Last week, I mentioned the harsh truth behind traditional house publishing, so that leads us into the harsh truth behind self-publishing! Many of you have no intention of publishing your book with a traditional house publisher. Instead, you want self-publish because there is no waiting game, you get to keep more of your writing rights, you know you have more control over the outcome and you’ll get a bigger royalty check from book purchases.
However, there are some cons to it such as it’s up to you to make all the sales (you don’t have a sales team unless you hire out), you have to come up with your own cover design, and do much of the manual work to put your book together.
I want to share with you my own personal story using Amazon’s CreateSpace, since that’s the way I published before and I know, for me, I will continue to publish this way.
Amazon has a nifty publisher that’s called CreateSpace. They publish thousands of books and they work well with Kindle Direct Publishing, which is another bonus to any author. And you know what the price is?
FREE! One hundred percent free! Yes, you can publish an ebook version of your book as well as publish a hardcopy of your book. FOR FREE!
So, how does it work?
When you are ready to publish, you will create an account with CreateSpace. Then you’ll create a New Project, in which you’ll be taken through a Step by Step Guided system. This system is so easy to use! As it guides you, it’ll explain exactly how to set up each step.
If you don’t have everything together (say your book cover), then you can save your project and come back to it later.
I want to mention how the royalty fee works. If you charge above $2.99+ for your book, you’ll receive 70% of royalty. If your book is $0.99-$2.99, you’ll receive a 35% royalty fee, which is automatically deposited into your account. Sweet, huh?
When you’re done with your book and it looks great inside of CreateSpace, all you have to do is wait 24-48 hours to have CreateSpace approve your book and then woola, you’re done and it’s out in the world!
The beauty that I personally LOVE about CreateSpace is that it gives you a price that you pay, as the author, per book when you’re ordering books for book signings, book giveaways and more. For example, I could buy my book, during its first launch of Write Your Book in No Time for $2.15/copy. The public paid between $7-$8 per copy.
Because it’s print on demand, you can order as many books as you want at any given time. There’s no minimum and it’s not like Traditional Publishing where they give you thousands of books to sell. Nope, if you only need 10 books, then you can order 10 books.
With shipping, my book came out to be a little bit over $3/copy. I was selling it for $5/copy before I up the price to $8/copy.
What are some things you, as a writer, have to provide in CreateSpace? You’ll have to make sure your book is clean of errors, of course. Many of you may be great writers, but even the greatest of all writers will miss a word or two in their own book. I would suggest having someone else edit your book to ensure that there is another pair of eyes looking at it.
You have to write your bio and your book description on the back. Once again, write it and then have someone else look over it to ensure you’re giving your soon-to-be audience an idea of what your book is all about.
Then you have to be responsible for your own book cover art. There is a feature inside of the CreateSpace Guide where you can create your own book cover. However, if you want to stand out and be seen, then using the generic template isn’t going to make you look much different.
My suggestion? Hire a book cover designer to design a cover that both captures and captivates your audience to want to read your book. In the next section, I’m going to talk about what I used personally for when I published this book the first time.
While self-publishing is a lot more work due to you making sure you have your book cover, have an error-free book, and more, it can seem daunting. But if you just go step by step and day by day, you can certainly get it all done in a timely manner. Then you’ll have to do all the marketing after your book is on the market, which means unlike traditional house, you have no one helping you out. So it’s up to you on getting your work out into the world by yourself, unless you hire a marketing team.
But for me, self-publishing has changed my life and the way I write my books, so I hope this post and my last post is a way to compare and contrast the two publishing sides and see which one is the best fit for you and your book.
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