Self-Publishing Your BookSelf-publishing's benefits include:
Most of the publishing houses will only pay you advances equal to the royalties they project will arise from selling your book within a limited time. Unless you are somewhat well known in your field, your book won’t get much publicity. You are expected to promote your book yourself to spark sales. If your book doesn’t reach their sales quota levels in the first six months to a year, the publisher will not reprint. As for artistic control, you can almost bet money your book won’t be published as you wrote it. If you are going to have to give up so much working with a publisher, should you not be receiving a bigger chunk of the profits? I self-published my first book because the audience was relatively small and I imagined no publisher would be interested. When the book received rave reviews, however, I approached several major publishers about buying the reprint rights. After getting a pitiful offer of $1,500 advance and a contract full of clauses that took much and gave little, I decided to expand the subject to a larger audience and go back to self-publishing. The first year in print, the new book sold 2,000 copies. Retail sales accounted for 40% and the remaining 60% sold at an average discount of 50%, bringing in a total gross revenue of $20,000. To date, that book has sold over 16,000 copies and continues to sell, even six years after the initial publication. A typical publishing house would have dropped the book within a year, not because it wasn’t selling, but because it wasn’t selling enough to meet their corporate demands. If I had sold out, I would have lost thousands of dollars and control of my material. Self-publishing allows you to take charge of your created material. You decide where, when, how and to whom your ebook will be presented. A big plus for self-publishing is that you can take pride in the accomplishment of being a publisher as well as an author. As the author, you can promote your books for a much longer time than most publishers. This gives you time to build credentials as an expert in your field, which helps book sales, which feeds back into building your reputation. Self-esteem is healthy
and publishing can bring you lots of it. I am often overwhelmed by the
respect I receive from readers of my books who tell me how much my advice
has helped them. Technically, anyone who can use a computer and browse the Internet can become a publisher. That doesn’t mean they will become profitable, get their books reviewed or become recognized as an expert in their field. Successful ebook publishing takes many of the same kinds of efforts self-publishing paper books demands, but without the typical, associated costs. You still have to produce good content and market it well. How difficult is it to set up systems for payment and delivery of ebooks? Much of the payment transaction and fulfillment can be automated. Click here to learn how to set up your own payment and delivery system. Since most ebook authors report more sales from their own web sites as compared to online reselling sites, set-up your delivery system as soon as you have your ebook formatted. Digital distribution bypasses the costs and waiting time for printing and delivering bound books, both to the publisher and to the customer. At best, it takes most book printers three to six weeks to set-up and print your book. That’s just getting the books to you. The customer has to wait two days or longer to receive books you send by mail. Follow the resources and strategies outlined in Ebook Publishing Success and you can be selling and delivering ebooks profitably in one day. With ebooks, you keep all of the profits from sales minus your expenses. Even when you sell your ebook through one of the many online resellers described later, you will earn from 30% to 70% royalties — considerably more than traditional royalties of 7% to 10% paid on paper books.
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