How to Successfully Self-Publish a Book

Self-publishing is now a valid option for the current publishing market: authors can now self-publish their works without interference from third parties and exercise control over their creative work. It offers the author more outstanding royalties along with better opportunities to have their own works read directly by readers. At best, the process of self-publishing can be overwhelming, but a proper approach and strategic planning can help you successfully self-publish a book.

This guide takes you step by step on how to publish a book from focusing on the main considerations to providing insights into book self-publishing services that may make things easier for you.

Write and Edit Your Manuscript

Before going into how to publish a book, be sure your content is polished and ready for readers. Writing a manuscript takes time, but managing goals helps. Break the process into portions: outlining, writing, and reviewing.

After plotting your manuscript, there’s an editing and enhancing part that will be online next. Of course, you’ll begin here with editing yourself, but you do want a professional editor to extract those grammar issues and help tighten up the structure and flow of your book. This will ensure your book is polished when it goes to print. Many book self-publishing services offer editing packages to help with this step.

Format Your Book for Publishing

Next on the list of how to publish a book, or rather, for you as the author, is to make sure your manuscript is formatted correctly in order to appear the same way in print and digital formats. Book formatting is a bit more than just selecting fonts and margins; it ensures that the layout is visually appealing to read through on all devices-from e-readers to a smartphone.

Formatting can be a bit of a pain, especially for someone who’s just getting into the technical aspects. Many book self-publishing services can assist you in formatting so that your book is professional-looking in both physical and digital formats – when that first sale goes to the shelf, she won’t be disappointed.

Design a Professional Cover

Perhaps the most often repeated phrase in the world of grammar is “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” But in reality, in self-publishing, people do exactly that; they obviously have to judge a book by its cover. A professional-looking, eye-catching cover can make the difference between one success of a book and another failure.

One of the costs associated with publishing a book is the cover design: a good cover design is very essential; therefore, discovering a professional who can help design one according to genre standards that will click with your target audience is priceless. Many book self-publishing services include custom cover design in their packages, giving a book that good polished look and feel to make it stand out in the crowd.

Choose the Right Self-Publishing Platform

The platform is very significant for learning how to publish a book. There are many offering different features, different royalty structures, and different distribution options, making it difficult for an author to know where to start. While some may limit themselves to the most commonly used ones- there are so many to name, I will mention only three of them: Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP, IngramSpark, and Smashwords.

• Amazon KDP: Actually, being the largest online retailer for books, Amazon KDP provides a huge exposure for self-published authors. It offers the chance of both eBook and print books, at virtually zero upfront cost for most authors.
• IngramSpark: Massive distribution- Reaches more bookstores, libraries, and online retailers beyond Amazon. It aims at print and digital publishing to allow more control of locations where your book will be read and distributed.
• Smashwords: As an eBook distributor, Smashwords puts you onto the majority of retailers like Apple Books and Kobo, making it a sound choice for eBook publication.

Review the terms, royalty rates, and features of each platform to decide which best fits your needs. Many platforms offering self-publishing for books will support you in making these decisions and handle some of the technical work on your behalf.

Price and Royalties

Part of knowing how to publish a book also includes pricing it right. If you price the book too high, you are likely to lose some readers. However, price the book so low that you might miss out on some possible profits. Try doing research with other books in the same genre as yours to determine an ideal price range.

Most self-publishing companies allow you to determine your book’s selling price and provide several royalty models. For instance, Amazon KDP offers a 70% royalty for eBooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99. IngramSpark and other similar providers offer different models of royalties.

Choosing an appropriate price is a balance between maximizing profit and being attractive to readers. Many book self-publishing services provide tools for market research to help with decision-making.

Market Your Book

Publishing is one thing, but getting it in front of readers is quite another. Success through self-publishing must rest on an effective marketing plan, and the essential strategies are:

• Development of an author website: this is a source where the reader will find out about you, your book, and future releases
• Microblogging or social media: These are Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, which facilitate contact with the reader to talk up a book.
• The most popular ones include running promotions to gain visibility and boost sales through discounts or by entering some form of giveaway and joining book promotion websites.
• Email marketing: Enable you to create an email list so that you can send updates about your releases and promotions to readers. Of all the tools to connect directly with your reader, being able to build a loyal following is one of the best ways to accomplish this.

Marketing actually seems pretty intimidating, but many of the services that go along with book self-publishing services provide marketing packages that can be as simple as social media management, paid advertising, or email campaigns.

Track Sales and Collect Reader Reviews

Tracking sales and soliciting reader reviews once the book is published will tell you if your book is selling well. Most self-publishing platforms have real-time sales tracking. Therefore, it provides the opportunity for continuous review of the marketing plan in order to adjust it if needed. Feedback through reviews also helps determine the level of reader satisfaction. It will help improve your work in order to do even better in subsequent books.

Interact with readers and urge them to write a review. This will also help refine your work and push its visibility in search results on self-publishing platforms.

Conclusion

Becoming a writer and publishing through self-publishing can be pretty intimidating, but by the end, these steps helped writers of great books achieve success as an author. From writing and editing to formatting, cover design, marketing, and sales, every step counts in the overall success of your book.

If you have a book to self-publish, this type of service can certainly make things easy, providing expert support for all aspects of the process. Whether it is your first book or in a series, it allows complete control over the publishing journey and gets the story out to the world.