Chris A. Baird | November 5, 2020
Where To Self Publish eBooks?

Publishing your book the first time can be challenging especially in figuring out what is the best place to put your books on. Learn where to self publish eBooks as well as some helpful tips to make self-publishing easier for you.

Today's question has three answers and you are going to want to stick around for the third answer. Because it is a secret as to how to avoid the one mistake that most self-publishers make when choosing the right platform to publish on.

So, let's get into it. The question that was sent to me today was, where to self publish eBooks? This is an excellent question because when you are first getting started, there are a lot of options available.

You already know that some of these options may result in your book to be selling a lot of copies. Finding a huge audience to work from and other options are going to cost you a lot of money. They won't earn you anything.

So we will use time, energy, and money to self-publish these books into our eBook format. Only to discover that we are not making any money off of it. We will get disappointed and it will stop us from continuing with the process where it is completely unnecessary if we do the right steps.

Check out this related article: How To Self Publish A Book Wikihow?

Before we get into the answers on where to self publish ebooks, grab a copy of my absolutely free Self-Publishing Secrets Checklist. You're not going to want to miss it because it's going to make sure you are not skipping any of the key steps to winning at the self-publishing game. So go ahead and check that out.

Let me tell you a little bit about my story. When I first got started, I understood something very clearly which was that there isn't a silver bullet of one location. Rather, there is a lot of locations that you can put your books on.

I was looking at the time with Smashwords, Draft2Digital, Kindle with Amazon KDP, Createspace, Lulu, Ingram Spark, Kobo, Apple Books, and all sorts of places that tempt us to use our time to get our books processed out there. And that brought me to quite a bit of an overload.

I was feeling too much stress associated with having to make this tough decision of where to self publish ebooks? Where should I get my book out first? This fatigue starts to kick in when you are trying to make a decision and you don't know if it's the right decision for you.

It can make the process very heavy and that's where I was left. However, I ran across somebody in one of the forums on Facebook that I was in, on the self-publishing side. They commented to me that I needed to quit trying everything at once.

One Area At A Time

They told me that this was the key issue to my failure. It was the fact that as long as I was trying lots of stuff at the same time and not feeling the results and not getting any books out there that this was a bigger problem. So, I needed to just focus on one area at a time in one particular platform.

For me, that platform was Amazon Kindle using Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP. I set up an account and I got my first book out. It was not making that many sales but it was a start.

I was just excited to see that there was money flowing at all. That people were interested in the books that I was putting on the market. What happens is we start to see the results come through.

We make changes then we add another platform to where we are pushing our books. Then we continue this process over and over. So, winning is not in one area but the combination of multiple areas for which we are slowly expanding through time.

It is exactly where we are putting our books so that we don't end up being overwhelmed. At the same time, we don't end up getting our accounts closed or frozen. Amazon is known to do that even Facebook was freezing ad accounts for people as well all over the place.

Check out this related article: Self Publishing On Amazon In 2020 + What You NEED To Know!

This is maybe going to be the new normal in some ways. Like you try to run ads and Amazon suddenly will not let me run ads against some of my books. It may be because the titles have a promise or something that they don't believe I'm allowed to make for whatever reason.

So we see that suddenly the revenue can start to drop. So, we want to make sure that we are taking the time necessary to get our books onto multiple platforms. But let's get into the specific answers.

The first thing is you are going to want to get your book onto Kindle Direct Publishing. It's the first place we want to get our eBooks out. It's easy to do and we have the largest audience and I get more sales on my eBooks through Kindle.

The next is not the eBook front but you should go to KDP Print and ACX Audible. On the eBook front, we have a couple of other options. One is Ingram Spark but you are going to need to have an ISBN to get it out there.

That is going to cost you money on the eBook front. Putting an EPUB, you could also do it on Lulu though I would only recommend using them for hardback books and not the eBooks. You can take your books and throw them through Smashwords and that gets it to a ton of different sites.

Don't Get Overwhelmed

The maximum distribution is my personal favorite but the sales are not as good as Kindle sales. So you are going to need to keep that in mind. You are going to need an EPUB version which I use the program Jutoh to ensure that all of my versions are great for the different platforms.

You could also try Draft2Digital. I'm not a big fan and there is less distribution. Another place is PublishDrive and I'm not a huge fan also because they want to charge you every month for the books that you're going to be putting out.

I definitely would not try to individually put my digital eBook version onto the different sites. I would use an aggregator and I recommend you try Smashwords once you have got your Kindle version out. But do not try them all at the same time.

Where to self publish ebooks? The secret answer of today which is also the biggest failure it is that don't try multiple areas at the same time. Slow and steady wins the race. This is very true when it comes to your Kindle Publishing.

So, you are going to want to pay a lot of attention to what exactly you're doing when it comes to Kindle Publishing. To make sure that your books are hitting as large of an audience as possible. So that you are not getting overwhelmed by trying to put your books onto too many platforms way too fast.

Check out this related article: Self Publishing Lulu VS Amazon?

This is a huge mistake that many beginning self-publishers and sometimes the advanced self-publishers get into. Don't try too much stuff at the same time. Also, you can hire out people to do this work for you.

I have a series of virtual assistants who work with me to make sure that the books can get published without me having to do all of the steps for each of the platforms. I have them do most of the steps and then I would just simply have access to the account itself and to put the book out onto the market.

So this is another little trick once you are an intermediate or advanced self-publisher that you are going to want to pay attention to. It avoids overwhelm but also gives you that reach of getting your books to as many listeners, viewers, or readers as possible.

Have you felt overwhelmed in choosing the platform? If you have felt overwhelmed in this process, write "Yes" below in the comments. If you have never experienced that, write "No".

I really want to hear from you and see what you have been experiencing. Check out my other blogs and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}