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
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.
Between us, we usually discover what actually happened.
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. Independent publishing changed the route, but it did not remove the work. It handed most of that work to the author.
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.
What you’ll find here
What broke
Clear accounts of publishing problems as they happen.
What fixed it
Enough of the solution to help you move forward.
When to ask
If your problem needs more than an article, you can bring it to us.
No grand theory. Just publishing.
We are not interested in pretending every problem has a seven-step framework or selling certainty where none exists. We will tell you what we know, what we tested, what worked—and when the honest answer is that the platform appears to have lost its mind.