Options for Self-Publishing

Print Books
POD Books
E-books
Audiobooks

Print Books

Print books have a great advantage in having been around for a long time. Print books make up around 94 percent the current book market. Here are some of the paths you can take to build and sell a print book. No matter what path you choose, you will need to hire your own indexer for your book. For information about how to do that, see Wordmaps Indexing FAQs!

Four ways to build a print book

1. Publish with a traditional, independent press, or a small press publisher. You will need to hire your own copyeditor, indexer, proofreader, and possibly your own publicist and marketing expert.
2. Put together an author-support team. Hire your own copyeditor, indexer, proofreader and possibly your own publicist and marketing expert. Hire your own editor, cover designer, layout specialist, printer, book binder, administrative assistant, and distributor too.
3. Do all or some of the above author-support team jobs yourself as you build and sell your own book.
4. Use a POD publisher for some of the above author-support functions.

To understand what traditional publishers do for authors, see Wordmaps Publisher Services Checklist. You will need to some of these things for yourself or  find professionals to do them for you.

The main functions of publishers are: book production and book distribution. Publishers market books too, but their marketing is very limited. Publishers specialize in coordinating all the services an author needs to build a book and sell it.

Publishers also do a variety of important administrative tasks such as registering copyright, getting an ISBN number, and sending your book to the Library of Congress for preliminary cataloging information (included at the bottom of your title page).

If you publish on your own, there are specially trained freelancers called Virtual Author’s Assistants (VAAs) who will do the same things editors at publishing companies do. VAAs also know how to set up book tours, do research for you, and get permissions for photographs or quotes.

POD Books

POD books have a great advantage if you don’t have space to keep a lot of copies of your book. Their drawback is that you will need to find readers for your book yourself. While POD books have some online distribution, they don’t usually have the wide range of outlets available to traditional print books or even to e-books.

POD publishers print each book “on demand.” They usually provide software for “typesetting” your book. Lest you think this is more work than going through a regular publisher, be aware that regular publishers vary greatly in the amount of typesetting they do. Many ask their authors for “camera ready” copy. In other words you do it yourself, and with your own software.

However, many POD publishers with special software for book production are limited in the support they offer authors. They truly are Do It Yourself when it comes to designing. They may limit you to very simple options for layout, illustrations, and your cover.

Some POD publishers market and distribute your work just as regular publishers do, but some do not. If they do not promote and distribute books, you will need to take care of these things or hire professionals to assist you.

Some POD publishers offer a variety of other services for authors, such as providing you with a free ISBN (international standard book number) and UPC (product code strip) for your books. Others do not, and you’ll need to pay for these things yourself. An ISBN and UPC is essential if you plan sell your book through bookstores and/or if you’re marketing to libraries.

For more information see “Is POD Right for Me?”

E-books

E-books have a great advantage in that you get to keep about 70% of what your book sells for in e-bookstores. But way more people buy print books right now. This, of course is changing. E-books are something you should consider seriously, especially if you plan to write more than one book.

Like POD publishers, e-book publishers have special software that helps you put together your book . The two protocols are Mobi (for the Kindle) and Epub (for Nook, the iPad and other brands)

Unlike POD publishers, most e-book publishers own their own distribution channel. In fact e-books are largely distribution-driven. The fastest growing market for e-books is now the mobile (cellphone) market! If you want, you can market your book to a wide variety of e-book distribution sources at the same time.

In general e-books require less assistance than print books to produce. However, e-book indexes are more complicated. E-books do not have pages. Therefore, extra work has to be done after your indexer is finished in order to make your index look like a typical book index. There are many tricks to typesetting an e-book. You will probably need some help from a digital formatting expert when putting one together.

Because the technology is new E-books have limitations print books do not. Photographs in digital form can only be so big. Other things commonly found in print books can’t yet be duplicated in an e-book. But the future is wide open. Many writers are exploring interactive apps for e-books they plan to publish for the iPad. E-books can even offer readers “augmented reality” by putting additional information about you and your book “in the margins” of your e-book. And at least as of now, a big plus for e-books is: no ads!

Click here for Wordmaps e-book FAQs

Audiobooks

There are two separate types of audiobooks:  commercial audiobooks and audiobooks for the blind/hearing impaired. Each requires a different product to create and listen to an audiobook.

Audiobooks for the blind and hearing impaired use a special protocol called Daisy and require an e-reader or software download via the Internet to hear them. Libraries in the United States have a program for distributing these kinds of e-readers and e-books to the blind and sight impaired.

The protocol that audiobooks for the blind and hearing impaired use allows for adding an index to the audiobook. The index is readable as a whole, although it is not searchable by voice command. However, a voice command using a term from the index in an e-reader for the blind or sight impaired will take the reader right to the paragraph that index term refers to.

Daisy is a powerful international protocol that lets readers flip from chapter to chapter, search for terms in the text and take a lot of other actions readers of print books can take.

Commercial audiobooks do not use the Daisy standard. As a result, most audiobooks by commercial publishers omit the index. And they must be read straight through. Most commercial audiobooks are fiction books.

According to Spoken Books Publishing, a quality commercial audiobook POD publisher, over 40 million audio books were sold last year.

It is easy to make either kind of audiobook. If you have an audience already lined up, you can quickly create and package an audiobook to sell to them. Otherwise, bookstores, both virtual and non-virtual, are your most likely distributor. Schools and public libraries are your primary market for both commercial audiobooks and audiobooks made for the blind and hearing impaired.

For the blind and hearing impaired, service organizations like the Lions Club and senior citizen organizations are interested in audiobooks, large print books or Braille books.

For a overview of publishing today see Wordmaps Author Options Mindmap