My Journey into Self Publishing

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What is self publishing?

Producing, marketing, and distributing your work yourself is self publishing.

If you have produced a book, short story, collection of poems, any literary work, you are going to want to find an audience. You can go the traditional route of finding a publisher or you can choose to cut out the middle man and market directly to your audience.

Well…here I go…

As I take my first shaky steps in my journey into self publishing, I’ve decided it might be useful to record my progress. Useful to me to look back on. Hopefully useful to any budding authors out there thinking of doing the same. It’s going to take time and a lot of research as I learn about promotion, pricing, and probably quite a lot of what not to do. I’m focusing exclusively on eBooks to start with. I may add more about paper self publishing if that is a direction I take. eBooks are very easy to publish. Paper publishing takes more artwork and expense but may well be worth it.

Where to begin?

I will start with Amazon, publishing on the Kindle Direct Publishing site. From what I’ve read so far Amazon hold 50% of the market so they are a good place to start. If you enrol in the KDP Select programme they promote it for you in return for 90 days exclusivity. After that (or if you don’t use KDP Select) you can target more outlets. Apple’s iBooks is a good place to start, being another large portion of the market. You may not need to go directly to Apple. If you use Smashwords they automatically publish it for you on quite a number of other sites. These include some big names such as iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Scribd, and WHSmith. Lulu is also a possible site I will use. I’ll add a site at a time and chart my progress here.

The first problem?

The first question that has raised it’s head so far is, is it better to focus on one site or spread the book far and wide. Logically it would seem that the more places the book is being sold the more chance it will sell but as I begin to investigate I have heard from some authors that focusing on one site is actually better. You can better track the results of your marketing and I would imagine marketing one site would be easier and cheaper than marketing links from many.

I’ll investigate this and post the results here, along with any other titbits I discover along the way.

If you are an aspiring writer I wish you luck and hope my journey can help you on yours.