Self-Publishing

Hi all,
Are you one of those self-publishing writers who thinks printed books are still the bee's knees and hate electronic books? If you are, I'd just like to tell you that you are missing out on some real opportunities.

I am a self-publishing author and I'm selling my books in both print and electronic formats. Interestingly, because I'm a self-publishing author, I keep a close eye on my sales and I can tell you now that my e-book sales are outstripping the printed versions by about ten to one. So if you are a self-publishing author and have only gone down the printed route to publication you are missing out big style.

If you are an unpublished author or still writing your first epic, you need to give as much thought to self-publishing electronically as with books aimed at the print market.

Self-publishing is an exciting place to be right now. Anybody who has the determination to write a book can publish it for less than £10. Yes, that is all it needs to cost you to have a copy of your book in your hand and available to the rest of the world.

The point is, that in years gone by, many would be authors got tangled up in vanity publishing. They would pay a lot of money to see their book in print and pay out another shed load of money to have hundreds of copies printed. The salesmen were very good at convincing them that the more copies they printed the cheaper each copy would be.

The good news is, you don't have to bother with vanity publishing anymore. You can write your own book and through self-publishing make it available in all the popular e-book formats and print, all for less than a tenner. You will only need to order one copy of your book for proofreading purposes and that's it. When somebody wants a copy, they order it and one copy is printed and dispatched to the customer. This is called print on demand and it is absolutely brilliant for self-publishing authors.

By the way, many self-publishing authors, myself included have given up actively seeking an agent or trying to get a deal with a big publishing house because the odds of succeeding diminish by the day. Producing a synopsis, a covering letter, author's bio, etc and putting these into a package with several sample chapters is very time consuming and can become costly by the time you are on your sixtieth package. I wouldn't mind, but after all that hard work about 50% of the recipients won't bother to reply even if you have included a self-addressed envelope.
So if you want to write a book, be it a block busting novel, your memoirs, or instructions on how to build a model of tower bridge from kangaroo teeth, just do it. You can publish it for less than a tenner in print and electronically and do your own marketing. You don't need anybody else getting involved and taking a cut, your destination as a writer is in your own hands. The picture on the left shows me reading my novel Bossyboots. I sent the picture to my local paper with a press release and it was printed in the next copy.

My book, How to get Started as a Freelance Writer Plus a Guide to Self-Publishing and POD is an interesting read for anybody who would like to make some money from writing. If it's a new career you're after or just a desire to make some money from an absorbing hobby my book is a good starting place and absolute bargain if purchased in the electronic version. In my next writing post I will discuss the issue of formatting. Print books and e-books need to be formatted differently. For example, an e-book should not include any page numbers.

If you want any more information about me or my books, please click here.