Friday, November 2, 2012

Guest post by Austin Rinehart - Self-Publishing Resources

Posted By Sue Collier on November 1, 2012

Getting to those busy traditional publishing agents is not easy at all. Though there are some of them interested in discovering new unpublished authors, the reality is they only take about one in a thousand manuscripts that come their way, and even if you manage to get to one of them, in most cases you?ll have to give up a lot of your rights if you want to get published. Having this in mind it?s no surprise self-publishing has become more of an option for different authors trying to reach their audience.

In spite the public opinion, self-publishing can be easy and you?ll certainly enjoy the satisfaction of having control over every element of the book design, production and sales process. Here are few things you need to know and be prepared for if you decide to self-publish your book:

Define your goal for your book. Nonfiction niche books focused on a certain audience are quite popular lately. Religious books, indie romances, erotica novels are well positioned on the market. What is the audience you target? If your book is about something your family and friends are only interested in, you can certainly go well with a regular self-publishing company, but if your aspirations are bigger you?ll have to be more careful when choosing.

The book has to be good. If you want to sell a product it has to be of good quality. The same applies for books. If you are serious about self-publishing make sure you?ll offer quality content, professionally edited and with an attractive cover. The title has to be unique. This is important for you to get the most SEO (search engine optimization) for your book. You want your title among the first results on search engines and if it is similar to others the chances are your book will get buried in all the other products. These elements can really make a difference in terms of sales, particularly if you want to first try out the self-publishing waters with an e-book.

Consider going digital. The e-book market is unpredictable and constantly evolving and changing, but on the other hand producing an e-book is a lot easier, especially when it comes to formatting and cover design, and since you won?t have printing costs you can price it much less than a paperback which means it will be a lot easier to sell it. Most self-published print books are $13.99 and up, while the majority of indie e-books cost $0.99 to $5.99. If all goes well, you can easily do both, print and digital.

Self-publishing is easy, but now everybody is doing it. When self-publishing you can choose the size of your book, format your writing so it can fit that size, convert it to PDF, create an arresting cover in Photoshop, upload everything and send it to the self-publisher you chose, and if you formatted everything as supposed to, you are all done ? your book can officially be published. Because all this appears easy, now everyone is a writer. This makes the competition harder, though large part of these authors are charlatans, crooks and a bunch of others in between, which lowers the quality of the self-published books. Still, every few months some of them manage to hit big.

The odds are against you, so prepare for a chance your book won?t sell. Success stories are there to inspire and motivate, but you can?t get carried away and go quit your job just because you think your book is a masterpiece. Even if it is, the chances are it won?t immediately fly off the shelves. The statistics say that the average self-published print book sells about few hundred copies. Set your expectations lower and your work standards higher to increase your chances of success.

Self-publishing is a rapidly emerging industry. If you have talent for writing and are willing to work hard to be able to compete and make money you can definitely consider entering this market.

Austin Rinehart is the senior writer on Papersconsulting.com [ASHLEY?PLEASE ADD HYPERLINK], married and have two lovely adult daughters. Looking for opportunities to publishing on various topics such as internet trends, science researches, strategies of life improving and etc.

Source: http://selfpublishingresources.com/guest-post-by-austin-rinehart-what-you-need-to-know-about-self-publishing/

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