HOW TO GET PUBLISHED

It has never been easier to get your own story into print. Michael Donaldson looks at the rise — and some of the pitfalls — of self-publishing.

The 1976 Kiwi hockey team at the Olympic Games in Montreal.

The family story you’ve always meant to write, that set of poems you penned as an angstridden teenager and the history of your local sports club — if you think there’s an audience waiting on your words now is the time.

Self-publishing has never been easier — or cheaper — and hundreds of us are taking the opportunity to tell stories that in the past would not have made it past a publisher’s rejection tray. Modern self-publishing — a far cry from vanity publishing — is usually about pursuing a passion a major publishing company wouldn’t dare take a risk on.

For years, David Appleby believed there was an untold story about the New Zealand hockey team that won gold at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Appleby could have been in that team but pursued his accounting career rather than risk his job for what was then an amateur pursuit.

Four decades on he was able to indulge his passion, self-publishing the hugely successful Striking Gold.

“I was totally foreign to publishing but I thought there was an untold story about the guys and their achievement — and there was a need for a legacy document to be put in place while they were all still alive,” Appleby says.

Three years ago Appleby hired Auckland journalist Suzanne McFadden to write the story. The rest of the journey unfolded by chance. He bumped into Geoff Walker — former publishing director at Penguin — and over a coffee gleaned as much information as he could.

Walker acted as a consultant and introduced Appleby to independent publisher Mary Egan, who became the project director — organising the proof reading, design and the printing of the book in China. Peter Greenberg was hired as a distributor and Appleby picked up an independent marketing person to help generate publicity.

That added to the cost and even though the bulk of the 3000 print run was sold, Appleby didn’t make any money.

“I never intended it to be a profit-making exercise. We got good sales to a small target market — but you wouldn’t want to do it for a living. The numbers don’t stack up — but I’m really happy we’ve created a legacy document.

“And as [ team member] Ramesh Patel said to me — if you don’t sell any books at least you’ve made 16 people happy.”

Appleby realises how lucky he is to have met Walker, saying if he’d known what was involved before he started he may have been put off.

That’s something Professor Grant Schofield can relate to.

Schofield, with co-authors, dietician Caryn Zinn and chef Craig Rodger, self-published his runaway success cookbook What the Fat?

Schofield was determined to self-publish the book — which espouses a high-fat, low- carbohydrate diet — after a negative experience with a publishing company. He and former All Blacks skipper Buck Shelford co-authored a men’s health book, Buck Up, for Penguin.

“First of all you give away all your intellectual property to the publisher, which seems wrong at every level, then they rely on you to promote it. And I wanted an ebook but they were against it,” Schofield lamented.

“I kept thinking, ‘ I know better than this’ and then I was like, ‘ Oh, get serious, these guys have been in it for years and they know best.’ But sometimes being in something for years when things change rapidly puts you in the worst possible position.”

Schofield was spurred to do his book to sell the controversial science he believes in passionately.

“I ’d been working in this high-fat, low-carb nutrition space and everyone was just smashing it to bits, saying, ‘ It ’s not right, it ’s not right’ — or saying, ‘ People will just eat KFC or fish’n’chips’. So I wanted to put it out there properly and I thought: ‘ Why don’t we just do it ourselves?’

“People say you should plan and know all this stuff but, frankly, not knowing what you don’t know is sometimes a good thing, otherwise you wouldn’t even start. Should I have found out more before I started? Probably — but it might have been too scary.”

Schofield admits he and his team made errors — the design and photography could be better — and he wishes they’d taken a leaf out of Annabel Langbein’s recipe books.

“In terms of writing recipes Annabel Langbein does it superbly.