PUBLISH A BOOK

One of the best ways you can start to earn a living online is to publish a quality ebook. I know you may be thinking that you’re not a writer, but I disagree. Are you passionate about anything? Have you gone through some tough times and have overcome? If your answer is yes, that’s your starting point. Believe me, there are many people out there waiting to hear about your experiences because people are looking to be inspired. You could write about your passion, a hobby, or share your personal journey to give others hope and encouragement. Just start with a pen and paper in hand, and begin to write down your daily experiences. Before long, you’ll have the rough draft of your book. After that, there are many people eager to assist you in putting it all together. 

HOW TO PUBLISH YOUR FIRST BOOK, FAST!

Trying to publish an ebook? No Worries! It’s not as difficult as some people would like you to believe. Let me ask you a simple question: do you really need a hundred or a thousand and one publishing tips to release a quality book? To me, anything more than ten tips makes my head spin. Who really has time to go through so many things, trying to implement each tip? It’s not feasible. If you are anything like I am, I want to enjoy the writing process—not get overwhelmed by it. To make it easy for you to publish your ebook quickly, I have given you some real simple and straightforward tips below. If you follow these steps, you'll have a good book out in no time.

SIMPLE TIPS:

1. WRITE GREAT CONTENT

What you write about is entirely up to you. But don’t just write about anything because you want to make money publishing a book. Rather, write about what you love or are passionate about. Also, write from your heart and be genuine, and as much as possible, try and incorporate your own experiences to help readers relate to you.

2. FIND A GOOD EDITOR and PROOFREADER

A competent editor is important because no matter how good of a writer you may be, it’s just not possible for you to catch all your errors, or to fully critique your own work. To be honest with you, this was the part that was more concerning to me because almost every single article I read told me how expensive it was. And it can be, but you can still find a good editor who is willing to work within your budget. It cost me a total of $400.00 to have my 238 + page book edited, and in the end, it was 167 pages. If you want something more affordable, check out this editorial service.

3. GET YOUR BOOK PROFESSIONALLY FORMATTED

This process doesn’t have to be complicated. In my opinion, it’s not worth the trouble of trying to do it yourself, unless of course, you know what you are doing. Otherwise, use this service and pay only $5.00 to get it done. If you are not totally satisfied, you can request as many revisions without paying more. In my case, I requested about two revisions that were very minor issues with a paragraph. In the end, my book was professionally formatted to a MOBI version that was accepted by Amazon the first time I uploaded it. 

4. GET A COVER PROFESSIONALLY MADE

I’m sure you have heard the saying “don’t judge a book by its  cover.” Well, in this case, your book will be judged by its cover. People are visual so an attractive cover can be used as a bait to entice readers to look inside your book and then hopefully purchase it. But if you have a poorly designed cover, no matter how great your content, very few people will want to take a second glance at it. Again, this doesn’t have to be an expensive undertaking. I got mine done here for $5.00, and I was very happy with the results. Take a look at my covers—both the flat version, which you'll need to upload on Amazon and the 3D image to use elsewhere.

5. LOG ON TO AMAZON

When you have completed steps 1-4 above, it's time to log on to Amazon. If you already have an account just follow the very easy steps; answer the questions; upload your files; preview and hit publish if you are satisfied. Amazon said it takes about 72 hours for it to go live in the kindle store, but mine was less than a day. If you decide to enroll in KDP select at that time, choose that option then. I didn’t enroll in KDP at first because I wanted to have the freedom to distribute my book through other channels like Smashwords, or draft2digital. However, after several weeks, I decided to give KDP a try and it has been promising so far.

When you have finished publishing your ebook, use Createspace to get a paperback version. But don’t use amazon’s platform to do it. I tried that and ran into problems and ended up going straight over to Createspace. To publish through CreateSpace, you’ll need to get a PDF version of both your book and cover. Keep in mind, though, that you have to format the book to a PDF file first before the cover is made, because whoever is doing the cover would need to know the number of pages for the book. After that, you can make the cover. To get my PDF file, I choose a trim size of 6x9, which seems to be the most popular. It took about 2 days for it to start selling in the CreateSpace store and on Amazon. Remember to always make your paperback version more expensive than the ebook version to offset printing cost. Overall, it cost me a total of $10.00 on Fiverr for a CreateSpace ready book, with very few revision requests. Take a look at the finished product below.

6. PROMOTE YOUR BOOK

Just because you have published a book on Amazon doesn’t mean it will automatically get noticed. You have to submit your book to promotion sites to reach your target readers. Go here to find out where to submit your books for promotion—all for free.

Hope your experience is rewarding!  

For more about my newly released book A diamond out of the rough: Uncover the treasure in you go here https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MXSOJC6 

These posts may contain affiliate links but they are only services or products I have used or trust.