Who We Are

Publish Yourself Online takes the stress and worry out of self-publishing with its publishing house Humble Journey Publishing. Our goal is to put “vanity presses” out of businesses by helping new authors to publish their books without being scammed.

Company founder, Sian Ceinwen, is an internationally best-selling self-published author. She was inspired to start the company after a relative told her they spent $8,000 to publish a 48-page book with a well-known vanity press.

Having spent years in the book world, she knows how to go about getting a book published and wants to help as many people as she can to avoid being scammed.

Our Goal

Our goal is to guide authors through their publishing journey in an honest and transparent way. We will find cover designers and editors within your chosen budget to make your book baby into a book you can be proud of. All book formatting is done in-house using Vellum for a fee of $100. This includes all future revisions after publication of less than 10% of the book. Any revisions that are more than 10% of the book will cost another $100.

Publish Yourself Online’s fee is 15% on top of your chosen services, not some arbitrary figure pulled out of thin air. We will also take 15% of your share of the royalties (not 15% of the total!).

You will be provided with a copy of all invoices from our suppliers as part of us being transparent with you about costs.

If you choose to “cut out the middleman” and go directly to them in future, we are so happy for you to do that and proud of you for moving forward with your newfound confidence in publishing. Our goal is purely to avoid new authors falling into the vanity press trap.

What does this look like for you?

Here is an example of the cost for a 50,000-word book:

• Editing - $0.05 per word ($2,500 total)

• Cover - $500

• Formatting - $100

• Total costs - $3,100

• PYO 15% fee - $465

Author cost - $3,565

These figures are flexible and depend on which service providers you choose to use. Covers that are more detailed and time consuming to make cost more because cover designers are worth their weight in gold! By the same token, I know some very beautiful and talented cover designers who can do whole cover packages for $250 or less.

We will work with you to make sure you’re happy with the end result, because that’s what it’s all about.

“Never pay someone to publish your book!”

While this is true with traditional publishing, self-publishing is a different beast. Traditionally, publishing houses bore all of the costs of publishing a book in exchange for your soul almost all of the profits of that book.

Authors were generally royally screwed by the industry. For every massively successful author, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of authors who either never saw a profit from their books or received very little.

When self-publishing came along, the barrier to entry for publishing a book was essentially obliterated. You no longer needed to impress some stuffy gatekeeper at a publishing house to get your book into the world.

You do need some things, though. A cover, editing, formatting, and an ISBN. These are necessary for your book to be sold anywhere.

Along came “vanity presses” who were more than happy to organise these things for you… for a price. With vague promises of bestseller lists and preying on the dreams of thousands of authors, they’re arguably worse than traditional publishers. At least traditional publishers didn’t take the author’s money! If a book didn’t earn out its advance, they just didn’t publish that author again. The author was rarely required to even pay the advance back.

Vanity presses are designed to charge you as much as they possibly can at every single turn because that’s how they make their money.

Do you remember Sian’s family member who paid $8,000 to publish their book? Publishing with us using the example numbers above would have cost them a mere $1,380 instead.

What about royalties?

Once again, this is dependent on the size of your book (both its physical size and its page count!), but a standard format for books is roughly 250 words per page.

Which means for our 50,000-word book example, that would be 200 pages. Let’s allow 10 extra pages for front and back matter (don’t worry, we’ll explain that to you when we publish your book!). So we have a total of 210 black and white pages.

Amazon pays 60% royalties for print books and 70% royalties for ebooks.

Paperback

• List price - $9.99

• Print cost - $3.52

• Proceeds from sale - $6.47

• 60% royalties - $3.88

• PYO 15% fee - $0.58

Author royalties - $3.30

Ebook

• List price - $4.99

• Delivery fee - $0.30 (depends on the size of the ebook file)

• Proceeds from sale - $4.69

• 70% royalties - $3.28

• PYO 15% fee - $0.49

Author royalties - $2.79

What is your stance on the use of AI?

Publish Yourself Online is very proud to confirm that we do not condone the use of artificial intelligence in any of our work, nor will we stand for it from any of our service providers. If we find that either an author or any of our services providers are using AI in either their books or their work provided to us, we will cut ties with them immediately.

Books are a work of art like any other and we only believe in associating ourselves with human created art. As AI art becomes more and more indistinguishable from human art, we will be less and less inclined to work with new artists unless they have been thoroughly vetted or have proven themselves trustworthy.

If you are an editor, proof reader, or cover designer who wishes to work with us, please complete the form below and provide references from other authors who have worked with you in the past.

Make your dream book a reality!

If you have a book you want to get published, we want to help you do that. If you know someone who is talking about how they’ve been offered some amazing deal by a publisher who wants them to pay some exorbitant amount to publish their book, send them to this page.

If all you do is read this and learn to be wary of vanity presses, then our work here is done!

If you want to publish with us, fill out the form below and get started on making your dream come true!