One of the best ways to save costs on anything, whether it be furniture, or publishing, or who knows what, is to do it yourself.
But if you are going to do something with your books and you’re marketing yourself, it’s going to cost more time, and that is the trade-off.
If you do something with professionals, you can get it quicker, but it does cost more money.
If it’s do it yourself, and you’re trying to do it yourself and speedily, it can be a recipe for disaster.
Because you need to do the research, and you need to spend the time painstakingly going through your manuscript.
And you’re spending energy, and maybe all you end up with is understanding that it’s not going to be a “one and done” simple process that just takes you an hour.
To do something well can take a lot of time.
This is one of the reasons why I pay professionals to do a lot of my publishing and business work.
Because I know I’m not just paying them for the time that they spend on my particular project.
I’m paying them for the hundreds or thousands of hours they’ve spent learning the craft.
So I think going DIY in the beginning of your career absolutely makes sense.
You just need to be willing to spend the time to get pretty good at these sorts of things.
Some people say it takes 20 hours to at least have a basic understanding of something.
So take the 20 hours to get really good at DIY… or hire the pros.