The Fine Art of Selling Yourself

"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day about freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.

Last year, I self-published a digital short story. It's called THE TUMOR. I used Gumroad to publish and sell it because Clayton Cubitt recommended it and because Gumroad takes less of your money than Amazon does. This Isn't Happiness designed the beautiful cover, Susan Clements did a beautiful job copy editing it, and Domini Dragoone did the gorgeous page layout and assembled the entire thing together into a variety of publishable formats that transformed it into a digital book.

Here are a few good reasons for self-publishing:

You can own your shit, soup to nuts

As a freelancer, there's a lot of relying on other people to get permission to do the shit you want to do. Editors, or bosses, or directors. When you self-publish, it's all you. If you fail, it's on you. If you succeed, it's all yours. I'm a control freak, so this was very appealing to me.

You can step outside the box

Who was going to publish a short story about a man that wants to stab his wife to death over a malignant tumor that wanders around the house? Well, who knows, but no one, probably. Except for me. If you're going to go through the bother of self-publishing, you might as well do it with something that's more interesting than the dumb ass crap you do for money.

You can make some money

I used the Pay What You Want Pricing option on Gumroad. So my customers could pay $1, or they could pay however much they liked. I sold 123 copies, and my total revenue was $697. That was nice.

I really enjoyed doing it, and I highly recommend it. Gumroad makes it easy. The rest is up to you.

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