When you want to self-publish, the first step, naturally is writing a book. But once you’ve got a book that’s been edited by you and others…then what?
The short answer is, you’ve got a lot of decisions to make.
If we’re being honest, most of this you should actually work out during/before writing the book, but you’ll absolutely need to have it figured out once you’re ready to publish, because these choices will determine what your next steps are.
Read part one of the Self-Publishing Guide for Beginners!
Where to publish?
Once you decide to self-publish, you’ll realize there are a lot of ways to get your book out there. The simplest way to summarize this is whether to “go wide” or not. What does going wide mean? It’s when you decide to have your book available for purchase at places other than just Amazon.
“Well, sure,” you might think. “Why would I only publish it one place?” The answer, my friends, is KDP Select. KDP (which stands for Kindle Direct Publishing) is Amazon’s ebook publishing arm, and allows authors to publish their ebooks directly to Amazon—and exclusively to Amazon. If authors choose to make their book only available on Amazon, they’ll be a part of the KDP Select program, which offers perks to authors for being exclusive. This is the system that makes Amazon’s program Kindle Unlimited possible. With Kindle Unlimited (often shortened to KU), readers pay about $10 and can read any book in KU for free.
To make sure there are plenty of books for KU readers, Amazon offers bonuses for authors in the KDP Select program—the biggest of these that KDP Select authors get paid for page reads, not just the initial sale. So the more pages of your book somebody reads, the more you get paid, regardless of the cover price. This post by Reedsy does a great of explaining the other pros and cons of KDP Select.
So, going wide is the opposite of all that—you don’t join the KDP Select program, and Amazon is just one of many places readers can purchase your book. To be clear, going wide doesn’t mean that you have to individually upload your book file to the dozens of bookseller sites. Companies like IngramSpark and Draft2Digital allow you to upload your book to their one website, and then they’ll take care of distributing it.
I would highly recommend you use a service like one of those if you choose to go wide—it’s relatively affordable, and will put your book in front of a much bigger audience than if you tried to go at it alone. It also gives you the credibility and ease of having a wholesaler taking care of printing and shipping your book, which means more booksellers and libraries are more likely to stock it, since they’re already working with these companies. For my book, I’m going with IngramSpark. They have a wide distribution, allow for both ebook and physical versions of the book, and give you an ISBN for free if you want it.
How to publish?
Once you’ve got a document full of polished words, you can’t just print out those pages and call it a book. (I mean, I guess you could? But don’t count on selling many copies…) You have to decide what format the book will be available for purchase.
This decision will, in part, be affected by the earlier decision to go wide or not. If you’re a part of KDP Select, you’ll at least need to have an ebook version, since that’s the format that KU books are in. Then you can also choose to have a paperback version available through Amazon (again, exclusively). If you’re going wide, you have more flexibility.
At the very least, though, I would recommend you have an ebook. Ereaders have been growing in popularity for the past several years, and it’s by far the easiest way for readers to find independently published books. Even if you distribute books through a place like IngramSpark, it’s still not easy to have bookstores stock your book in the store or even warehouse—there’s only so much space. But ebooks allow stores and libraries to offer your book without taking up shelf space, and readers are more likely to try out a new author when it’s a cheaper ebook.
Beyond that, you can do a paperback, hardback, or even audiobook. Audiobooks are growing rapidly, and becoming easier to create for indie books. Most well-established indie authors are predicting that audiobooks will be the way of the future, and trying to add audio versions of their backlist (aka all the books they’ve already published). But it will cost money to make an audiobook version, so you have to decide if it’s worth the investment to you. That’s also what you have to decide with whether to do paperback, hardcover, or both.
Which brings us to the most important part…
How to make these decisions (and others)?
I’ve listed a few of the bigger decisions you’ll have to make. But others will come up, and for anything like this, how are you supposed to decide?
Focus on your goals.
In the first part of this series, I had you figure out what your goal was. What does success for this book look like to you? Making money, building a brand, learning the business, just having a book published? Now we’re seeing why describing that is so important: It’s going to be your north star as you make all the decisions around publishing. Will going wide help you make more money and build a bigger brand, or will choosing KDP Select be helpful to just have a book published? What format will support each of these goals?
There are a lot of factors to consider, so take your time and do your research. Blogs like Reedsy, Create If Writing, and The Creative Penn are great starting places. But once you get the information, your goal will need to serve as a filter for all that information so that you can make the decision.
For my book, I’m not focused on making money, and it’s more about creating something I’m proud of and learning about the publishing industry. So I’m going wide—I have a dream of seeing my book on the shelf at a bookstore, and that’s how it can get there. To start, I’m choosing just ebook and paperback formats. Even though I’m not focused on making money, I don’t want to lose huge amounts, and I know paying for a hardback cover design will increase the price a lot. I want a physical copy of my book, but I don’t have a burning desire for it to be hardback. Bookstores and libraries can easily stock paperbacks, and I’d be proud to see that sitting on any shelf.
I know my goal is a little wishy-washy, but it has still informed the choices I’ve made about publishing, and will continue to do so. It can be easy to get overwhelmed by all the information available and decisions to make, but let your goal serve as your guide, and the answers will become clear.
How do you plan to publish your book? Have you tried either method before? How did it go? Let me know in the comments!
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Featured image by Corinne Kutz
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