Are You Cut Out to be an Indie Publisher?

Let’s say your blogged book doesn’t garner enough readers to attract a traditional publisher or you simply would rather independently publish your book. Great! Or not. The experience you have self-publishing your book depends to a great extent on if you are cut out to be more than just a writer or blogger. Before you decide to self-publish, ask yourself if you are cut out to be an indie publisher.

Most writers and bloggers just want to write. To self-publish a book—ebook or pbook—you must wear many hats. You have to basically become a project manager; your book represents the project at hand. To complete the project—publishing your book—you will need to manage:

• Editors (likely more than one)
• Designers (possibly more than one)
• Printers

And you’ll need to manage a variety of details, such as:

• ISBN number
• Barcodes
• Copyright
• Metadata
• Uploading cover and interior designs to printers
• Printer registration
• Pricing
• And more…

As the publisher, you have control over your project—content, title, design, pricing, earning potential, promotion, etc. For some writers, this is a benefit. They enjoy the details and making decisions about their book, and they don’t mind paying to publish their work.

For others, self-publishing has no benefit. It simply makes them feel overwhelmed with too many new tasks and jobs to learn. And the extra work means they have less time to do what they do best: write.  Not only that, the expenditure can feel stressful; self-publishing can prove expensive.

Ebooks can prove less of a financial strain, but much of the same work is entailed to produce them. You still become a publisher as well as a writer.

All that said, in today’s ever more competitive publishing world, even agents are becoming self-publishing advocates. As they find it more and more difficult to find homes for their clients’ work in traditional publishing houses, some have begun offering “assisting self-publishing services” to those whose work they feel deserves to be published.

As you blog your book, therefore, think hard about your options. Work hard to build a readership that can, indeed, attract agents and publishers. If you do get “discovered,” that means you have a viable product—a successfully test marketed book idea. But even if that doesn’t happen, that fan base you create will form the foundation—the author platform—from which you can successfully launch your new publishing company when you release your blogged book.

Please nominate this blog for the Top 10 Self-Publishing Blogs at www.thefutureofink.com. Doing so is easy. Just click on this link and leave a comment. Include this url: https://howtoblogabook.com and your reason for believing this blog is one of the best self-publishing blogs round. Thanks so much.

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