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I can do my best to explain it to you by my experience in self-publishing. 🙂
So once I was finished with the long and tedious editing process of my novel, I researched the best possible free e-book publishing companies out there. I went ahead and choose to use Booktango because they offered 100% royalties of all sale made on their site. And because their publishing system was super-duper easy. All I had to do was upload my manuscript to the processor on their site and fix all the messed up spacing (the site notified me of these) and then I could upload the cover file I made for the book and fill out the needed information. (author name, book title, synopsis, author bio) and it was then literally ready to be published.
I was also able to set up how I wanted to be paid by Booktango when my book sold. (either by direct deposit into a bank account or they’ll send you a check by mail) And they required me to fill out some tax information. After that was all taken care of my book was out there on the market, including hubs like Amazon and Barnes&Noble.
But alas this is only really the beginning of self-publishing because when I published it, I wasn’t really prepared to market the book. I just wanted to say I was published. 🙂
So if you have more specific questions, please ask. I hope this was a bit helpful.It’s pretty much you doing all the work to get your book out there and known. But it has some wonderful benefits, such as being able to make all the decisions and work at the pace you can to get the book ready for publishing!
https://rolenahatfield.com/
You do everything or contract what you want, you have complete control of everything, you can do whatever you want, you make or break yourself and all of your mistakes and all of your victories rest on you. It is an incredible opportunity. A little scary, but the opportunities for success are way broader than the opportunities for failure. The worst that could happen is nothing. Then you might have $0-$600ish dollars lost depending on how much you spent on a cover, formatting, marketing, etc. That however, is not a very high price to pay for learning many valuable lessons that will give you a way better chance of success later on. On the other hand, with self-publishing, the sky is your limit. Many authors do earn hundreds of thousands of dollars self-publishing. And I’ll tell you one thing – they’re not just lucky. They know their craft. They know how to write well. They know what makes an eye catching cover, what makes a mouth watering book description, how to maximize their marketing budget, how to manipulate Amazon’s algorithms to make their book show up everywhere, how to convert readers into fans. If you’re interested in self-publishing, what I would say is look at the people who do really well at it and see what they have to say. One of the great things about self publishing is that the royalties are about 70% for an ebook compared to maybe 10% which is what you might get with a traditional publisher.
With self publishing you never hand over your rights to a publisher. Sometimes publishers will take your right to self publish your book even in a country they are not marketing to. They might not let you make an audio version of your book. They very well might even take your copyright if you are not wary and in that case they can rewrite your book if they want to without your permission. You may have no control over cover design or font or anything. Of course, there are traditional publishers that will give you a lot more control over others, but I know of none that will give you full rights. Full rights means you own your book completely – you can do anything with it.
It does not mean that you have to print your on books. There are companies that will print your book and ship it to whoever ordered it for you. They have a base line for how much they earn on the book and however much you up-price it from there is how much profit you will make. As for e-books, you can publish those yourself by uploading your e-book to all the online realtors (Amazon, Kobo, ibooks, Google play, B&N). You can use an e-book publishing company like Rolena talked about, but there is absolutely no need to. In fact, I would tend to be wary of them. They have to earn money somehow. That doesn’t mean they’re dishonest. They might not harm your business in any way and they may save you some time, but there is nothing they can do that you can’t do yourself better. Personally, I would recommend doing everything yourself or having it done by a pro.
There are really limitless possibilities with self-publishing. Limitless. You could have your book translated and publish it in india. You could sell the right to publish your book to a publishing company in Russia and continue to sell your self published book to the rest of the world. You can turn your book into an audio book, a movie, a play. You can change the title, change the cover. It’s your’s.
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Thank you so much, @rolena-hatfield and @daeus! Now I have two questions. How do you market/advertise your book? And what is the difference between a e-book realtor and an e-book publisher?
Oh, and another thing. I’m not an artist. If I self-publish a book, how do I get the cover designed?@sarah-h
First of all, the difference between a publisher and a realtor. A publisher is a person or company that turns your text document into a book. an e-book publisher is just like a traditional publisher except that they have far less work to do. A realtor is basically just a book store, except for e-book realtors, they are an online book store. If you have an apple device, you probably have this application called ibooks. On that you can buy books from the ibook store and read them on the application. It is the same with a kindle which is made by Amazon. Both Amazon and ibooks are are book realtors. Amazon however, rules them all. Amazon will almost always get you the most sales.Next, for the cover design, using images and a software that will let you play with them, you can design your own cover. The only problem is, unless you really have a talent at it, you almost certainly won’t come up with something as good as a pro would. The other option is to pay a professional book cover designer. Their prices can vary. You may feel adverse to paying someone for a cover, but it has been shown time and time again that a great book cover can dramatically increase sales. If you really don’t want to pay someone, you may be able to find a friend with the necessary skills who would be willing to do it for you or you could just keep tinkering around until you come up with something that others agree is great quality.
Finally, marketing. I saved this one for last for a reason. It is a much broader subject than the last two. What I am going to attempt to do is almost funny. I’m going to try to take everything I’ve learned from a webinar, an online course, and about 8 books on the subject and try to condense them all into one small cheat sheet. *deep breath* Here goes!
Let’s approach this step by step. What are the steps we need to take (or need others to take)? They are the following:
1.Create an awesome story that will make people want to read your next book.
2.Get as many people as possible to see that your book exists.
3.Get as many of those people as possible to look at your book and give it a consideration.
4.Convince as many of those people as possible that your book is going to be fantastic and they need to buy it – and that they need to do so right away.
5.Get as many of the people who bought your book as possible to sign up for your email list so you can develop them into fans and let them know when your next book is out.
6.Get as many of the people who bought your book as possible to leave a review and generally share with others that they liked your book.
7.Approach your email list with a careful plan to keep your subscribers interested but not to overfill their inbox or annoy them. Have them interact with you, tell them how your writing is coming, tell them when a book you think they’ll love is on sale, give them free stuff, etc. Don’t let them forget about you by emailing too often or get annoyed by emailing too often. Email maybe twice a month.
8.When your next book comes out get as many people from your email list as possible to buy your book and share it with others.
9.Finally, always always look for new ways to grow your email list with new quality subscribers.Ok, I’m getting called away now and won’t be back for a bit, but I’m not planing to leave you there. I just told you (actually quite shortly to my pleasure) what to do to market a book and even more yourself as an author. When I come back, I will talk about how to do that – how to do everything on the above list. I will also share helpful resources. Ok, really gotta go.
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Ok, now for the explanation. I’ll skip number one, because that is mainly what we always talk about here. Here we go.
2.Get as many people as possible to see that your book exists.
This is the subject of what we call “visibility”. There are three-ish ways to get visibility. One is by promoting the book yourself by emailing your friends, doing guest blogging on the subject of your book and finishing up with talking about your book (though mainly this is used for non-fiction), Telling a random hobo about your book, etc. The second way is to get ads. You can use programs to put banner ads on websites where readers are, you can use amazon ads which can be pretty targeted, you can do Facebook ads, twitter ads, any ads. There are also companies that will promote your book specifically to avid readers. Some of these are junk, some of them work well but on a small scale (it might cost you $15 to sell 70 books say), and some of them work amazingly well. Bookbub is the king of these companies right now and probably will be for at least a couple years. Bookbub is expensive and can be hard to get into, but it is almost guaranteed that your promotion with them will pay itself off. One promotion from then can literally sell you thousands of books (depending on the genre and price). If your book is free, you may get tens of thousands of downloads. The last way to get visibility is through the online realtors themselves. How you get them to show your book to people is by these methods: Sell tons of books in a short period (but not all in one day), choose categories that are well read but not too competitive, get as many good legitimate reviews as possible, and perhaps most importantly, use and overuse meticulously chosen keywords. These techniques will get you the most success with Amazon, but will help with the others. One of the best ways to get good visibility outside of Amazon is by publishing a permafree book and being patient. For further reading, see Let’s Get Visible and Supercharge Your Kindle Sales.
3.Get as many of those people as possible to look at your book and give it a consideration.
People may see your book just browsing, but they have to click on the link to actually go see your book page, otherwise there is now way they can buy it. To do this with ads, you need to target your ads and be specific about what type of book you wrote. Amazon will tend to show your book to people who will already be interested, so your main job there is to make the most of that visibility. You do that by having an amazing cover and by having good reviews. That is why a good cover is so important. People may see your book a million times but never be interested in it if the cover does’t attract their attention.
4.Convince as many of those people as possible that your book is going to be fantastic and they need to buy it – and that they need to do so right away.
You do this by having a great cover and good reviews as well, but you also do it by having a good book description. Spend a lot of time perfecting your book description and make it enticing. Finally, people can now read the first 10% of your book on Amazon with no fee. That’s what e-readers do. If the first part isn’t great, they won’t keep reading, so make that first 10% gets the plot moving quickly.
5.Get as many of the people who bought your book as possible to sign up for your email list so you can develop them into fans and let them know when your next book is out.
To do this, you must give them a clear inciting reason to join your mailing list. Perhaps the best way to do this (and the method I plan to use) is to offer them a free book of yours if they join your mailing list. Make sure you place this eye grabbing offer at the front and back for your books.
6.Get as many of the people who bought your book as possible to leave a review and generally share with others that they liked your book.
There is one perfect way to get them to do this. You ask them! Really, it works. More than that though, you must make it as easy as possible for them. Always always make the steps you want people to take easy. This means if you want a review, when you ask for one, provide the link so they can go do it right away without any searching.
7.Approach your email list with a careful plan to keep your subscribers interested but not to overfill their inbox or annoy them. Have them interact with you, tell them how your writing is coming, tell them when a book you think they’ll love is on sale, give them free stuff, etc. Don’t let them forget about you by emailing too often or get annoyed by emailing too often. Email maybe twice a month.
Well, I pretty much explained how to do that, but I’ll go into a little more detail. Don’t make your messages too long. Always show care for them but also regularly let them know how you are doing. Don’t ask too much of them, but getting them involved in what you are doing will turn them into a fan really quick. Make sure they are a part of things, but make sure their part is really simple and easy. For instance, if you have two different covers for your new book that’s coming out, ask your subscribers which one they like best. That is easy for them and gives them the sense that they contributed to your book. I’ll tell you, whenever I contribute to something, I am way more tied to it. Also deals, whatever deals you can offer them, do. Someone who first joins your mailing list is interested. If you handle that situation rightly, they will become excited.
8.When your next book comes out get as many people from your email list as possible to buy your book and share it with others.
The way to do this is, again! 1.Ask them! 2. Make it as easy as possible for them. The book Book Launch Blueprint covers this topic exceptionally. I would highly recommend it.
9.Finally, always always look for new ways to grow your email list with new quality subscribers.
Once you have got your author business going, this is the number one thing that will explode it to success. I am currently taking an online course on this subject. It is called “Serious Email List Building For Authors”. This course is fantastic. I’ll try to summarize it, though this will not do it full justice.
On the financial side of things, what you have to do is earn as much money off of your subscribers in the least amount of time possible and acquire those subscribers at a low rate. If you can do that, you can then reinvest that money into acquiring more subscribers and you can expand things almost limitlessly. On the practical side of things, you need to give people a reason to subscribe and then you need can just pay people to refer others to your landing page where they can subscribe and receive your offer. In the course he talks about how to get the highest quality and goes into detail about the how of getting others to promote your email list. I can’t really explain all of the how, but if you want to learn more about that, that’s the course for you.
So let me finish with a list of top resources:
Supercharge your kindle sales
Reader magnets
Let’s get visible
Serious email list building for authors course
Book launch blueprintThere are a couple other books I have read on the subject. I just listed the top ones here, but the others are worth reading too.
Hopefully I didn’t misspell too much here.
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Wow! Thanks for taking the time to explain all of that to me, @daeus! I’ve heard a lot about self publishing, but I never really understood how it works. It sounds like I need to have several books already written before I start.
@sarah-h Well, at least as you start.
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