Now that you have your manuscript you may wonder what’s the best self publishing companies to hire? Or how to self publish your own book without incurring too much cost?
If you have never self published before let me suggest that you first try your hand at publishing an eBook on Amazon. From there you can migrate to publishing on the other e-reader platforms, like, Barnes and Noble, IBook, Kobo, and eventually to other -e-reader distributors worldwide.
Technically speaking once your book is on Amazon it is available worldwide. But there are many readers with other e-reader devices aside from the Kindle, which is why it’s not a bad idea to distribute to other e-readers.
Once you have finished your e-reader distribution, then it’s time to get your book in the print format. We will discuss how to print your own book in another article.
Certainly books and publishing has been a hot topic these last ten years. With Kindle publishing and Amazon opening the doors for anyone to self publish a book for little cost if you have the know-how there is no excuse not to do it yourself.
There are a few things to keep in mind when you want to self publish.
If you know how to do these 6 easy things you should be able to get published worldwide in as little as a week, and there is no need to pay self publishing gurus thousands or even hundreds of dollars. Your book can be distributed all over the world with just a few clicks of the button. And there’s no need to pay anyone for this.
Self publishing costs these days have plummeted and you should not be using a self publishing house to help you do these simple tasks, such as:
1. How to format your manuscript from a word doc to the Kindle’s.mobi version.
And it’s not as hard as you think. Some software requires you to download onto your computer and they may be free like, Calibre, others are for a small cost like Jutoh.
But I really like the free cloud based software that Draft2Digital provides. I’ve tried a few paid and free services, including Amazon’s KDP converter, but the Draft2Digital is still my favorite. They are a UK company. If you have issues email them and they will get back to you in the morning if you are in the USA.
2. How to set up a website and blog. Because these days you can get one set up for $5 a month or for free, even. No need to pay thousands in developer costs like I did once a upon a time. The technology is simple and free if you know where to look, and how to perform easy drag and drop stuff-similar to copy and pasting on a Word doc.
Some software allows you to build landing pages on your WordPress website, but others like Wix gives you the option to create a landing page even without having to purchase any plugins. I actually created a landing page for my 16 Princess books using Wix, and really like the flexibility this technology gives me. For a non techy I found Wix easy to use. Nothing to download or upload to create the pages to the site.
3. How to get your eBook (mobi format) uploaded onto Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)-a matter of filling forms. Not kidding.
4. How to set up an Amazon Author page so you can direct your readers to it, so they can just click on your name and get to your bio and other website presence you have from your website, to your blog, to your Facebook fan page and all other social media-all from the Amazon book site.
5. How to get your eBook formatted for the other non-Kindle readers-with a click of a button, for free.
6. How to get your eBook distributed worldwide on e-reader bookstores, from Australia, to Italy to Japan and beyond. And with Amazon you can even get your books into libraries in the USA.
With the way things are set up for self publishing all you need these days is a good editor and a cover design. Everything else should not cost you thousands as it did in the past.
But as in everything in life, you must know where to look.
