The self-publishing dream

An insider’s guide to publishing your own book - both physically and online
By Sarah Spear

It’s funny to think that the day our book My Little Geek went to print, I received the “no-go” from a publisher, and 10 months later, we’ve sold over 1,500 books.

In the initial stages of writing My Little Geek, we identified key companies that might sell our book. These were ThinkGeek (USA), Mighty Ape (NZ), and Dick Smiths. We thought about using our existing contacts through our Plethora App (80+ designer blogs). We also identified tech celebrities, who we wanted to feature in our book, as well as popular tech blog sites.

We chose Edit Sliacka, from Prague, to illustrate our book. In this world we live in talent is only an email away. We sketched up what we wanted and worked with her agency Illustopia.com. We initially commissioned the front cover and the inside page to test the market.

It takes guts to test the market. Booksellers are blunt and that is exactly what is needed. It is better to hear early on that our book is not going to sell, rather than spend a lot of money to discover the same thing. Although they liked My Little Geek, they told us it was not mainstream enough to be taken up by a publisher.