Every writer wants to become a best-selling author. However, for decades it seems to been impossible to do this without the backing of a publishing company. It is hard to grab the attention of a major publishing company as it includes sending manuscripts and impatiently waiting for a response that might never come. Collaborating with a popular publishing house is certainly a dream come true, however, what if you can skip this hassle altogether? In this article, we are going to talk about – how to self-publish a book?
How to Self-Publish a Book? – 7 Way Process
Marketable Book
Before publishing the book, you need to understand the book and recognize your target audience. These are methods that will evaluate the market potential of your book. You must go through this before you go ahead with the self-publishing process. The peculiarities of your genre are important to reach the target audience. A children’s book will not have the similar words of a murder mystery to describe a certain noun. Learn what the readers seek from the genre you chose to write about. Understand the strong points of the best-selling books. Try to find out a niche in your genre so that you can stand out in the marketplace and create your name.
Editing
Your book needs to be as polished and refined as a book published by a major publishing house. First, edit the book on your own and go through it as one of your target audiences. Second, give the draft to people and get feedback before handing it over to a professional editor. Try to revise your draft with helpful feedback. Lastly, professional editing is necessary as a writer you are likely to overlook small details of your work. You can hire a professional editor on Fiverr, Guru, Upwork, and Reedsy.
Cover-Design the Book
Most people judge a book by cover especially while buying books. So, an eye-catching book cover design is important. You can use freelance services if you want to hire a designer, you can use these apps – Fiverr, Guru, Reedsy, and Upwork. If you want to create your cover design you can use tools such as – Fotor, Visme, Canva, Edit.org, etc. You need to have a professionally edited manuscript and a proper cover design at this stage to follow the rest of the steps.
Self-Publishing Platforms
The self-publishing platform you will choose for your product will affect your channel so it is an important thing to decide. For self-publishers, print-on-demand books are a good option as it is low cost and saves time. KDP or Kindle Direct Publishing is Amazon’s self-publishing platform which let users print books on order at the point of sale. Lulu is a self-publishing platform that offers tools for printing and distributing books and e-books. It offers a wide range of sizes, page types, and bindings that offer a ton of options for developing the script and covering it into a physical product. A few other self-publishing platforms are Blurb, IngramSpark, Reedsy, etc.
Format
During the formatting stage, you’ll add the finishing touches to your product. Even though your manuscript is written and edited properly, it still has to go through certain edits – such as the margins, trims, and page size.
The front matter – this comes before the preface of your story. Books typically have five kinds of front-matter pages – half-title page (only containing the book’s title), title page (author’s name, subtitle, the logo is optional in case of self-publishing), copyright page (all copyright information of the book), dedication page (usually two-three sentences), and table of the content page (list of chapters along with page numbers).
Body matter page – it starts with the first chapter and always right facing page. Back matter – Bibliography and reference pages may not be needed for a fiction book. The author bio page includes the writer’s photo and a brief biography. The index page appears at last with the list of topics in alphabetical order, only in non-fiction books.
ISBN is a 13-digit code that identifies each edition of the book along with its physical and publisher properties. It is useful as they offer a universal reference number for the books that will function across libraries, marketplaces, and different platforms. They act as ownership proof so they are significant for self-publishers.
Launch Your Book
Amazon is one of the significant platforms for product launches. You need to make sure the channel is working properly or not, that is are you able to accept payment or not? Go through the test purchase and get a book as a customer. Your book must have a home base through which your buyers can reach out to you and gain more information. Make sure you set up an author website so that people can contact you for promotion and interviews. Use e-mail marketing apps such as Seguno, Klaviyo, and more to build an audience. Install an analytics tool to have valuable insight into visitor behavior and thus, you can improve your online store.
Market on Social Media
Social media offers the advantage of huge marketing opportunities to small businesses including self-publishing writers. It provides low-cost access to massive audiences and having a proper social media marketing strategy will help you build the right audience which will boost your book sales. Growing social networking sites must be an ongoing process. Share samples of your writing on social media. Encourage the early buyers to leave reviews which will help with the visibility on apps like Amazon. You can use the help of Facebook ads. Collaborate with other influencers to build awareness. Try to reach out to online platforms such as podcasts, blogs, etc.
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