Self-Publishing Checklist Australia (2026 Guide)

Every time I sit down to publish a book, I go back to the same checklist. Not because self-publishing is a formula — it isn’t — but because there are dozens of small, easy-to-forget steps between “I have a manuscript” and “a reader can buy this,” and missing one of them costs far more time than writing the checklist ever does.

This is that checklist, in full, covering ebook, print-on-demand, and audiobook formats. I’ve broken it into three stages — Creation, Production, and Publication & Distribution — because that’s genuinely how the work unfolds: first the words, then the object, then the release. I’ve also flagged where I bring in outside help, because self-publishing doesn’t mean doing everything yourself. It means being the one who decides what gets outsourced and what doesn’t.

Table of Contents

Self-Publishing Checklist

Stage One: Creation
☐ First draft
☐ Self-developmental edit
☐ External developmental edit
☐ Blurb
☐ Acknowledgements
☐ Audiobook opening/end credit + sample text

Stage Two: Production
☐ Copyedit and proofread (all stories, front/back matter, audiobook text)
☐ Audiobook recording
☐ Audiobook editing
☐ Audiobook accuracy check against manuscript
☐ Audiobook mixing/mastering (external)
☐ Cover design artwork
☐ Font licenses checked and sorted
☐ Interior formatting — print (PDF)
☐ Interior formatting — ebook (EPUB)
☐ Cover formatting — ISBN placement
☐ Cover formatting — IngramSpark print file
☐ Cover formatting — KDP print file
☐ Cover formatting — ebook cover
☐ Cover formatting — audiobook cover

Stage Three: Publication & Distribution
☐ Final external proofread (fully formatted files)
☐ Upload — print: IngramSpark
☐ Upload — print: KDP
☐ Upload — ebook: KDP
☐ Upload — ebook: Draft2Digital
☐ Upload — ebook: Google Play Books
☐ Upload — audiobook: INaudio
☐ Pre-publication pass (metadata, pricing, formatting consistency)
☐ NED (National edeposit) lodgement
☐ ISBN registration — Thorpe-Bowker (each format)
☐ Booklinker universal link
☐ Books2Read universal link
☐ Website book page updated
☐ Google Merchant Centre updated
☐ PLR/ELR registration
☐ Library distributor listing
☐ Copyright.com.au registration
☐ Consignments negotiated (physical stockists)
☐ Release date set
☐ Social media announcement (Facebook, Facebook groups, Twitter, Instagram, Threads)
☐ MailerLite mailing list announcement

Stage one: Creation

This is the stage where the book is still just words — before covers, before formatting, before any of it becomes a physical or sellable thing. It’s the part that can’t be rushed, and the part most tempting to skip past.

First draft. Obvious, but worth naming as its own checklist item, because everything downstream depends on it existing.

Developmental edit. I do this in two passes: a self-developmental edit first, where I read the manuscript with fresh eyes for structure, pacing, and whether the story is actually doing what I meant it to do — and then a final developmental edit of all stories, which I send out externally. This is one of the places I don’t try to be my own editor all the way through. A second set of trained eyes catches what familiarity hides from me.

Blurb. The back-cover copy, written early enough that it can inform the edit rather than being an afterthought bolted on at the end.

Acknowledgements. Short, but it needs a slot on the list or it gets forgotten until the very last proof pass.

Text for audiobook opening credit, end credit, and sample. Easy to overlook if you’re not producing an audiobook from the start, but if audio is part of the plan, this text needs to exist before recording begins.

Stage two: Production

Once the manuscript and its supporting text are in shape, production turns the book into an actual object — or three actual objects, if you’re doing print, ebook, and audio simultaneously.

Copyedit and proofread — everything. All stories, front matter, back matter, and the audiobook text. This is external, every time. Line-level editing is a different skill from developmental editing, and doing your own copyedit on your own book is close to impossible to do well.

Audiobook production. This has its own internal checklist: recording all stories, editing, checking the recording against the manuscript for accuracy, and mixing/mastering — the last of which I also send out externally, because studio-quality sound is a specialised craft.

Cover design artwork. The single most important marketing asset the book will ever have, produced before anyone reads a word.

Format. This is where the checklist gets technical, and where most first-time self-publishers underestimate how many separate deliverables “formatting” actually means:

Font licenses — checked and sorted before anything is finalised, not after
Interior formatting for print (PDF) and ebook (EPUB) — two genuinely different files with different constraints
Cover formatting, which itself branches into: ISBN placement, the print file for IngramSpark, the print file for KDP, the ebook cover, and the audiobook cover

Four platforms, each with their own cover specs, from one piece of artwork.

Stage three: Publication & Distribution

The book is ready. Now it has to actually reach readers — and this stage has the most moving parts of the three, because it’s where a single manuscript becomes listings on half a dozen platforms simultaneously.

Final proofread, external, one last time, on the fully formatted files — because formatting introduces its own errors that a manuscript-stage proofread would never catch.

Upload, across every format and platform:

Print: IngramSpark and KDP. Two separate print-on-demand platforms with their own file specs and account setups — IngramSpark reaches bookstores and libraries through wider distribution, KDP covers Amazon.
Ebook: KDP, Draft2Digital, and Google Play Books. KDP for Amazon, Draft2Digital to reach the retailers it distributes to in one upload (Kobo, Apple Books, and others), and Google Play Books uploaded separately again.
Audiobook: INaudio. The audio distribution platform, uploaded once the recording, editing, and mastering from the production stage are finished.
And a pre-publication pass to make sure everything is staged correctly before it goes live — checking metadata, pricing, and formatting are consistent across every platform before hitting publish, since a mistake caught after release is far harder to fix than one caught before.

Update, the unglamorous administrative layer that keeps everything else functioning:

NED (National edeposit). Legally required lodgement of the book with Australia’s National and State Libraries — easy to forget because it happens behind the scenes, not on a sales platform.
ISBN registration via Thorpe-Bowker (myidentifiers.com.au). Australia’s only ISBN agency. Each format — ebook, paperback, audiobook — needs its own ISBN, so this is really several updates disguised as one line item.
Booklinker. Generates one universal link that redirects readers to the right Amazon store for their country, so I’m not maintaining a dozen different regional links by hand.
Books2Read. Same idea as Booklinker, but across every retailer, not just Amazon — one link that routes to Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, and the rest depending on where the reader is.
The book’s page on the website marketing. Updating the shop listing itself — cover, blurb, buy links, formats available — so it actually matches what’s live on retailers rather than lagging behind.
Google Merchant Centre. Keeps the book’s product data feeding correctly into Google Shopping and search results, which is separate from — and easy to assume is covered by — normal SEO.
PLR/ELR (Public and Educational Lending Rights). Australian government schemes that pay authors small royalties when their books are held in public and educational libraries — registration only pays out if it’s actually done.
Library distributors. Making the book available through the wholesale channels libraries actually order from, which is different from a library simply being able to buy one copy retail.
Copyright.com.au. Registering with Australia’s copyright licensing body, which matters for things like photocopying and educational use permissions down the track.

Consignments, negotiated separately for any physical stockists.

Release, the part everyone thinks of as “publishing day,” but which is really just the last item on a very long list:

Setting the date
Social media — Facebook, Facebook groups, Twitter, Instagram, Threads
MailerLite, for the mailing list announcement

Why write it all down

None of this is complicated in isolation. What makes self-publishing hard isn’t any single step — it’s the number of steps, and the fact that they touch legal registration, technical formatting, creative editing, and marketing all in the same project, often in the same week. A checklist doesn’t make the work smaller. It just means I’m not relying on memory to catch a missed ISBN update three months after launch.

If you’re self-publishing your own book in Australia and want a hand working through any part of this — from developmental editing through to release strategy — that’s exactly what I offer through self-publishing consulting. Book a free 30-minute strategy call and we’ll figure out where you actually need support.

Want the next update before it happens? Sign up to my newsletter.

(Drafted with the help of Claude AI.)