Featured: Self-Publishing an E-Book

For many writers, publishing their own book for sale is a life goal, something to work towards. Publishing can be a laborious task and often, many people don’t get the chance to go through the motions involved in getting a book published into print. For those who don’t have the time or the resources to publish to print, there is another option: e-book publishing. Compared to the more strung-out processes of going through a publisher, self-publishing your own book for a format such as Kindle or other PDF versions can be a fairly easy — and pride-inducing! — task. There are a few simple things that you need to know, but publishing your own book could be as easy as snapping your fingers.

Choosing a Distributing Platform

The first thing to do when deciding on self-publishing an e-book (aside from writing and editing!) is to choose a distributing platform. There are many different platforms that you can choose online to help you. Although some will charge you initially for distributing your book, there are others that will take a small fee from any sales of your book that you make. These platforms normally have a free sign-up and upload feature, and only take their cut of the profits.

Some of the distributing platforms that you can use include:

Kindle Direct Publishing — Kindle Direct Publishing is a tool that allows you to publish your book to Amazon’s Kindle store. This service is delightfully simple to use — it even has a convertor that changes your manuscript from Microsoft Word format into a Kindle-friendly publication. The site itself comes with easy-to-work instructions and hints and tips to help you get word out of there. The standard royalty rates behind publishing through Kindle Direct Publishing depend on the list price that you choose, but tend to be 35% for smaller totals and 70% for anything over €/$ 2.99 or £1.99.

CreateSpace — CreateSpace is, again, incredibly easy to use. After signing up for an account, you are given options such as a cover creator and a way of converting your novel into e-book format. In addition to offering e-book services via the Kindle store, CreateSpace also allow for independent physical distribution. CreateSpace also have a handy calculator that you can use to calculate the royalties expected by distributing your e-book through their service.

Draft2Digital — Draft2Digital distribute to a number of e-stores, and like the other two choices, they also have a convertor for Word formats. They tend to offer a slightly better royalty rate than the other two options, and will also distribute to more areas. The only catch with Draft2Digital is that all prices must be entered in USD, which can be off-putting for those of us using other currencies.

It is important to look thoroughly at all of your options when choosing a digital distributor. Think about things such as how much you want to charge for your e-book (although most options nowadays will give you the option to choose and change your own prices) and where you want to sell it. Also look carefully at any copyright that the distributor may change or alter — you want to keep all of your copyright if absolutely possible.

Once you’ve decided who you’re going to go with, you’re ready to start preparing your final draft for publication!

Final Checks — Editing

Before putting your work anywhere, you should ensure it’s your best. One of the most basic checks to do before you commit to publishing is a basic spelling and grammar check. After all, nobody wants to read a published book that’s full of basic errors! Go through your manuscript with a fine-toothed comb and be ruthless — anything that doesn’t work or fit, change. Your best work needs to be exactly that — your best.

Even if you think you’ve caught everything and don’t have any errors throughout, get somebody else to have a read through it for errors. Employ the use of a beta reader or editor — Mibba’s Editing Hub has a list of people on Mibba who are willing to help out with any editing, if you’re struggling to find somebody — and ensure that they read through a few times in order to spot any mistakes that you might have missed.

Another thing to ensure when editing is that there are no discrepancies in storyline or characterisation. Again, employing the help of somebody else can be invaluable in this stage. Often if you’ve been working on something for so long, you miss little things that are inconsistent with the storyline, or you know a character so well that you don’t notice them doing something unusual as it seems completely natural to you.

Finally, an important thing to remember is that if you do employ the help of somebody else, listen to what they say! Sometimes we’re too proud of our work to accept constructive criticism — being proud isn’t a bad thing, either — but if somebody points it out while reading, it’s likely that people reading your book after buying it will notice the same errors. Don’t take what somebody says as an insult — oftentimes, constructive criticism is as important as blinding praise!

Final Checks — Copyright

As much as looking into copyright for your own story is a good thing, it is also important to remember that when publishing something, you have to be careful of copyright for any other items you may use. For instance, one of the easiest copyright breaches you can commit centres around the image you use for your cover. On Mibba, we tend to use images found off of the internet in layouts, which while we’re not earning money for is fine, but if you’re going to be earning money off of your book, you need to have permission to use any images you may want. Oftentimes, this can either be done by contacting the owner of the photograph and requesting that you be able to use it — this is something that is entirely up to the discretion of the original photographer or artist and they have every right to say no if they don’t want their work associated with your work. Oftentimes, however, authors will pay for a cover to be professionally created. If you have money to spare, this may be an avenue to look down as a professionally-created cover may look more appealing to potential readers.

In a similar vein, it is important to look at your story title. If you published it here on Mibba before you chose to publish it to e-book format, were you using a song title or lyric? It may be worth looking up alternate titles or finding out the legalities behind using a part of a song in a story title.

There is a lot to think about when it comes to e-publishing, and a lot more than this article can hold. If you’re seriously thinking about e-publishing a book, ensure that you do your research thoroughly before you do choose to do so! However, don't be scared away by the research — having a book published online is a massive achievement for many, and it could just lead to a blossoming career!

Special thanks to losing control. and cleopatra. for editing!

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