Taking the Independent Publishing Route

Once you decide to become an ‘Indie’ author, you’ll need to make a decision:

• Do you want to sell printed copies of your book?
• Do you want to sell ebooks?
Do you want to do both?

To me the obvious step is to do both. An Amazon book page shows the formats available with their prices. Since paper copies are inevitably more expensive this makes the price of ebook, on which you'll earn most of your royalties, seem attractive.

 So now we’ll see what is involved. First, however, don’t let anyone tell you that an independently published author is not a proper author. 

• Stephen King publishes independently 
• John Locke publishes independently 
• Amanda Hocking publishes independently

 All have sold over a million books without an agent. Indie authors now appear regularly on the New York Times lists of bestsellers. (https://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/)

I’m going to show you how I published a book, both as a printed book and as an ebook using Amazon and other services. The illustrations are from the software I used and actual web pages I came across at ‘Lulu’, ‘Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP),’ ‘Draft2Digital’ and other publishing services.

If you've been following this guide you should already have a formatted book manuscript ready to work with. You'll need to make a few minor changes and save a new copy in both docx and pdf formats. Later we'll make more changes to the docx file to make an ebook.

If you plan to make money from your paper and ebooks there are four things you need to consider before publishing. Without getting these exactly right you'll find your book becomes invisible amongst the millions of other books available. The four things you need to work on are:

• Keywords
• Book description
• Book cover
• Price

Producing keywords, description, covers and making a decision about prices may take you some time so go work on those and come back to this page when you are ready to proceed.

A word of warning - over the last years I’ve seen all of the self-publishing sites change – they are now even easier to use. It’s possible that things might change again. I’ll assume you are working on a budget and want to do it all yourself. 

You should have already completed the first step of thoroughly proofreading and editing your book. Let’s first cover producing a paper book. Using a print-on-d emand Service You could go to a publisher/printer and ask them to print five hundred or a thousand copies of your book. It would be expensive and you would need a lot of space to store them. A much better option is to use ‘print-on-demand’ publishing, where books are printed as required. Paperbacks cost less and the cover is less demanding to produce, so we’ll start with those.

I use Lulu for paper books. Amazon also have a system where paperbacks and hardbacks are produced through KDP (Kindle Desktop Publishing). At the moment, it doesn’t offer a full range of services though so I can’t recommend it yet. They are getting better though. If you want a hardback copy of your book, I suggest you look at Lulu.com. Lulu offer a ‘You send us the manuscript and we’ll do it for you’ service or you can do the work of editing, cover design and formatting yourself. Amazon’s KDP Print and Lulu are not the only ‘print-on-demand’ publishers. You can find more by searching on Internet for ‘print on demand services’. Add your location and you may well find a local service.

 

Next step: Making the minor changes for a print-on-demand PDF