Oh, my goodness it is Hot, Hot, Hot and I don’t mean your latest book you are about the self publish either. Mother nature is really taking us all for a ride with extreme heat these days. Kind of makes you long for those lovely rain showers last fall. Not those hail and thunder ones we get like a bad-tempered tempest. The really nice gentle rains that cooled us down so that we could sleep well that night. Anyway, that was my rant about the weather.
For now, we want to talk some more about self-publishing and the steps you need to keep in mind when you are wanting to tackle this task on your own. Getting a publisher these days, but let’s be honest since forever, is and will continue to be almost impossible. HOWEVER! if you truly believe in the story you are writing and want to get it out there so that you can possibly find those like-minded people who would enjoy such a tale then self-publishing is the best way to go about it.
First, you need to decide which company to try and self-publish with first. Most authors just bale out on the decision research and go with Amazon Kindle. That is not a bad choice in that you can publish both a Kindle and paperback version of your story to millions of people worldwide. Their royalty fee schedules say the author gets 70% but it is more than like you will only get approximately 20 to 30% of the retail price as royalties. I don’t know of any authors who actually get the 70% royalty for eBook or paperback as Amazon charges a publishing fee first then gives you a percentage of the balance. You might get a percentage of the Unlimited/Prime/Lending Library pot if you can get lots of Kindle readers to request your book and actually read over 50% of it. If you do want to opt into their Kindle Exclusive deal (every 90 days renewed unless you turn that off) for a bigger cut of the pie you CANNOT submit that book to any other self-publishing house while it is in the Kindle deal period.
Once the 90 day period has completed and hasn’t been automatically renewed you can self-publish your story with Smashwords.com. The great thing about their service is you do get 70% royalties on any eBook purchased on Smashwords itself and then you get a lower percentage for each of the book vendors that Smashwords send your information to such as Barnes and Noble, Overdrive, iBooks, LibraryDirect, Kobo, and Scribd to name a few. You can link the Amazon paperback copy to this listing as well as the audio version if you have it already. This information along with the eBook version that they create gets passed on to each of the services. You will have to change your copyright page to say “SMASHWORDS VERSION” as well as change the ISBN number as Amazon doesn’t give ISBN numbers for their version of eBooks. Since you are just linking the paperback and audio versions they stay the same.
until next time…
