Amateur To Published: The Fiction Writer's Guide To Publishing

1 - Sign-Up With Self-Publishing Platforms

Okay, first to explain what self-publishing platforms are. Think of your books as products like bread. You could own your own bakery or store and sell your bread from it but that would mean having to pay for overhead costs. To cut costs, you could choose to bake the bread then put in supermarkets and give them a cut of your take from every loaf of bread sold. That's exactly what these platforms are. They let you put your books on their platform in exchange for a cut of whatever you get. For instance if I put my books on Amazon for $2 per book, they'll take 30% of this $2 dollars (which is $0.6) and thus I'll earn $1.40 per book that I see there.

This cut may seem large but consider that you're actually getting 70% of your sales price. If you were using a traditional publisher, you'd get less than 40% of your sales price, sometimes even as little as 10%. Besides that, the audiences that these platforms have are large enough that the 30% cut won't bite too much.

Note that you don't need to pay any upfront costs to put your books on theseplatforms. They only get paid if you get paid.

To make sure that your books sell, you'll need to:

STEP 1: SIGN UP WITH THE MAIN ONLINE RETAILERS

There are some retailers who you should absolutely register with because they earn the most for self-publishers. These retailers include:

- Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

- Barnes & Noble's NOOK Press

- Apples's iBooks Author

- Rakuten Kobo's Kobo Writing Life

- Google Play's Books

Note that some of these retailers may not beavailable for writers in your country especially if you live in places outsideNorth America and Great Britain. Just register with all the ones that you'reallowed to.

STEP 2: REGISTER WITH AGGREGATORS

The five retailers in Step 1 above are the highest earning for self-publishedwriters so it is best to register directly with them. However, in some casesyou can't. For instance, iBooks requires that you have an Apple Device to uploadyour document, Barnes & Noble only allows publishers from North America andGoogle-play only periodically opens up for new publishers. If any of theseconditions keeps you from registering, there's still ways you can get on thoseplatforms. You can use aggregators.

Aggregators are self-publishing services that mass-publish to all the above five sites plus other little ones. They are not publishers. All they do is submit your books to all the platforms that they have agreements with. In exchange you give them a 10% cut + Whatever the main retailers will take.

This ten percent may not be much money if you're dealing with the smaller sites, but if you consider your income on Amazon and the thirty percent cut Amazon is already taking, it seems like throwing money away. That's why it's good to first register with as many of the top five sites as you can handle before you turn to aggregators. These aggregators include:

-Draft2Digital

-Smashwords

-Books2Read

The good thing about these aggregators is thatthey publish on several sites that are so little it would be tiresome topublish on all of them yourself. Also, once you publish with them, yourmanuscript is converted into different formats thus catering to all customersneeds

However, I must repeat, do not use them for the big sites like Amazon, Kobo, iBooks etc unless you cannot get your own account.

STEP 3: REGISTER WITH PUBLISH ON DEMAND (POD) PUBLISHERS

The above retailers and aggregators take eBooks. You're still going to need someone to distribute your paperbacks for you. When you register with Kindle Direct Publishing, you'll realize that you can upload your paperback there too and formany this is the most convenient way to publish their paperbacks. In fact, youcould stick to just KDP and be fine because self-publishers tend to sell moreeBooks than paperback anyway.

However, there are other POD Publishers you canuse especially if you're looking for better production quality, would like hardcover copies, want expanded distribution in places like Barnes & Noble andwould like to send your book to Book stores. These publishers include:

- Ingram Spark

-BookBaby

- Lulu Xpress

Note that you're only registering with these sites for the PODservices. Don't be tempted by the additional services like cover-design, e-bookformatting etc. They are severely overpriced. You can get cheaper elsewhere.