Authorship and Self-Publishing

I have written and self-published more than a hundred books, so it came as quite a surprise to me the other day when a good friend and author of four excellent books told me that he found authorship in the form of self-publishing on his own daunting and confusing. It seemed so straight-forward to me, but it got me thinking.

If my intelligent, Internet-savvy friend found self-publishing on his own difficult, how many other authors must be having the same problem with self publishing by themselves as well?

I suppose it’s quite obvious really. We all have our blind spots, don’t we? Some people can’t even boil an egg, mend a car or write a book, so it stands to reason that some people won’t be able to understand how to self-publish a book on their own via the Internet too. I suppose the problem is a mixture of technology and terminology. If you don’ understand the instructions that you are reading, how can you do what they are telling you to do?

As it happened, I was in the final stage of writing a novel, so when it came to publishing, self-publishing, it, I described exactly what I was doing so that other writers could easily follow the process. When that book was published, I wrote the whole process down and followed the narrative to publish that manual on self-publishing.

I am happy to report that my instructions, help and advice allowed the publication of that reference manual to be achieved without let or hindrance!

So, there you have it, there is now a brand-new book on the market which will take you through the process of authorship and self-publishing step by step. However, there is not only one route to self-publication, since there are two sorts of books these days and two major printer/publishers for the do-it-yourself author. Not to mention the four of five major distributors that you must have your book with in order to have a chance of selling it to many people.

The two types of book are, of course, print books and ebooks. Before you pooh-pooh ebooks, let me say that Amazon reported in 2010 that it had sold more ebooks than paperbacks for the first time ever and that it could only foresee that trend increasing. The two printer/publishers available to self-publishing authors are Amazon and Lulu. Amazon creates and sells print books via CreateSpace and ebooks via Kindle, both of which are owned by Amazon.

The other major distributors of books and ebooks are: Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes and Noble, Nook, Smashwords and XinXii. All of these outlets require a different form of book or ebook. The format of print books and ebooks is completely different anyway, but Kindle, Lulu, Smashwords and XinXii each have different requirements for ebooks too, so if you want to be with them, you will need to know what they want.

This reference manual sets out the requirements of each of these outlets and describes, step by step, what you have to do to format your book’s text to meet them. Anyone, no matter how a-technical, can be a self-publisher on his own with the help of this book.

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