La Viola Ward-Tofani began self-publishing three decades ago. When she was 9, she cobbled together a tome titled “Delicious Dreams” from a collage of construction paper and magazine cutouts. She finished it with a laminating machine and tied the pages with plastic gift wrap string. 

“It’s about a girl who goes to bed hungry, so she thought of all these delicious foods to help her fall asleep,” Ward-Tofani, 38, says.

Ward-Tofani is a full-time licensed professional clinical counselor who works out of Rancho Cordova and grew up in Merced. As a child, books were her escape. 

“I grew up very Pentecostal and super religious, didn’t have a TV and wasn’t allowed a lot of secular anything,” Ward-Tofani says. “I read voraciously. Because I absorbed so much from books, I think naturally I started to create books.”

Much later, when she was an undergraduate at California State University, Stanislaus, Ward-Tofani approached publishing the traditional way. She sent her ideas for children’s books to publishers without an agent or literary manager to guide her. They were universally rejected.     

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I sent them off in manila envelopes,” she says. “They were very kind about it and said it’s very hard to market rhyming books. They said, ‘Make sure you have an agent, and good luck.’”

The rejections devastated Ward-Tofani, and she didn’t write for years.  

And then the pandemic hit, during which Ward-Tofani got married, had her daughter Roma and went on maternity leave. 

“Out of desperation, I needed to do something creative,” she says. 

She pulled out the original copy of “Delicious Dreams,” which she’d held onto for over 20 years, and said to herself, “I can turn this into an actual book that people would buy.”

The hungry little girl didn’t have a name in the initial tale. In this next version, she would. 

“I have my little daughter, Roma; I could make this her story,” Ward-Tofani says.

Today “Delicious Dreams” is one of seven children’s books Ward-Tofani has self-published through Amazon’s platform Kindle Direct Publishing, or KDP, since 2021. 

For every $10 paperback sold, Ward-Tofani gets $8.50, and Amazon gets the rest. The Kindle version costs $2.99. She says she gets about half of that but has yet to keep track of how much money she’s made on the endeavor. She admits she needs to get out more as an author and is still held back by the fear of criticism and rejection.

“I think that keeps most creatives from branching out to try to sell or do anything outside themselves. You don’t want people to tell you no,” Ward-Tofani says. “Nobody thinks, ‘Well, I’m great; they just can’t use this right now.’”

As a therapist, Ward-Tofani recognizes the irony that she should take the advice she might give to a client in the same situation. 

“I would absolutely encourage them to go out,” she says, “I’d say ‘You have applied all of this love and care. The hesitation you have is because you are passionate about these things. Don’t they deserve to be shared with the world?’”

A DIY approach

Ward-Tofani is one of many local authors who’ve taken their creative fate into their own hands by writing, publishing and marketing their books without a traditional publishing model. And, in an age dominated by DIY and self-marketing, she says it makes sense.

“I think Gen Z, the generation after me, they have mastered taking out the middleman,” Ward-Tofani says. “There is no reason to pay an outside entity to do what you want to do.”

Ruby Sketchley lives in Oak Park and writes under the name of Rhys Shaw. Like Ward-Tofani, Sketchley, 63, was inspired to start her self-publishing journey during the pandemic.

“In 2020, I decided that a story I’d been working on over the years that had come from me out of a dream. I was just going to make it into a book just for me. I’ve never written a full-length novel,” Sketchley says. “I’ve written shorts. I’m going to write a book.”

A book became four, and this became “The Welexia Series,” which Sketchley also published under KPD. Amazon lists the books as “historical fantasy,” but Sketchley says the series is more like historical fiction. 

“I don’t have dragons,” she says.

Sketchley, a local actor, took an extra step. She recorded the audiobook of the first book in the series, “Someone’s Daughter: Will to Survive,” at the home recording setup of a friend who hosts a podcast. 

Sketchley’s husband David, a professional editor, edited the audio. She says that if she had hired a voice actor and audio editor, it would have cost $5,000 to do the one book.

“There’s something nice about that,” she says. “There’s something nice about ‘I’m doing the work.’”

Sketchley says it never even occurred to her to try the traditional publishing route.

“I never did. It didn’t even occur to me to try. I think because I was initially going to write one book just for me. Also, if I think about it, as an actor, auditioning is constantly setting yourself up for success or rejection,” she says.

Sketchley estimates she’s put around $6,400 into her self-publishing journey, and about $1,300 has returned her way. Of the $1,300, she says $632 has come from Kindle Direct Publishing and $74 from Audible. 

“I suppose, from a business perspective, being a self-published author might look quite expensive,” Sketchley says. “However, the joy and mental health positivity I get from writing is priceless. I’ll stick with it. One day, I will make a profit.”

A place on the shelf

You can find paperback copies of “The Welexia Series” at Crawford’s Books in South Sacramento where the owner, Sue Richards, carries many local authors on consignment. 

“Depending on space, I usually carry books for six to 12 months,” Richards says. “If they sell, they get a check. If not, not so much.”

She says the relationship between the self-published author and independent bookstore is valuable.

“It’s really their one opportunity to get their books in front of people in an age where a lot of people shop for books online, and you’re competing with the bestsellers and publishing houses that spend a lot of money on marketing,” Richards says, “It’s hard to break into that.”

Richard’s advice to the aspiring self-published author is simple: “You have to be willing to hustle and get your name out there.”

Putting in the footwork

Ashley Shult Langdon’s “Mildly Scenic, A Trail Guide to Sacramento’s Lower American River,” came out mid-May, published through IngramSpark. According to their website, IngramSpark is an online self-publishing company that allows you to print, distribute globally, and manage your print and ebooks. As the name suggests, it falls under their Travel/Hiking category.

Langdon chose to avoid the traditional publishing route for a variety of reasons.

“I was worried going through a third party would slow the project down another year at least and bring in a level of fact-checking and scrutiny to whether I was legitimate enough to write this trail guide for Sac,” Langdon says. “DIY keeps it less ‘official,’ but also more unique. I prefer to be on the fringe of mainstream, and doing it on my own just felt right to me. It’s more fun too.”

“Mildly Scenic” is the “first-of-its-kind American River trail guide,” according to its press release, and in just over two months, Langdon says she’s sold around 1,000 copies. She’s still waiting on her first check from Ingram, but she expects one around the 90-day mark.

“It has never been about the profit to me. This was never a business venture. It’s kind of become one. The whole purpose of this has been to provide a tool for the community of Sac that wasn’t there before,” Langdon says.

According to wordsrated.com, the average self-published book sells 250 copies, and 90 percent of self-published books sell less than 100 copies, which means that Langdon has already bucked a handful of self-publishing trends. Perhaps that’s because she’s done exceptionally well on what Richards says makes an excellent local author: She’s hustled.

Langdon, 44, has a go-getter’s background. Before she left her job early in the pandemic to care for her two young sons, Langdon was a West Coast Admissions Officer with The Experiment in International Living and had spent over a decade in the nonprofit space.

“When I was working at The Experiment, and I would go and do presentations for nonprofits, I’d have to set it all up and find someone to welcome me in, an entry point,” Langdon says. “When I would get to the gigs at the schools, I’d get anywhere from two to 30 minutes to get my message out about how cool it is to study abroad to a bunch of bored college students.”

She says her works with nonprofits and “Mildly Scenic” have one striking similarity: They are both mission-driven.

In the fall of 2022, Langdon started an Instagram account on Sabrina Nishijima’s recommendation. Nishijima owns East Village Bookshop in McKinley Park and is the self-published author of  “1001 Things To Do In Sacramento With Kids.” 

Nishijima says she acted like a cheerleader and answered Langdon’s self-publishing questions as Langdon was writing and marketing the book.

“I can see that small press and self-published authors who take control of their publicity and marketing are the ones who do well with book sales,” Nishijima says. “I think there are more ways than ever to promote your book on various social media channels and gain an audience and following within a matter of months if the book fills a need out there.”

Langdon says she quickly found Instagram fun to use as a visual medium through photos and Nishijima recommended Langdon also post about the writing process. 

“At that point, my writing process was a laptop in a cafe,” Langdon says. “The interest level kept growing. Not only were people excited about the river, but my book posts and anything about the process of writing were the most interesting.”

Langdon started a website through Squarespace with an integrated platform with Printful for merchandise. 

“You basically just slap your logo on anything you want, a T-shirt, a sticker, a hat, at no cost to me,” she says.

Langdon hustled her own press and appeared on CapRadio’s “Insight.” She hosted a book launch at Sac Yard Community Tap House with Wild Sisters Book Co. The “Visit Sacramento Podcast” featured her, and Molly Riehl of “Molly Riehl’s Adventures,” a segment on “Good Day Sacramento,” found “Mildly Scenic” on Instagram and reached out.

“I was going to reach out to Molly, but she beat me to it!” Langdon says. 

Barely three months after her publishing date, Langdon could write a book on how to hustle and get your name out there as a local author. She sort of already has; she’s kept track of everything “Mildly Scenic” in a black notebook, which includes to-do lists, drawings and hand-written calendars. It’s like a trail guide of her four-year self-publishing journey.

“The whole reason I had all this information is because I like to get outside, exploring trails and playing with my kids. It’s not because I like to build a website necessarily or crunch the numbers,” Langdon says as she flips through her notebook at her kitchen table in East Sac. “Every single step of this is something I’ve never done before.”
    

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