Self Publishing

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Self Publishing

Questions? Comments?

How To Publish Books and eBooks

I've moved the Self Publishing 2.0 blog to http://www.fonerbooks.com/selfpublishing.

You can subscribe there or through http://feeds.feedburner.com/SelfPublishing20.

In response to a recent comment, I've made the original archives, 485 posts worth, searchable with a Google appliance. The search box will be on the bottom of every page of the new blog, or you can access it directly here.

The Internet brings many new challenges and opportunities to writers, whether they are aspiring first-timers or published authors. The creator of this site is thankful for being able to make a living as a non-fiction writer, and sought to even out the karma by giving something back. I've been writing about publishing for the past decade, and the articles and blog posts on this site are based on my personal experiences self publishing, attendance at industry conferences, my years as a trade author and LOTS of correspondence. If you're just looking for a definition of self publishing, I'd suggest Wikipedia.

For readers who haven't followed my blog over the years, I started out self publishing in the mid-90's, and then jumped on a trade contract from McGraw-Hill when they offered me a $5,000 advance. One contract led to another and I eventually wrote five books for McGraw-Hill, which sold well over 100,000 copies and paid the bills for a number of years. During the period I was earning good money on royalties and five figure advances, I stopped working at building my own publishing business and spent three or four years translating the complete works of my great-grandmother from Hebrew to English. Her married name was Sarah Foner, and that where the name of this website and my publishing company, Foner Books, originated.

By this time, I had become obsessed with Amazon sales ranks, and I added a couple articles about publishing I had published elsewhere to this site. Then I got serious about self publishing again, and self published three books in three years, one of which is still selling today. By 2004, I was making the majority of my income from self publishing, and the last few years, my average earnings have been around the same as a tenured professor at a good private college. That's not bad:-)

Today, my publishing income is divided around 50/50 between printed books and electronic revenue. The electronic revenue is all a result of my publishing articles and excerpts online and letting people read them for free. In return, some people purchase eBooks from me or paper books through Amazon Associates, which pays a commission on sales. I also run advertising on some pages, it seems to do best when people are primarily interested in purchasing goods or services related to what I'm writing about.

I can save you a lot of time reading through my publishing book or the half a million words about publishing on this site by giving you a brief take on good self publishing right here. If you want to publish a book for your family, or because you can't get a trade publisher to do it, or because you figure having gone to the trouble of writing a novel you should see it in print, just pay somebody. It's not worth starting your own publishing company for the sake of printing one title you have no intention of actively marketing. Are there any exceptions? Sure, but you'll have to read through a lot of blog posts to find them.

If, on the other hand, you want to self publish for a good living, starting your own publishing business is the best path. The main challenge for self publishers is not getting the book printed, designed, or edited. Do what you can yourself and hire contractors to do the rest. I hire an editor and a number of proofreaders for every book I publish and they still have mistakes. If you hold out for the perfect book, you'll never make it to print. The challenge for the self publisher is selling the books. Without effective marketing, most self published books will never sell a dozen copies beyond family and friends. You need to sell many thousands of copies a year to make any sort of a living. See my online guide for how to sell books.

What this means, is you, as a self publishing author, need to write books that are marketable. That means doing market research to determine whether or not there's enough potential demand for the book you are writing, and figuring out if you, not some marketing guru but YOU, have the ability to market the title. The fastest way to learn that about yourself, especially if you have limited marketing experience, is to read as much as you can stomach from authors like myself who make a living self publishing and write about it, and figure out if you can realistically expect to do something similar.

While I've experimented with all sorts of book marketing over the years, my sole promotion effort these days is writing for my websites, which draw around 10,000 visitors a day to read articles and book excerpts. Obviously, it took a number of years to build up to this point, but the playing field is even and the results are very easy to monitor. Most importantly, I was making a living with a tiny fraction of the number of visitors when the only material on this website was book excerpts from the books I had available. Part of the reason I have so much "unpublished" writing on the web is I use it as a test bed to see whether there's enough interest to go through the work of authoring a complete book and doing the production work. In my role as the acquisitions editor for Foner Book, I have no trouble turning down my own book ideas if the feedback isn't what I expect.

That's my approach in a nutshell. If you want to give my publishing book a shot, I updated it in 2008, and it's available on Amazon (print or Kindle) or you can buy it direct from me as a paperback or eBook.