find them in case I’m audited (touch wood I’m not!). That’s just a matter of forwarding them to my business email and moving them to the folder. Two seconds, and done.
That’s all you really need to cover you for the financial year. I have also got a separate sheet for each month’s sales, so I can see the progression and, at the end of the year, I’ll add all the figures to a graph to see it nicely, but that’s just for my own benefit and not really required.
Obviously, this is not important if you’re not on Centrelink, but if you are, or you want to at least be aware of the requirements in case you need to be on it in the future, this is what I’ve learned.
Unsurprisingly, their customer service was not helpful and had no idea what to do in the case of an indie author. They said all I would need to do was update my assets to include book income every few months, and that would be all. So I did that, and then I was told that I had to submit a heap of forms within two weeks or my payments would be cut off. Panic stations!
So for you, just skip the whole assets and fill out the following forms:
Business Details Form (Mod F)
Profit and Loss Form (SU580)
Most of this is fairly self-explanatory, standard Centerlink requirements. The first important thing to be aware of is the extra supporting evidence you need to supply. As a self-published author, this is likely:
Latest personal income tax return (you can get this from the ATO section of the mygov website)
Latest bank statement of the account you are using for your business (I set up a separate Wise bank account for all my book-related expenses and income, so I just gave them a statement from that. I highly recommend having a separate bank account just for book-related stuff).
Latest balance sheet. You will have to create that. I think I used my expenses and income spreadsheets from the Taxes section. I’m not sure if that was right, but they haven’t cut off my payments, so I assume it was accepted.
You’ll also need to detail the tasks you do and how long you spend doing them in a given week. Obviously, this is a bit hard for an author who is fitting their work around real life. I put down:
Administration - 1hr
Advertising - 1hr
Book Production - 5hr
This obviously will vary depending on how you work and your requirements, but I also needed to keep it under a certain amount when including my part-time work, so I figured this would do for an average.
Again, fairly standard. I put the name of my business as my pen name (J D Lear); you can use your pen name, your real name, or if you’re publishing under a publisher name, put that.
The first important part is the “Period of this statement”. That should cover from when you started incurring expenses (or tracking the expenses on your tax spreadsheet) to now. So, for me, I went back to August 2025 because that’s when I started recording what I spent on publishing Salt and Ice.
The second page of this is the big one, and this is where your Taxes spreadsheet will really help out. I also relied rather heavily on ChatGPT to work out what categories things should go under because I suck at categorising things. The key here is to make sure you’re operating either at a loss or as close to a loss as possible (otherwise your income will start affecting your payments, which is fine if you’re earning enough for that not to matter, of course).
The first section is where you put your total income for the period covered in this form. This is your gross income, so what you earned before expenses are taken out.
Next are your Non-Variable Expenses and your Variable Expenses.
Non-variable Expenses
Accountancy (not tax agents)
Depreciation able to be claimed under Division 40 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 (see tax return if available)
Insurance premiums (for example, business premises, public liability, sickness and accident, stock, motor vehicle)
Interest on money borrowed for business use
Levies, licence fees and government charges
Registration of motor vehicles less percentage of private use
Rent or rates less percentage of private use
Other (give details – provide a separate list if needed)Variable Expenses
Advertising
Bank Charges (on business accounts)
Cost of goods sold in period - see description*
Freight, cartage and travelling expenses
Motor vehicle running costs
Hire (plant and equipment)
Journals and periodicals for business use
Power cost for business use
Phone costs for business use
Printing and stationery
Materials (for example, hardware, chemicals, parts)
Repairs and maintenance (unless included as part of motor vehicle expenses)
Wages/salary paid
Capital items (for example, tools, office equipment) - each item purchased for less than $100
Other (give details - provide a separate list if needed)
I had $0 under the Non-Variable expenses, and I included a separate list for high ticket items that didn’t fit under the other categories (in my case it had Business Equeipment (which included my kobo and printer), Book Specific Costs (which was ISBN purchases and the like), Website and Domain (the costs in setting that up), and Subscriptions (Canva, BookVault, etc)).
Everything else I slotted into something in there. I also decided that since I am writing at home 5% of the total time I’m at home, I would claim 5% of the power bill as a business expense, and I use my phone for business-related activities (social media on my author page mostly) 10% of the time, I could claim 10% of my phone bill as well. I also didn’t pay myself a wage or a salary, but you can do that if you need to bring your total profit down some.
That’s everything I could think of to do with what I have done in self-publishing my debut novel. Have I forgotten anything, or is there something else you’d like to know about, or know more about? Drop a comment, I’d love to chat!
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.