FROM ASTERROW • AUTHOR NOTE

I went into a publishing webinar looking for the things I might not know yet. I found a sales pitch, a few genuinely useful ideas, and another reminder of just how expensive getting a book into the world can become.

I Went Because I Am Still Learning This

I recently attended a webinar hosted by Spines Publishing, mostly because I am still trying to learn as much about publishing as I can while building Asterrow Books and getting my own work out into the world. I am doing most of this solo dolo. That means writing the stories, editing them, designing covers, figuring out typesetting, learning distribution, building the website, understanding metadata, working out marketing, and dealing with a whole collection of things I did not know were part of becoming an author when I first started writing.

That has left me with a question that comes up pretty often: what do I not know yet?

That was the reason I signed up. I was not really looking for somebody to publish my book for me, and I was not going into the webinar expecting some magical answer to everything. I wanted to hear how another company approached publishing in 2026 and see whether they might mention something I had overlooked. When you are learning an industry largely from the outside, sometimes you have to sit in rooms like that just to hear the vocabulary, see how people package the process, and figure out what pieces actually apply to you.

What I got was, unsurprisingly, a webinar designed to sell a product. I expected that. Spines is a publishing company offering publishing services, so of course their presentation was eventually going to lead toward what they could do for an author and what those services cost. I do not really hold that against them. What interested me was everything surrounding the sale.

The packages shown during the presentation ranged from a little over $3,000 to almost $6,000. The three options displayed were $3,115, $4,717, and $5,892, and those packages bundled together different parts of the publishing process. Depending on the level, that could include things like editing, proofreading, cover design, audiobook production, translation, distribution, marketing support, and other services meant to take a manuscript closer to a finished commercial book.

Seeing those prices brought me right back to something I have talked about before: writing a book and publishing a book are two very different financial experiences.

You can write a story for almost nothing beyond your time, your computer, your software, or whatever else you use to actually put words on the page. Once you decide that story needs to become a professional book, though, the expenses start stacking up. Editing costs money. Proofreading costs money. Cover design costs money. Typesetting can cost money. Audiobook production can cost a lot of money. Marketing has its own budget. Translation is another specialized service. Even after all of that, you still have distribution decisions, proofs, revisions, advertising, and whatever else comes with trying to convince somebody who has never heard of you to take a chance on your story.

I understand why those services cost what they do because there are people doing actual work behind them. My problem has never been believing that editors, designers, translators, narrators, or other professionals deserve to be paid. They absolutely do. My problem is that the cost of accessing all of those things can become a barrier between a writer and the simple act of putting their story in front of readers.

For somebody with $5,000 or $6,000 available who wants assistance handling the process, one of these packages might make sense. There is something valuable about being able to hand parts of the production process to people who already know what they are doing. That just is not where I am financially, and more importantly, it is not necessarily where I need to be because I already do a lot of that work myself.

I make my own covers. I handle a lot of my own editing because hiring an editor at every stage is not something I can afford right now. I do my own typesetting. I have graphic design experience. I have been learning the production side while building Asterrow itself. Paying several thousand dollars for a package that includes a lot of work I can already perform changes the value of that package for me considerably.

The question for me is not whether professional publishing services have value. It is whether I need to pay somebody else to do every part of the process.

Translation Was the Part That Made Me Think

There was information in the webinar that I genuinely found useful, and one of the biggest things was the discussion around translations. That is something I had not been thinking about nearly enough.

When English is your primary language, it is very easy to think of releasing the English edition as simply releasing the book. You write the story in English, publish it in English, and then start trying to find readers. What the presentation made me think about is how many potential readers never really enter that equation if you stop there. Spanish is an obvious example. There is a massive population of readers who primarily read in Spanish, and if your book only exists in English, you are simply not giving those people the same opportunity to discover it.

That does not mean I am about to dump Hunter’s Eye: Alive Pays Better into an automatic translator and release whatever comes out the other side. Translation, especially with fiction, has to be treated like part of the editorial process. Voice matters too much. Dialogue matters. Rhythm matters. Meaning can change depending on how something is phrased, and a story like Alive Pays Better has its own vocabulary, setting, names, and Western voice that I would want preserved properly.

What changed is that translation moved much further up my mental list of things an independent publisher should eventually think about. Before the webinar, I considered translation something that might happen much later if a book became successful enough to justify it. Now I see it more as another potential avenue for reaching readers, something worth considering as part of a title’s longer life instead of treating the English edition as the only edition that matters.

That was information I went there hoping to find: not necessarily an answer, but something that made me reconsider part of my own process.

I Had Been Overthinking Book Trailers

The other thing that stuck with me was their example of a book trailer. I have thought about trailers for Asterrow before, but somewhere along the way I had built the idea into something much bigger in my head than it really needed to be.

The trailer they showed was essentially a sequence of clips that suggested the story and its mood, eventually leading into the book itself. It was not trying to recreate the entire novel. It was not a miniature movie adaptation. It was just enough visual storytelling to give someone a feeling for the book.

That made me realize I had been overthinking it.

I can do something with that idea, especially because I already have a particular visual direction I like. I have always liked parallax animation and the way layered artwork can be given depth through subtle movement. There is something almost painterly about it when it is done well. A still image can become a landscape. Fog can shift. A foreground can move separately from the background. Light can change. A character can remain almost completely still while the world around them feels alive.

That feels much closer to Asterrow than simply assembling random stock footage.

I can imagine Alive Pays Better presented that way: the prairie, the Greyspine Mountains, the moon, Gwyon’s silhouette, the glow of the Hunter’s Eye, pieces of the environment moving just enough to create depth while sound and restrained text carry the rest. That could eventually become a recognizable style for Asterrow trailers instead of every book getting a completely unrelated marketing video.

I probably would not have arrived at that idea when I did if I had not watched their example. The webinar did not give me the finished answer, but it made the problem look simpler, and sometimes that is just as useful.

One of the larger marketing draws in the presentation was the possibility of putting a book on advertising in Times Square. I understand why that works as part of the pitch. Seeing your book enormous in Times Square sounds incredible. If somebody put Alive Pays Better up there tomorrow, I would absolutely take a ridiculous number of pictures of it.

It just did not make me want to spend nearly $6,000.

That kind of thing is cool, but I have become increasingly interested in separating something that looks impressive from something that actually helps me build a readership. Maybe a Times Square advertisement does both. Maybe it does not. Either way, I would want to know exactly what I was paying for and why before treating the spectacle itself as proof that I needed the package.

My immediate thought while watching was that if I ever decided a Times Square billboard was genuinely useful for one of my books, I would probably start by figuring out who actually controls the advertising space and what it costs to purchase placement directly.

That is becoming a recurring part of how I approach publishing. Before paying someone to solve a problem for me, I want to understand the problem.

There Is Something Interesting About What Spines Is Doing

I also do not want to make it sound like I walked away thinking Spines itself was a bad idea. In a certain sense, I actually understand exactly where something like this fits. One of the hardest parts about becoming an author without already knowing somebody in publishing is simply figuring out where to go next. You finish the manuscript and suddenly there are twenty different jobs attached to turning it into a book. Spines is trying to give somebody a route through all of that.

The biggest drawback to me is still the upfront cost. Three, four, five, or nearly six thousand dollars is a serious amount of money, especially for an author who may be publishing their first book and has no idea whether that book is going to make any of that money back. At the same time, I think there is something bold about the way they are approaching the problem. They are not really presenting themselves like a traditional publisher, and they are not exactly asking an author to figure out every piece of independent publishing alone either. It sits somewhere in the middle.

Their approach to AI was interesting for the same reason. AI in writing and publishing is obviously controversial, but they were not presenting it as a replacement for the author. If anything, one of the things they stressed was that these tools should not replace your authorial voice. Their position seemed much closer to using AI for coming up with Ideas and brainstorming in the publishing process rather than handing your actual storytelling over to it.

That distinction matters because we are already living in a world where these tools exist whether publishing is comfortable with them or not. You can make pieces of a book commercial with tools like Seedance or Veo. There are services claiming they can take a manuscript, edit it, format it, prepare it for print and Kindle, or even help generate an entire book in minutes. Some of those claims deserve a raised eyebrow, but the larger point is that the technology is already changing what one person can attempt to do.

Spines seems to be embracing that future without completely throwing away the things that make publishing worth doing in the first place. There are still editors, designers, production decisions, marketing decisions, and, most importantly, an author whose voice is supposed to remain at the center of the work.

I think that is probably the part of their model I found most interesting. It is unconventional compared with the publishing system most of us grew up hearing about, but it is also responding to a very real problem. There are authors who have written a book, have no idea what comes next, and would gladly pay somebody to give them a clear road from manuscript to finished release.

For those authors, I can see the appeal.

For me, the question is simply whether that convenience is worth the price when I already know how to handle a large part of the road myself.

I Left With More Confidence in What I Am Building

I did not leave the webinar wanting to buy a publishing package, but I also do not think that means attending it was a waste of time. I learned something about translation that changed how I think about reaching readers. I came away with a much clearer idea of how I could approach book trailers. I got another look at how a publishing company divides and sells the different parts of the production process. I also got another reminder that the skills I already have are saving me a significant amount of money while I build Asterrow Books.

There are parts of this process I will eventually want other people involved in. I want professional editors involved when the budget allows it. A real literary translation should be handled by somebody who understands both languages and understands fiction. Audiobook production has its own specialists. There are things I can learn to do myself, things I already know how to do, and things where bringing in somebody better suited to the job will eventually make the book stronger.

Learning the difference between those three has probably been one of the most important parts of becoming an independent publisher.

I am not interested in doing everything myself simply so I can say that I did. I am interested in understanding enough of the process that when I do spend money, I know why I am spending it. If I am going to put thousands of dollars behind a book, I want that money going toward the places where it genuinely improves the story, the product, or its chances of finding the people who might love it.

So no, the webinar did not convince me to spend $3,000 to $6,000 on a publishing package.

It did give me a few ideas I intend to use.

For something I attended because I was wondering what I might not know yet, that is enough.