James Lloyd on self-publishing: 'We have to rely on word of mouth'

Why did you choose to self-publish?

Like a lot of self-publishers, I tentatively sent my work out to a few publishing agents, but either received a negative response or nothing at all. After having no luck with my first batch of emails, I thought it'd be quicker and more productive if I tried to publish them myself.

Tell us a bit about the book.

I've published a couple of children's books so far.

Johnny and the Wig is a poem about a boy who's visited one night by a magical wig that takes him up into space to meet its owner – the Man on the Moon.

Sam at the Window is a short story about an old fisherman who spends his days watching the world go by from his cottage, until he's visited one day by a little viking called Emily.

I've made them both available to read here.

Recently I've been working on a longer children's poem, which I'm also hoping to publish once it's been illustrated.

What are the positives of self-publishing?

Self-sufficiency: being able to turn the finished text into a shiny new book without having to pass via any middlemen.

It's also great to have the freedom to look for illustrators and then work on the layout and design with them directly. I imagine I'd have less say over that if the books weren't self-published.

And the negatives?

The age-old problem of how to get your stories out into the big wide world. With traditional publishing, the marketing is generally part of the package. With self-publishing, it's not so obvious where that publicity's going to come from. In my case, the illustrators and I both do some promotion around us – on our blogs or within our circle of friends and family – but for the rest we have to rely on word of mouth.

Secondly, putting a picture book together from scratch is a time-consuming business. Self-publishing websites don't seem to have been designed with picture books in mind, and I spent many an hour hunched over my computer, frantically trying to get the images to fit on the pages or appear in the right places. There's only so much image-trimming and page-rearranging you can do before you start going quietly mad.

What was it like working with an artist?

Fantastic – finding illustrators and seeing them bring the stories to life was the most satisfying part of the process.

I spent a while browsing through websites looking for illustrators with a style that I felt matched the stories. The fact that we could do everything digitally meant that it didn't really matter where the illustrators were located. In the end, I worked with a different artist for each story - Victoria Bjørge in Norway for Johnny and the Wig and Stefania Manzi in Italy for Sam at the Window.

Once we'd agreed to work together, I sent them the key plot points that I thought needed illustrating, and they then came up with a storyboard. I gave them pretty much free rein to design the characters and locations, and I was chuffed with what they came up with.

Would you self-publish again?

I'd love to get my stories into a real-life, ink-and-paper bookshop, so I haven't given up on publishers yet. But it's great to know I have the option of self-publishing if that doesn't work out.

Have you worked with an editor or designer on the books?

The books were made on a shoestring budget, so I didn't think about working with anyone at the time. One benefit of working closely with illustrators is that they tend to have an eye for design, so I didn't feel I needed too much extra help with that side of things.

Do you think this is important?

I imagine most authors would value some kind of professional editorial and/or design advice if offered it, but not everyone can afford it, and not everyone receives the opportunity: that's one reason why self-publishing is so attractive.

You're also a science writer – have you self-published any non-fiction?

Not yet, but maybe one day!

Can you talk us through how you're publishing? How are you pricing it?

Once the words and images are all laid out, I convert the stories into pdfs and make them available to read on Scribd. This means that I can start publicising the books, and readers can easily access them. I also use the self-publishing website Lulu to create paperback versions that I sell online for about £5 each.

Ideally, I'd like to convert my stories into ebooks, but I haven't got my head around how to do that yet. With Johnny and the Wig, for example, all the text is embedded into the images, so the words shrink to microscopic sizes on a small screen. It's possible that the books would need to be redesigned for ebook format.

Give us a short taster.

From Johnny and the Wig:

Johnny was sleeping one Saturday night,
When all of a sudden he woke with a fright.
For there at his window hovered a wig –
A fine mane of hair, dancing a jig.

This vision of hair, oh my, what a sight!
With threads of pure gold that gleamed in the light.
Thousands of fibres bobbing as one –
A shimmering hairpiece, blonde as the Sun.

Now Johnny was speechless, bereft of words.
For he often saw bats and he often saw birds,
But never a mass of glistening hair,
And so the poor boy did nothing but stare.

This yellowy wig, it swooped and it swayed,
Came right to the bed where Johnny was laid.
It hovered awhile then slowly it dropped,
And onto the top of his small head it plopped.

What other self-published titles would you recommend?

I'm a big fan of self-published magazines and fanzines. They're not usually the work of one single person, but the principle is the same – they're all created and distributed without the help of an established publisher. I read a couple of wonderful comic magazines called LOAf and OFF LIFE and I regularly contribute to a crowd-sourced science magazine called Guru.