Ways to Self-Publish Your Book

Today is unbelievably enough the 16th day of the 28-Day Blog Challenge for Authors (newbies can learn about the challenge here) and the prompt is:

Did you publish your book as a traditionally printed book, an eBook, or both? How did you come to your decision? Which company(ies) did you use for printing and distribution? How did you select them?

I published First Visions as both an ebook and as a paperback. Originally, I was only going to sell through Amazon as an ebook and enroll in KDP Select, but decided to forgo that route. I know some writers who are huge fans of the program, but I find it kind of lame of the retail giant to block other competitors and force you to give exclusive rights for three months in exchange for five free book promotion days.

After uploading my book to the Kindle Direct Publishing system, I created a seller account on Barnes and Noble's PubIt platform. I had to do some slight re-formatting to publish it (i.e. PubIt doesn't recognize page breaks), but otherwise the process was straightforward enough. On PubIt, for a $2.99-$9.99 eBook, you earn a 65 percent royalty rate compared to the 70 percent rate offered through Amazon.

Smashwords is an awesome platform for indie writers. Things I love about Smashwords: multiple supported formats, ISBN assignment, premium catalog distribution to sellers like Apple and Sony, and coupon generator. Royalty rate is approximately 85 percent. Their easy to follow guide also made publishing a cinch.

These are the three ebook retailers I've used for my book. Sales have been by far the best on Amazon, but my book has done fairly well on Barnes and Noble as well. Smashwords sales fluctuate and only about five percent of my sales have come from the bookseller.

I decided to publish my book in paperback mostly for promotional reasons. I've given out paperback copies for giveaways and to family members. I had less of a familiarity with print publishers and used Createspace due to the company's connection to Amazon. I have no complaints and the royalty rates offered seem fair. I didn't see a reason not to offer up my book in print when you can do so without having to pay any upfront fees. Createspace does not charge you anything for listing your book on Amazon.com and their own bookstore. Expanded distribution allows bookstores and distributors to order your book. You pay a one-time fee of $25. However, the royalty rate is very low. For each $9.99 book I sell on Amazon, I receive $2.38, but only $0.38 if I opted for expanded distribution.

Curious to see what other writers have to say about this topic!

Fun With Ebook Formatting

I say “fun” with as much sarcasm as I can muster up. Yesterday, I spent the day converting First Visions to the various ebook formats available. Easy peasy I figured. However, what turned into what I thought would be an hour project became an all day thing. I think normally this process doesn’t take this long, but I believe my Kindle file for the book LOST ITS MIND. I believe inside the file was an evil little brain that decided to ruin my Sunday. Anyway, here are a few tips I figured I’d share with fellow newbies:

• Take some time to go over the guidelines. I suffer from a mixture of ADD and impatience which usually causes me to jump into a project and decide that I’ll learn the process as I go along. Both PubIt and Kindle Direct Publishing have simplified guidelines (Kindle also offers a free downloadable book for more detailed instructions). Smashwords has a great set of guidelines with illustrations and an active Table of Contents.

• Get rid of tab indents. This seems like pretty much standard across the board. If you’re using Word like I did, you instead assign a first line indent of approximately 0.3 to 0.5.

• Page breaks for most formats except Barnes and Noble’s PubIt. This was one of these annoying things I had to go back and change before converting the book for the Nook. The Nook doesn’t recognize Page Breaks in your document and instead you must remove all of them and use Section Breaks. Another difference with PubIt is the cover image guidelines. They’re a little more restricted and require the sides to be between 750 and 2000 pixels in length.

• Read over your book after the conversion. Some important things can be lost in translation. When I did the Kindle version, a lot of my bolding disappeared.


• No matter how much you follow the guidelines sometimes things will not work. This brings me to my Kindle nightmare. Cleared all formatting, but indents were completely wrong. In some spots the indents were fine while in others second and third lines were incorrectly indented. No tabs, no weird formatting in the spots and it was still buggy. FINALLY, I did a forum search (aren’t forums the greatest? I have no idea what we did before they existed) and found that the indenting problem could be solved by saving the Word file as a HTML document. Say what? I hadn’t come across this one yet. But sure enough it worked and the indenting issue was fixed.

Glad, this part of over (at least I hope so). BIG DAY TOMORROW! Release day for First Visions!