The temptation to publish

For me, one of the main advantages of self-publishing on Amazon is that I don't on anyone else, neither publishers nor intermediaries. I can write about whatever I want and know that the next book can be available when I decide it to. It also has its drawbacks, of course. It implies that whatever a publisher would do for you, you either do it yourself or pay someone else to do it. It is not an option that I discard for the future, to try to get a book published so they take care of the revisions, cover design, marketing, but for now, the saga "The Factory of Gods" will be self-published. A couple of things I've learned these days. All that takes time. A lot of time. And dedicating an enormous amount of hours does not guarantee that the result will be the best possible. For example, with cover designs. It is recommended to hire professionals and it there is an obvious reason for that, unless you have special ability for the design or you have a very clear idea of how the cover should be, when you do it by yourself, the result may be good but hardly "very good". The issue of revisions has been on my mind these days. Once I finished the story, reviewed it, the temptation to publish was very great. In spite of using spelling and grammar checkers, I knew that a detailed review of the whole book was still needed. And that would take many hours. I kept telling myself that it wasn't worth it anyway, that it wouldn't matter much if there were any mistakes, but once I went through the whole novel I realized that there were things to fix in at least 1 out of every 3 pages. And that's a lot. It's worthwhile to self-publish but not in any way. Only when you've done everything you think it should be done. Then, yes. Afterwards, the book can have its mistakes, it doesn't matter, you learn from them and the next novel will be better. We are humans, not machines.