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 While that growth has started to level off as fewer writers have unpublished novels in their closets to publish, you can still expect to go up against thousands of other motivated indie authors.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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