On July 25, I’m hosted a public celebration that 1) I wrote a book and 2) I had physical copies and 3) they were available to purchase.
It was pretty great.
Representatives from so many different parts of my life. And representatives from so many different beautiful labors of love—social work, community leaders, artists, teachers, nurses, editors, engineers, scientists.
But there’s also a back story. A frustrating one.
The background: I wrote a book. A lovely one. A little text that helps us put words to who we are and tell others about it. Includes all the prompts to think; everything about what I know about working with words; how I play with language to get to real meaning; even a nearly infallible template for bios.
I announced it in May 2023. Told everyone physical copies were coming soon.
I had a book party at my house with my close friends.
And then. AND THEN.
Physical copies did not come soon.
Life happened.
Print fiascos happened.
Time passed.
Years.
I forgot I even liked the book.
I would wake up at 4am on random nights and immediately think “I still don’t have copies” and feel a rush of embarrassment and anger so strong I wouldn’t go back to sleep.
Here’s what happened.
Print on Demand is the standard route for self-publishing. The printer takes an order for the book AND ONLY THEN prints a copy. AND ships to the buyer.
The writer doesn’t pay for printing or distribution. And they get a cut of each book sold, a cut that is much higher than from a traditional publisher who would also be taking their own cut.
The buyer can be an individual.
Or the book can be listed in major suppliers like Amazon or Ingram and ordered in bulk by stores or colleges etc.
You’ve likely never heard of Ingram. They are a massive warehouse and supply company. Stocks most of the independent bookstores and libraries. Even bookshop.org I think uses them to source books.
The positives for the writer are major.
We don’t have to pay to print copies. Writers rarely have the cash upfront to pay for something like that at scale. Traditional publishers are the ones who would pay for printing otherwise.
We have access to major suppliers so our books can be sold in retailers like a local shop or Barnes and Noble. It isn’t immediately obvious that our books are self-published make it a more equal playing field.
Our cut of the profit is higher than a traditional publisher.
Or that’s the idea anyway. My experience turned out very differently.
The process started out wonderfully. I had used several fabulous freelance experts to get the book ready for printing.
Lisa Lotito put together a chic cover with visions of this book existing on both USA and European bookshelves (old title at this point).
Kelsey at Paper+Oates laid out the interior.
Amanda Lewis was developmental editor.
Crissy Calhoun gave each line a close read as copy editor.
This wasn’t a cheap process but I wanted it to look legit. I had ambitions of a big release at this point. I even had a few bookstores and a class at Stanford ready to include the text in their program. They just needed a way to get physical copies.
With my interior and exterior all ready to go, it couldn’t take more than a few weeks to get a solid proof copy and list it online, right?
I started out using Blurb.
Easy template to use. Uploaded the cover and interior.
But even on the preview, getting the cover to work was a mess.
And then when I finally got it to center, it still printed wild.
I have so. many. copies that I paid to order at full price.
Every single cover had a slightly different color scale and misalignment. Several had bright white lines on the edges where cropping just didn’t work, despite the adequate bleeds provided in the file.
I thought it was me. I thought it was my file. My friend Liron Lavi offered to check the file for me and ended up rebuilding it from scratch to try to make it work with the website—and we were on vacation! Our final morning in NYC!
BUT WAIT! Why didn’t I call Blurb and get help?
Oh I did. I tried. I emailed. I sent message in their chat form. I never got the help that resulted in a clear improvement.
No customer service to call. I couldn’t get help that wasn’t pointing me back to the vague “help desk” articles that’d I’d pretty much memorized.
And then the killer. When I passed the book around to early readers, they gave the same feedback: the standard-issue shiny cover felt cheap.
I decided to change vendors to one that offered a matte cover.
Ingram Spark is the Granddaddy of the print-on-demand world. It also has a nightmarish user design to match that aging status.
I decided to give it a go anyway.
The user design told me everything I needed to know.
There was no preview for the file here. Instead, I’d wait weeks for a real human somewhere on earth to review my file and tell me if it met spec or not.
AND THEN I had to upload an entirely new file that I could only hope and pray worked correctly.
Took me three months to get a file that was approved.
And then when I got copies, they were a mess as well. Each copy had a new problem.
If Ingram Spark ever reads this, yes I used the template. Of course I did.
Like with Blurb, there was no way to reach a real person in real time.
It was at this point that I realized something critical about print on demand:
They don’t use one printer.
Print-on-demand prints the copy at a printer nearest where that order was placed.
There would never be a way to confirm color or alignment for each copy. I would never know if someone ordered my book in Washington state was getting a copy set two inches in the wrong directon.
And no print-on-demand company is motivated to help you BEFORE you sell copies. They don’t consider you a customer until you’ve made them money and have a book listed for purchase. And the self-publishing world is booming enough that they don’t seem to think they need to change.
Life in the middle of this:
Move from MD to PA.
Be full time childcare for Summer 2023.
Burnout recovery
Daycare continual illnesses.
Undiagnosed chronic illness
Diagnosed chronic illnesses
Child’s surgery and ongoing food allergies
Phosphate crisis of 2024 with two week hospitalization
I took a break from even trying to get it published. I’d pushed hard from April 2023 (when the book file was ready) to October 2023, through a move between states, continual illness, no childcare, and a body screaming for help.
In October 2023, I said I needed to invest in my body and do whatever it needed to get better. The book would wait. It (and I) didn’t have much of a choice.
In May 2024, after some harrowing experiences, I decided to do a micro print. I’d print however many copies I could afford from a localish fine art printer and sell those.
In talking with Lisa Lotito (designer), it also became clear that my career goals had shifted since I wrote the book in my post-partum rage-fuled whirlwind of 2022. I wanted to WRITE. Naming was the eternal thread of my work but I wasn’t as interested in consulting or entrepreneurship as I had been.
Which prompted a name shift.
I’d titled the book around the intellectual property I wanted to claim: the ground truth process.
But that didn’t tell you what the book was for and it didn’t offer an anchor to my future work.
We opted to change the title. Lisa insisted on a complete redesign. That process took us several more months + looking for the right printer.
Lisa managed the printing process with Fireball in Philadelphia. We had several rounds of rough proofs there as well but it made sense given they are a smaller operation (compared to the print-on-demand monopolies).
We finally had 75 copies at my house in February 2025.
I pulled a tarot card for the project around this time. Death in reverse.
Yep. A lot of ego death on this road.
I wasn’t ready to release them yet. I’d just had a cancer scare and needed to take a second and regroup. I was finally building strength after years of setbacks. I went to England. Robbie and I bought our home.
Jade T. Perry suggested I might be experiencing creative backlog rather than burnout in July 2025. I decided it was time to “clean out the closets.” Give this book a chance at existing outside my computer and some digital sales.
There’s an idea that self-publishing is “free.” Or I had that idea anyway.
We write on instagram and press “post.”
I write on substack and press “send”.
I write something and press “print” because I’m old enough to still think that owning a printer in my home is essential.
I learned through this process that self-publishing is anything but free. There is always payment happening somewhere.
You do skip the gate keepers. You don’t need the dance of getting the agent or the publisher to think you are cool enough to print your words.
But you take on the rest of the labor yourself. And if you love what you made and envision a particular form for its physical life… well it’s a long and pricey road.
I paid experts at each stage. Some of them multiple times to repeat tasks that print companies rejected or was accepted and printed completely wrong.
Developmental editor
Copy editor
Interior layout
Cover design (x2)
Cover design rebuild by a friend
Approximately 1200 print trials from print-on-demand companies
Limited edition print run from high end press in Philadelphia with a million versions because it kept printing crooked
Print management
The photoshoot ages ago that I used for my headshot
I’d put the total cost at $7k
I won’t make that money back from the book at any point.
There’s a term in business called “loss leader”. It’s a product or service that doesn’t make you money BUT it generates interest at a high enough level that it produces paying clients. You end up making money in the long term because that “loss lead” works well enough.
Or that’s the idea.
I meant for the book to be a “loss leader.” I didn’t write a book on the illusion that books make people lots of money. So that helped at every step of the process.
But with the passage of time, my goals changed. This is a class “dissertation” problem—the person you are when you start a Phd is never the person that you are when you finish it. And it’s a gamble if Future You needs the Phd to do what they want the same way Today You needs the Phd.
The business behind the book shifted. Building an audience so I could “Simon Sinek” or “Brene Brown” language/naming in business world—that idea of my life wasn’t important to me anymore. I’d grown into confidence around writing as my practice. My ambitions had grown more specific to process rather than reception which is a gift of combining aging, disability, parenthood, and therapy.
I don’t wake myself up angry and ashamed anymore.
Not because it’s finally available. It’s because I had to let it go again and again and again.
And then, with enough letting go, it is gone.
I could have title this letter so many things.
“Deciding What Is Important To You When You Write a Book”
“Do you even care that the cover is crooked?”
“Self Publishing Is Not Accessible”
“The Year[s] I tried and Failed to Publish a Book.”
“I Wrote A Great Book And Then Froze Because I Had No Copies”
etc etc etc
But the “shittiness” feels the right one.
My fury at businesses not set up to take of the people who try to work with them.
The barriers to access posed by technology.
The privilege of having the money to lose but not really because it was my business that has already run on tight margins and this was already a loss leader.
I’d wanted to believe that self-publishing was equal access. But it wasn’t.
I wonder sometimes if I should have chosen differently. I value the physical object and design too highly perhaps. There is a “good enough” version that was ready in 2023. Did I go way off base trying to make it standardized? Refusing the simple realities capitalist bull-shittery for an ideal that is much smaller than imagined?
Because there are a shocking number of books on my shelf with uncentered spines. How?!
No answer there. Except I’m much happier when I don’t ask “what if?” about the past. I was really sick. I still am. And I did what I could.
I also thought a lot about giving up on the print book. Just letting it exist digitally on my website.
The only reason I kept going with a release at all was that I didn’t want to let Taylor Harrington down. She wrote a phenomenal forward and deserved to have that work visible. So thanks Taylor for existing and throwing confetti for me and all of it.
I am proud of the book as it came to exist in its micro-print form.
It smells lovely. It has a nice weight in hand.
I am proud it is out in the world. That the ideas get to live on someone’s shelf.
I like that I can hand it to Pippin and say, “Mom wrote that.”
With Love,
Dana
A Post Script on Amazon:
The book isn’t available on kindle or amazon.
From the very beginning, I wanted to opt out of amazon.
The un-amazon route was my choice for this book. Not everyone gets that choice. It isn’t the right one for every book or every self-published effort.
But for the record: Amazon is the worst of capitalism and is bad for writers, readers, and booksellers.
Amazon puts booksellers out of business just because they can by buying in bulk and selling at a loss.
Amazon won’t chase down stolen pirated copies or plagiarized texts which result in livelihoods being lost.
There are lots of good reasons to use Amazon.
I might make different decisions with future books.
My opinion on Amazon will not have changed if I do.