1. The exhilarating feeling, you get every time from clicking the publish button on one of the self-publishing platforms you’ve just uploaded your book to, reminds you why you got into this business.
2. You need to keep looking at the sales records in your Amazon KDP account every 5 minutes.
3. If your book sales stop for a day or two, you begin to get anxious. This keeps happening until you finally learn and believe that the publishing industry is seasonal.
4. Writing is your strongest point; however deep down you believe you can do pretty much the whole publishing process yourself including editing, and cover design.
5. When a stranger tells you he/she read your book, you smile slightly, try to hide your pride, usually can’t and hope the person can’t tell how happy he/she has just made you.
6. You dream of your title being number 1 in the Amazon bestseller list in its category.
7. When your book does reach number 1 (or anywhere between 1 and 10) on Amazon, you take a screenshot of it and upload it onto Facebook for all your friends and followers to admire and ‘Like’.
8. You’re obsessed with Twitter and usually tweet and re-tweet messages, morning, noon and night.
9. You have more virtual friends than you have in the real world.
10. You have written books in a series, or have at least considered it.
11. You obsess about getting loads of 5* reviews of your books.
12. When you get a really bad public review of one of your books on an online retail site, you get really hurt and want to lash back, but know that it isn’t professional to do so and somehow hold yourself back.
13. Whenever you feel depressed about an aspect of your writing and/or publishing, you go and hang out on the KBoards forums to write about it, get some sympathy and find posts by others who’ve experienced the same.
14. When you’re doing a free run of your ebook on Amazon, you wish that details of it will be picked up by one of the large book blogs, and result in thousands of downloads.
15. You know that book fairs and writing conferences are good for your career, but you find yourself coming up with excuses about why you can’t attend one coming close to your home
16. Even though you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t need to go down the traditional publishing route, you still believe (at least secretly) that one day you will land a traditional publishing deal.
17. You consider established self-published authors such as Joanna Penn and Dean Wesley Smith to be like God.
18. You love the flexibility of being able to add a new paragraph to your already published book, or remove its existing cover design and replace it with a new one.
19. You dream of one day becoming a true, celebrity self-published author that the entire world adores.
20. Once you actually make a sale of your ebook and book, and realise self-publishing does work, you find yourself catching the entrepreneurial bug.
Image credit: Andy Maguire on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0
Hiten Vyas is the Founder and Managing Editor of eBooks India. He is also a prolific eBook writer with over 25 titles to his name.