Publish Your Own Book Like a Pro
Due to new technologies, self-publishing is easier than ever, however, publishing a successful book is a different story! As it gets easier for anyone to get into the writing business, competition has also become fierce! This is exactly why we are here to help you out with 9 tips for self-publishing a book successfully.
What You’ll Find:
- Hold Your Horses, Is Your Book Ready?
- A Book Design that Converts
- Choose Your Publishing Website Wisely
- Don’t Forget About Print Books!
- You Still Need to Know Your Audience
- Market Your Masterpiece
What Is Self-Publishing?
Self-publishing is acting independently to publish your own book using a book platform instead of a publishing house. You no longer need a big publishing house to publish your book in your way. But let’s talk about why you would
For Starters, Why Self-Publish a Book?
Going rogue has its beauty. There is no one between you and your publishing. This means higher profit margins for you, full control over your book and the way you tell your story, as well as deadlines.
🔥 Try out this Book Title Checker to make sure you are using a unique title for your work! 📖
There are tons of self-published authors out there who have even managed to get bestsellers out of their books! It doesn’t matter which road you decide to take. If you put the right efforts into your book and your release plan, you will get a great outcome! Let’s go over 9 important tips for online book publishing:
1. Hold Your Horses, Is Your Book Ready?
Before you even start planning to publish your book and promote it, ask yourself if it is impeccably ready. So before you set your book free have some professionals take a look at it, maybe even have a group of readers to test your first drafts.
Proofreading your book is simply an essential step you cannot jump. There might be several details you are too close to seeing. Make sure it’s formatted properly, look for professional editors, or at least use a platform like Grammarly to proofread your book.
Also, asks yourself the main questions again. Is the title intriguing enough? Is it memorable? The simpler the title the better! Does your format look clean, have you chosen the right fonts? And so on.
2. A Book Design that Converts
Whether you realize it or not, people choose books by their cover. Never choosing a book for its cover is a very nice saying however we should simply assume many people will be drawn to an eye-catching cover and that is simply a fact. So design something that is highly representative of your book and very attractive!
Your book cover is the very first impression your book will make on people, so give it all you have! It’s super important you clearly show your book’s name, your own name as the author of course, and you can add the publisher’s logo if you have one, and your book’s code which we will discuss ahead or you can go directly into ISBN.
On the back of your book, you want to add relevant information like important reviews, and a short description, you can add your bio, and so on.
You can always simply use a pre-designed template you can fully customize that will ensure you get a professional cover design no matter what you do! The Interior book design is a biggy too!
3. Choose Your Publishing Website Wisely
When choosing which book service to use to publish, you have to consider all their limitations, distribution, support, loyalty payouts, and basically, you want to choose a platform that adjusts to YOUR budget and has the largest audience possible!
Publishing a Book On Amazon
Amazon self-publishing services are a pretty popular book publishing platform due to how easy it has been for indie authors to publish their books and make a profit from them.
So when self-publishing a book on Amazon, where to start?
Amazon has a self-publishing services called Kindle Direct Publishing.
To get your book published by Amazon, first, visit Amazon’s KDP and create an account with either your existing Amazon account or your email address.
Next, you must fill in your tax information, and yes, it is mandatory. Once you are done with this you can go ahead and click on “finished” to complete your account.
What should follow is filling in all your meta information to add relevant pieces of data to your book! Write an awesome book description, and add categories and keywords to help your book be found by an interested audience.
Remember customer reviews will get your ranking growing. Reviews are also a great source of exposure, ask your readers to give you reviews that are genuine so that you can share them everywhere. Learn everything you need to know here.
4. Don’t Forget About Print Books!
Publishing an ebook is way simpler that’s for sure, but you should not get rid of the idea to print your book since there is a lot of audience for print books, probably way more than you think. You should definitely consider offering a print version of your book!
When printing a book never forget about quality, as technology has advanced, and print-on-demand platforms have made it way easier, self-publishers now can get the same quality on their books as any other book on the shelves.
What is ISBN?
ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number, which is an internationally recognized identification number for your book.
Is It Mandatory?
If you want your book to be available for sale in bookstores and/or online retailers, YES!
You’ll want to buy your ISBN before you design your book cover so that it can be included in the back barcode.
Many self-publishing platforms offer indie authors the opportunity to use a free ISBN or you can purchase one on your own.
You will need a different ISBN for each book format you decide to promote.
5. You Still Need to Know Your Audience
Just as with any other product, you should always get to know who your audience is and take them into consideration when choosing a publishing site and channels to promote.
As get closer to your audience, you will market your book way more easily.
6. Market Your Masterpiece
Great, you’ve done everything right and now it’s time to market your book! But how to market an ebook? When marketing your book among platforms it’s super important that you have to have your book’s metadata cleared out, this is basic. We talked about it before but once again is super important that you have a clear description of what your book is about, what genres, what keywords, title, setting a price, and any other relevant data you need to keep consistent among platforms when promoting.
Decide on a budget and promote your book on one, a few, or all of the following:
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Digital Campaigns/ Paid Campaigns
Create stunning marketing visuals for your book campaigns and make ads from them! Promote on whichever platforms are most visited by your audience.
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Social media
Share bits of your books on social media, share positive reviews from actual readers, and share a bit of yourself as the author, there are many ways you can create relevant content and even share user-generated content to feed your socials and help promote your book in an organic manner.
🔥Check out this step-by-step guide for Facebook Ads for book authors!
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Authors Website
This is a great way to allow your readers to find you, find out who you are, follow your events, and look for more of your reading material. This applies too to social media profiles! You can have a direct conversation with your audience and let them ask questions! You can show them you care by replying!
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Book Events
Events are a great way to connect with your audience in real life!
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Join the Indie Author Community!
Great authors support each other. Join groups and forums of like-minded people. Building relationships with colleagues is a very important step in getting your book out there.
FAQ
Last Words
Technology has now allowed indie writers to publish their books without spending a fortune or waiting for months! You can do it today, just get your plan ready. If you have enjoyed this post you most certainly find our Best Resources for Book Publishers post useful too! Time to get your book out there the easiest way.
So what do you think? Leave a comment for us and let us know!
