Book Self-Publishing: Quality Control Is Vital
I would like to emphasize the
importance of typesetting in book self-publishing if you plan to mass
market your book with the "big boys and girls" in the industry. I seek to help empower aspiring authors. Add me
to your Skype if you seek timely assistance with your projects -
AgoraCosmopolite I had founded AgoraPublishing.com as a not-for-profit book publishing organization in 1997
after having been involved in newspaper production, printing and
marketing just in case you would like to know my background. I have
worked with the largest booksellers in the United States and
internationally and have helped publishers and writers as far away as
Australia and southern Africa. Amateur-looking designed books with a crappy looking interior design
and a "clip art" looking book cover will not get the same respect among
book buyers and booksellers like Barnes and Noble as a quality typeset /
designed book no matter how fabulous your content is. Self-publishing can be a daunting task; and especially if you have
aspirations to sell more than a 100 or so books. I provide free
tutorials om book self-publishing. I have been invited by librarians to
provide free seminars on book self-publishing in the U.S. and Canada. E-books are less costly to produce. But, printed books are still in
my view, important for marketing your book into "bricks-and-mortar"
bookstores, reporters in the mass media and otherwise. I advise
aggressively pre-marketing a printed book before it's published to see
how many books you will need to print; and then to use some of those
printed books to then complement the marketing of any ebook you have in
mind through social media. I can also help authors with book marketing and search engine optimization. Here's some key points from an article entitled - "Self-publishing a book: 25 things you need to know" by David Carnoy. Since self-publishing's so easy, everybody's doing it -- One of the unfortunate drawbacks
of having a low barrier of entry into a suddenly hot market is that
now everybody and their brother and sister is an author. That means
you're dealing with a ton of competition, some of which is made up of
hustlers, charlatans, and a bunch of people in between. The growth of indie publishing in the U.S. has been huge over the
last couple of years. While that growth has started to level off as
fewer writers have unpublished novels in their closets to publish, you
can still expect to go up against thousands of other motivated indie
authors. Good self-published books are few and far between - Again, because the barrier to entry is so low, the majority of
self-published books are pretty bad. If I had to put a number on it,
I'd say less than 5 percent are decent and less than 1 percent are
really good. A tiny fraction become monster success stories, but every
every few months, you'll hear about someone hitting it big (for those
who don't know already the "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy was initially
self-published). The odds are against you The average print self-published
book sells about 100-150 copies -- or two-thirds to three-quarters of
your friends and family combined (and don't count on all your Facebook
acquaintances buying). I don't have a source for this statistic, but
I've seen this stated on several blogs and as a Publishers Weekly
article titled "Turning Bad Books into Big Bucks"
noted, while traditional publishers aim to publish hundreds of
thousands of copies of a few books, self-publishing companies make money
by publishing 100 copies of hundreds of thousands of books. Creating a "professional" book is really hard -- Barrier to entry may be low, but creating a book that looks
professional and is indistinguishable from a book published by a "real"
publishing house is very difficult and requires a minimum investment
of a few thousand dollars (when all was said and done, I'd put in
around $7,500, which included about $2,500 in marketing costs). You
wonder why "real" books take nine months to produce -- and usually
significantly longer. Well, I now know why. It's hard to get everything
just right (if you're a novice at book formatting, Microsoft Word will
become your worst enemy). And once you've finally received that final
proof, you feel it could be slightly better. Self-published books rarely get reviewed -- for free anyway.Kirkus' reviews service for indie authors. Kirkus Yes, it's true. It's very hard to get your self-published book
reviewed -- and the mantra in the traditional publishing world is that
reviews sell books. But that's changing a bit. People didn't take
bloggers seriously at first and now they do. And what's interesting is
that reputable book reviewers such as Kirkus and more recently
Publishers Weekly are offering special reviews services geared toward
self-published authors. In the case of Kirkus Indie,
the author pays a fee to have the book reviewed (around $400-$550,
depending on the speed) and a freelancer writes an objective critique
(yes, they do negative reviews) in the same format as a standard Kirkus
review. (You can also submit books that are in an e-book-only format). As for Publishers Weekly, it offers something called PW Select.
While you can submit your book for review for a fee of $149, only
about 25 percent of the book submissions end up being reviewed. But for
a lot of folks risking that $149 is worth the opportunity of getting
into the PW door. Of course, there's always the possibility that the
review isn't favourable. Design your book cover to look good small -- A solid indie cover effort. Amazon Traditional book publishers
design -- or at least they used to design -- a book cover to make a
book stand out in a bookstore and evoke whatever sentiment it was
supposed to evoke. Well, with Amazon becoming a dominant bookseller,
your book has to stand out as a thumbnail image online because that's
how most people are going to come across it. If you're primarily
selling through Amazon, think small and work your way up.
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