This question is something that caught my attention because it's an interesting one. Find out what are the steps to self publish a book online as well as some tips that will help make self-publishing easier for you.
Today's question has three answers and the third answer is a secret you're going to want to stick around for. It will tell you the difference between the books that are put online that make money versus those that lose money.
So let's get into it. Today's question is, what to do to self publish your book online? Now, the person asking this question clearly is trying to figure out how do you get the book?
Now you've written a book of some sort, maybe it's a long one or maybe it's a short one. It may be fiction or nonfiction and you're trying to figure out what are the steps involved to get this book of yours online?
There are a lot of different options. We're just going to take a look at the basic flow that is necessary to succeed exactly at this goal. But first, check out my completely free Self-Publishing Checklist. It will get you started on your self-publishing journey right away.
So, what to do to self publish your book online? When I first started, I realized that this was completely doable. I had some people in the family and I heard of some other friends who had managed to get their book published and out onto Amazon.
I was completely amazed to see they were even making sales on these books. The idea was very exciting. I had some ideas I wanted to share with the world but how exactly to go about doing that?
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Well, for me, the first part was just getting information. I was seeing some Kindle books at the time that we're discussing this exact issue of what do you need to do to get it online? The reality is anything you start with is going to be challenging when you first get going.
But by simply following through the steps, I began to realize that this is actually a reasonable business opportunity that I completely underestimated. My results were much higher than I could possibly have imagined.
But I made a whole bunch of mistakes in getting my books online. That is what we're going to discuss in just a little bit. So, what to do to self publish your book online?
Well, here are the answers. The first is that you're going to need to edit your book. You can pay somebody on Fiverr to go about doing the editing for you but you want to make sure that all of the grammar mistakes are out of it.
Format The Book
I like to also use Grammarly and use the word itself in terms of its proofing tools to take a close look and see what mistakes are within the text itself. So we can get rid of those and eliminate them right out of the way.
The second is that we're going to format the book. I use a program called Jutoh to go about doing the formatting and putting it into the correct format. Where it's all broken down into chapters and subsections and such.
Then, the next step is to convert it. Now, it depends upon where it's going to go. I recommend you put it on to Kindle but you can do it in different formats.
We can do PDFs, we can put it as EPUB that distributes it for example through Smashwords. You can do it that way also for the PDF, it'll give us our softback and our hardback versions of the book.
Once you have the Kindle book version out, that gives us the ability to create audiobooks on ACX through Audible and iTunes. That will make it possible for people to listen to your book. So there's a whole series of formats that are available.
But we're going to convert it initially into the Mobi format. So we can get our book right away out onto the Amazon platform in Kindle. That was our first step.
Number two, the book title itself, and the keywords we are using help people find our book. You're going to need to know the right keywords. I use Kindle Spy to help me find the right keywords for my book.
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So that when people are doing searches, they're going to show up. It also was a key to showing me whether or not my book is going to be profitable. If nobody is searching on the keywords that my book is on, maybe this type of book simply isn't selling.
Kindle Spy gives me the ability to see whether the books in that keyword are selling. Then I can also just do a search on the keyword for the book itself and see how many books exist.
If there are not many books and lots of them are selling, then that tells me that this book is probably not profitable.
If there's not much selling or on the opposite, if there are not many books but these keywords have an awful lot of sales going through them, then we can see that this book is great. It's an underserved market so this already tells me from the beginning. The single mistake will cost you a lot of money.
Copy The Formatting
The second one is the cover. People judge books by their cover every day of the week. So you need to make sure your covers are looking like the covers of other best-selling books in your exact market.
So you'll just look at other covers and make sure yours is not too far off. And as for me, I use Fiverr to make fantastic amazing covers that have sold thousands and thousands of copies of books for me.
Then you're going to need the description that again comes back to what type of book you have. You can look at other bestsellers and don't just copy their description but copy the formatting in the general flow of their description and make it relevant to your book.
That will ensure that your readers also know what to expect in this type of book and you're delivering exactly what they want to expect. A high-quality book with a cover that looks just like what they're used to.
The description looks like it and it's on a keyword that we already know these books are selling. And that brings us to our secret answer of the day. Our third answer is if you want to break through the noise when publishing your book online, you're going to need to run ads against it.
I like to run Amazon ads against my books. And then the second thing is mass distribution. Like we were talking about before, there's a lot of different formats we can put the book into.
Once we have it in the PDF format, that gives us the ability then to take the book and run it through Lulu for our hardbacks, KDP Print for the softback books for free and Ingram Spark for additional even wider distribution.
The combination of these 3 paper distributions gives us an amazing reach. On the ebook distribution, we're going to use Mobi format and push it through the Kindle platform. We're going to put it in the EPB.
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And then run it through Smashwords to get it out in a lot of different formats. There are a lot of different distribution channels through Smashwords. And finally, once we have that Kindle format, we can then put it on to Audible so we'll have an audiobook format.
This insane level of distribution putting it out and as many channels of distribution as possible is going to ensure that we're going to get as many sales as possible for our book that we've put online.
So, what to do to self publish your book online? Go ahead and let me know below in the comments what you found? And check out my other blogs and videos, you will find more answers to your self-publishing questions.