I published each of my fiction stories and self help books after discovering that publishing is actually the simplest parts of book writing. You can thank the great creation of technology and the World Wide Web for the vast amounts of resources and tools available to authors to help them. Back before the technology boom, authors had to solicit stories to book publishers in order to get books into print. Not anymore.
Self publishing is defined as the easy process of formatting and printing your book after it is written. Sure it is great to have a big named publisher on your book cover, but it must be understood that on average a book published through a traditional publisher will only sell 100 copies of a book and only one percent of published authors will hit the New York Times best sellers list. Doing everything yourself is within reach like never before and can even give you more advantages in the long run.
First, you must learn what a publisher does when they publish a book. The process is simple. Once you are done writing a story and it is in a standard manuscript format, it is at the beginning of the publishing process. This is when you start editing your story.
This can be very costly, so there is some great book writing software that can help with this and get the manuscript ready for the next stage. You can use editing software to find and correct the errors of your first draft. Use this opportunity to make your story the best that it can be.
Next is the formatting stage. Formatting a story is easy to learn but can be the hardest to part of the process. A program like Microsoft Word can create the professional format your book needs to succeed in the marketplace. Self publishing requires creativity on multiple levels, something each author possesses deep down inside. These artistic talents enable you to format your book into a "what you see is what you get" spread that is ready to publish into .PDF format. Just look at a few books that have already been published and use the same internal format.
Several print on demand companies are available to self publish your story. They accept uploaded files, but the book must be in a format of how it should look when it is printed. This formatting step of the process is crucial as the look and feel of your published book is all about your reputation.
Once the story is formatted and converted to .PDF, it is time to create the finishing touches. You must now create the ever important part of your book, the cover. A book cover is generally the first thing a person sees when they are looking for something to read. It's important for your book cover to gather as much interest from a reader so they want to pick it up and open up the cover. This is where more of your creative artistic abilities come into action. If you can use a photo editing or imaging software, you can easily create a cover for your book. But for those authors who don't have time or aren't able to create a book cover, there are many places to purchase a book cover custom made for a story.
Your formatted book and book cover are now ready to be self published using a print on demand company. Print on demand companies usually take money out of the cost to print the book after the book is purchased. The author self publishing the story gets to keep all of the remaining revenues generated from the sale instead of giving most of it to a publisher.
Self publishing your book will give you more profit for each book sale, benefiting you a lot more than what a publisher can offer. Since a publisher doesn't directly sell an author's book, all of the sales efforts are the responsibility of the writer. This self promotion after publishing takes a great amount of effort, but pays off better than when you publish the traditional way.
The benefits of self publishing a book in today's age of technology seriously outweigh those of a publisher. Learn more about writing and self publishing to understand the true rewards from the efforts.
