Are You Planning to Self-publish?

Every author wants to be acknowledged in their career. With every books being finished, the next thing that comes to mind is planning to self-publish. Self-publishing is an effort in which the author must write, publish and market their book all by themselves. I guess every author should ask these important questions: What are the pro’s and con’s when you self-publish? What are the steps to self-publishing? What are the lower and upper hand?

When an author wants to self-publish, first he needs to write a book – of course that is no brainer – but it doesn’t end there. You have to publish your book so that the world will know about it. Because publishing sometimes cost too much, many authors nowadays go for self-publishing.

Here are some important things you need to consider when you self-publish:

1. Planning aspects for the book including marketing plan

If you have written a book, there should also be a plan that comes in your mind on how you would market your book. After publishing your book, you must then create a marketing plan so you can effectively market your book.

2. ISBN

This is the one of the most important part in publishing where the issuance is country specific, and is tailored for each country’s national goals. It is the publisher code. A publisher may have different allotted publisher numbers. There also may be more than one group identifier used in a country. This might occur if a popular identifier has used up all of its numbers. Remember; ISBNs are not transferable so the owner of the ISBN is the publisher and can decide where the book is printed.

3. Cover

This is where you decide on how the images will appear in your book. You have to decide from colours, font, pictures, size and layout. It also includes the thickness and quality of the paper that are to be used. Considering the taste of the reader, how would it capture them by just looking at your book? The cover of your book should say so much about what is inside it because the truth is, people do judge the book by its cover.

4. Distribution Channels

Distribution channels determine the success and failure of the publishing of a book. If taken with effective marketing strategy, the book will easily gain popularity. You should really plan well your marketing campaigns, pricing and sales process of your book.

5. Caution

It’s wise to proceed with caution even you have already done self-publishing in the past. Although there are many honest companies to help you self-publish your book, still there are some whose sole purpose is to get money from you and just gain profit from you.

There are two types of companies to avoid and these are Vanity Publishers and Subsidy Publishers.

• Vanity Publisher – they spoil on the vanity of writers who want to see their book published at any cost. These publishers will oblige you to spend beyond reasons. Their price is and they provide nothing to assist you with marketing your book and have no enthusiasm in the process since they are only for profit. They will want to profit from you even if you do not sell a single book.
• Subsidy Publisher – whereas different from Vanity Publishers, the charge to the writer is still quite imminent. They do publish the book under their own imprint but the cost to the writer is still excessive and precludes much profit even if you do sell some of the books. They also distribute the book to some extent under their imprint but they maintain much of the rights to the book and limit your control significantly.

With these pointers that serve as a guideline, I hope you could continue carrying on your plans to self-publish your book. Keep in mind that in every bestseller has a commendable author behind its cover. An author who made the right judgment of taking a daring feat of planning to self-publish is the one who succeeds.