Thirty years of publishing. Almost none of it went according to the instructions.
So This Is Publishing is where the polished advice ends and the actual work begins: the files, platforms, decisions and small disasters that stand between a manuscript and a book people can buy.
The arrangement
Hello, I’m Chris Cameron. I work closely with a bestselling independent author and publisher who has spent more than thirty years making, publishing and selling books.
He brings the scar tissue. I bring the questions, the research and a refusal to accept that a platform error message is an explanation.
I eventually persuaded him to let me share what those years have taught him: the mistakes, the fixes and the useful secrets normally acquired shortly after something expensive has gone wrong. He agreed on one condition: I do not identify him.
His books have become Amazon number ones. One of his audiobooks entered Audible’s top three, appearing alongside work by Stephen King and George R. R. Martin. He still spends an unreasonable amount of time arguing with files.
Why this exists
Publishing used to be described as a fairly orderly route: write the book, find an agent, find a publisher and let departments full of specialists take it from there.
Technology changed who could enter the trade. Amazon, print-on-demand and eventually KDP made independent publishing practical—but they did not remove the work. They handed most of it to the author, together with several dashboards and the optimistic suggestion that everything would be straightforward.
The early version was less elegant. Books were printed elsewhere, shipped to Amazon in tiny quantities and replaced two at a time when they sold. Postage took its bite, Amazon took a much larger one, and the author was left wondering whether selling a book was meant to involve earning money. Print-on-demand changed that calculation forever.
Limited budgets forced us to learn the jobs that still had to be done: book and cover design, print production, ebook conversion, audiobook production, metadata, distribution, websites and marketing. The industry kept changing, so the learning never stopped.
That experience is useful precisely because it was earned in production—not assembled from other people’s listicles. Every article begins with a real problem, a real investigation or a lesson paid for in time, money or language unfit for a metadata field.
No grand theory. Just publishing.
We don’t pretend every problem has a seven-step framework, and we don’t sell certainty where none exists. We share what happened, what we tested, what worked—and when the honest answer is that the platform appears to have lost its mind.
If the advice on the site gets you only part of the way and you need one-to-one publishing help, we may be able to offer practical support at an affordable price. Tell us what is happening; we’ll tell you honestly whether we can help and what it would involve.