Self-publishing with amazon
Although I am not allowed to send my book to other publishers while I'm entered into Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Contest, I can use Amazon's services to Self-Publish, which I have decided to do with my own novel.
There are a couple very important points to take into consideration to watch out for costs and to still produce a professional looking end product when you upload your finished novel.
Besides getting your story written and edited, which is a subject for an entirely different
write-up. This write is focused more on the specifics you need to focus on
for getting your story turned into that finished product, which you will be
then using Amazon's tools to upload.
Before you even begin the createspace.com process, I would recommend determining the design you
want for the cover of your book. I believe this is so important because of
two things:
First, because for most of us this is a skill we will need to rely on another person to complete this, and the time and money it will take will depend on when we can complete the process
of publishing our story.
Second, because we should have at least the outlines of our website determined before our
book is published, and the art for the cover of our book is an essential element needed to make our website really stand out and promote our story.
I went ahead and found my artist at http://www.deviantart.com/ Just by going over artists websites and
profiles you get an excellent idea of the different types of art available for your story, and normally you can see the going rate of what each artist is charging for the work they are doing. Also,
you have the perfect medium to communicate with them and arrange for the work that you would like for
your cover.
Typical practice is for you to explain what you are looking for and a general price to be discussed. Once that has been determined, normally you work with the artist to get a rough sketch of what you
would like to be drawn. The artist sends you the rough sketch for your approval to proceed with the final image, and you pay half of the cost at this time. The last half is due at the time the artist has finished the
piece to both your satisfaction. You get full rights over the image for your website and book and to do as you like, and they get the option to post their artwork on their website.
Prices vary greatly between artists, so it really is important to do your homework. I did my
cover with Leo Black http://dleoblack.deviantart.com/ who was a great artist to work with. He made me feel comfortable with making changes and brought my image to life. Not to mention, I think his artwork
is incredible.
Once you have your cover finished for your book. I suggest getting your website created and setup if you do not already have one. I used www.weebly.com for my page. As long as you have your own
content ready to go, aka artwork, everything else is drag and drop for the entire design. No other special software is needed and they link automatically with Twitter and Facebook and other websites to automate your posts and help you establish your web presence.
This is important since you will be doing your own marketing.
Yes, let me restate this one more time. You will be doing your own marketing. Whether or not you are an established author that is published with a large publishing house or self-publishing from scratch. It is your creativeness that will get you known to your audiences. This means you need to have your
own website, your own blog, your writer's Facebook, twitter and etc presence and your own email address. Once you have all of this, you are going to put this in the informational part of your book at the beginning or end to direct your fans to your website.
Now that you have these key components in place, we can discuss the self-publishing aspect
on Amazon.
After creating your account on https://www.createspace.com/ you can begin building your book. One of the very first questions they ask you is do you want your own ISBN number or do
you want to use one of Amazon's own
ASIN numbers.
Initially I thought I had to have an ISBN number to get my first book created world wide, but that is really
not necessary. Also, if you're not careful it can be a very expensive prospect.
If you choose to get an ISBN number, it is important to understand what that means. First, the good part is that if someone wants to look up your exact novel they can go to an ISBN site and search for your exact book. Interesting enough, if you get an ASIN number from Amazon for free there are websites for searching out your ASIN number to find exactly your novel. If you buy your ISBN directly from Amazon it is expensive. In my case it was $125 for one number.
Sounds great, you now have your ISBN and you can upload your novel as a Mass Market Paperback
book, hardcover book and an Ebook with your ISBN, right? Wrong. Your one ISBN is only good for one of those book. Each type of print or ebook layout of the same book could use its own ISBN. At $125 a pop that could turn into a lot of money.
Interesting enough, Amazon offers ISBN's for you to buy from http://www.myidentifiers.com which sells, at this time, a set of 10 ISBN's for $250. This is a much better deal than Amazon's and only requires a little knowledge on your part. But, before you take the plunge to buy your ISBN's, let me point out a few other interesting bits of fact.
If you change from Amazon to another seller like https://www1.ingramspark.com or https://www.nookpress.com/ or a bunch of other websites. Although your ISBN should work for whomever you are publishing through, it really doesn't. I'm not stating that I fully understand it, but to change your ISBN over to the new company that is offering your books for sale requires some major
paperwork. From everything I have heard and researched about this subject. It is simpler to just use a new ISBN for the new company and the same book you're trying to sell.
After making the decision to buy one ISBN for $125 (and not the 10 for $250), I am now questioning how necessary it is to have an ISBN. Why not use each service's free or cheap numbering code they
are using like Amazon's ASIN number? As I further prepare my hardback book I will do additional research on this option, but for now I would argue that buying an ISBN number is a waste of time when your self-publishing. It is an extra expense that is not needed if you're wanting people to buy your
book directly from Amazon USA, Amazon Europe or the Create Space Estore.
There was also an option on Amazon for Bookstores and Online Retailers and Create Space Direct, which is the option to sell to Amazon's competitors and give physical bookstores and other Online Retailers the option to buy your book directly from Amazon. Although this sounds like an
awesome option for Self-Publishing authors, in reality this is not a choice these companies are going to make when your a new author. Possibly an option when you're very famous, but I would argue it makes more sense to go directly with each company directly if you are self-publishing and have complete rights to your novel.
What I noticed is that my book cost went from $8 and change to $12 and change in cost for a market that will not normally decide to buy my book or carry my book initially.
This means that your competitiveness on Amazon is dramatically reduced.
Your ability to compete against the other professional books being published by publishers is blown out of the water. From my research, many of the professional published books range between $8.99 to $12.99. Some even dip down to $6.99 and $7.99 which is not possible to compete against when your self-publishing with Amazon, since your book cost to produce is already in the $8 and change range.
The way for you to be competitive is to keep your costs down as much as possible and do as much of the work yourself. By doing this you can keep the price of your book down to an extreme minimum and still sell competitively. Remember, a known author going through a publishing company are only getting a few cents for each physical book they publish. Publishing houses get most of the money on the sale of a book because they need to pay for their professional services they offer their writers.
In this way I can usually beat or at the worst meet the price of a professionally publishing house and still make more money on each book sale than what the author is making by going through a traditional publishing house. Traditional publisher houses have more options for getting their authors to be recognized, but with social media sites and the internet, there are a lot of way for the self-publishing author to get the word out about their book.
I also think many first time authors believe that should make a lot more money for every book they sale, This belief causes many new authors problems in marketing their books. If you follow the logic on how professional publishing houses make their money on physical book sales. You realize they are banking their sales on selling a large number of books at an average price. From what I've researched, If you're
making three cents a book on physical media then you are making industry average on royalties as an author.
With self-publishing physical books you can easily get that percentage up to seven or ten cents per book and still match the prices of the professional publishing houses.
Ebook sales are even more money. You will make more actual money per book on your ebook sales in comparison to physical book sales. With ebook sales, self-publishers are ahead of the game on making money per book and keeping their sales below the cost of traditional publishing houses ebook sales. You can easily get your sales up to 54 cents an ebook and still be competitively priced against the prices being sold of the larger publishing houses. This is because as a self-publisher we have done the majority of the work and marketing ourselves and are now using Amazon as the outlet to sell our books.
The next option that you will have is preparing your "internal documents"
----------------I will continue this write-up another evening--------------------------
There are a couple very important points to take into consideration to watch out for costs and to still produce a professional looking end product when you upload your finished novel.
Besides getting your story written and edited, which is a subject for an entirely different
write-up. This write is focused more on the specifics you need to focus on
for getting your story turned into that finished product, which you will be
then using Amazon's tools to upload.
Before you even begin the createspace.com process, I would recommend determining the design you
want for the cover of your book. I believe this is so important because of
two things:
First, because for most of us this is a skill we will need to rely on another person to complete this, and the time and money it will take will depend on when we can complete the process
of publishing our story.
Second, because we should have at least the outlines of our website determined before our
book is published, and the art for the cover of our book is an essential element needed to make our website really stand out and promote our story.
I went ahead and found my artist at http://www.deviantart.com/ Just by going over artists websites and
profiles you get an excellent idea of the different types of art available for your story, and normally you can see the going rate of what each artist is charging for the work they are doing. Also,
you have the perfect medium to communicate with them and arrange for the work that you would like for
your cover.
Typical practice is for you to explain what you are looking for and a general price to be discussed. Once that has been determined, normally you work with the artist to get a rough sketch of what you
would like to be drawn. The artist sends you the rough sketch for your approval to proceed with the final image, and you pay half of the cost at this time. The last half is due at the time the artist has finished the
piece to both your satisfaction. You get full rights over the image for your website and book and to do as you like, and they get the option to post their artwork on their website.
Prices vary greatly between artists, so it really is important to do your homework. I did my
cover with Leo Black http://dleoblack.deviantart.com/ who was a great artist to work with. He made me feel comfortable with making changes and brought my image to life. Not to mention, I think his artwork
is incredible.
Once you have your cover finished for your book. I suggest getting your website created and setup if you do not already have one. I used www.weebly.com for my page. As long as you have your own
content ready to go, aka artwork, everything else is drag and drop for the entire design. No other special software is needed and they link automatically with Twitter and Facebook and other websites to automate your posts and help you establish your web presence.
This is important since you will be doing your own marketing.
Yes, let me restate this one more time. You will be doing your own marketing. Whether or not you are an established author that is published with a large publishing house or self-publishing from scratch. It is your creativeness that will get you known to your audiences. This means you need to have your
own website, your own blog, your writer's Facebook, twitter and etc presence and your own email address. Once you have all of this, you are going to put this in the informational part of your book at the beginning or end to direct your fans to your website.
Now that you have these key components in place, we can discuss the self-publishing aspect
on Amazon.
After creating your account on https://www.createspace.com/ you can begin building your book. One of the very first questions they ask you is do you want your own ISBN number or do
you want to use one of Amazon's own
ASIN numbers.
Initially I thought I had to have an ISBN number to get my first book created world wide, but that is really
not necessary. Also, if you're not careful it can be a very expensive prospect.
If you choose to get an ISBN number, it is important to understand what that means. First, the good part is that if someone wants to look up your exact novel they can go to an ISBN site and search for your exact book. Interesting enough, if you get an ASIN number from Amazon for free there are websites for searching out your ASIN number to find exactly your novel. If you buy your ISBN directly from Amazon it is expensive. In my case it was $125 for one number.
Sounds great, you now have your ISBN and you can upload your novel as a Mass Market Paperback
book, hardcover book and an Ebook with your ISBN, right? Wrong. Your one ISBN is only good for one of those book. Each type of print or ebook layout of the same book could use its own ISBN. At $125 a pop that could turn into a lot of money.
Interesting enough, Amazon offers ISBN's for you to buy from http://www.myidentifiers.com which sells, at this time, a set of 10 ISBN's for $250. This is a much better deal than Amazon's and only requires a little knowledge on your part. But, before you take the plunge to buy your ISBN's, let me point out a few other interesting bits of fact.
If you change from Amazon to another seller like https://www1.ingramspark.com or https://www.nookpress.com/ or a bunch of other websites. Although your ISBN should work for whomever you are publishing through, it really doesn't. I'm not stating that I fully understand it, but to change your ISBN over to the new company that is offering your books for sale requires some major
paperwork. From everything I have heard and researched about this subject. It is simpler to just use a new ISBN for the new company and the same book you're trying to sell.
After making the decision to buy one ISBN for $125 (and not the 10 for $250), I am now questioning how necessary it is to have an ISBN. Why not use each service's free or cheap numbering code they
are using like Amazon's ASIN number? As I further prepare my hardback book I will do additional research on this option, but for now I would argue that buying an ISBN number is a waste of time when your self-publishing. It is an extra expense that is not needed if you're wanting people to buy your
book directly from Amazon USA, Amazon Europe or the Create Space Estore.
There was also an option on Amazon for Bookstores and Online Retailers and Create Space Direct, which is the option to sell to Amazon's competitors and give physical bookstores and other Online Retailers the option to buy your book directly from Amazon. Although this sounds like an
awesome option for Self-Publishing authors, in reality this is not a choice these companies are going to make when your a new author. Possibly an option when you're very famous, but I would argue it makes more sense to go directly with each company directly if you are self-publishing and have complete rights to your novel.
What I noticed is that my book cost went from $8 and change to $12 and change in cost for a market that will not normally decide to buy my book or carry my book initially.
This means that your competitiveness on Amazon is dramatically reduced.
Your ability to compete against the other professional books being published by publishers is blown out of the water. From my research, many of the professional published books range between $8.99 to $12.99. Some even dip down to $6.99 and $7.99 which is not possible to compete against when your self-publishing with Amazon, since your book cost to produce is already in the $8 and change range.
The way for you to be competitive is to keep your costs down as much as possible and do as much of the work yourself. By doing this you can keep the price of your book down to an extreme minimum and still sell competitively. Remember, a known author going through a publishing company are only getting a few cents for each physical book they publish. Publishing houses get most of the money on the sale of a book because they need to pay for their professional services they offer their writers.
In this way I can usually beat or at the worst meet the price of a professionally publishing house and still make more money on each book sale than what the author is making by going through a traditional publishing house. Traditional publisher houses have more options for getting their authors to be recognized, but with social media sites and the internet, there are a lot of way for the self-publishing author to get the word out about their book.
I also think many first time authors believe that should make a lot more money for every book they sale, This belief causes many new authors problems in marketing their books. If you follow the logic on how professional publishing houses make their money on physical book sales. You realize they are banking their sales on selling a large number of books at an average price. From what I've researched, If you're
making three cents a book on physical media then you are making industry average on royalties as an author.
With self-publishing physical books you can easily get that percentage up to seven or ten cents per book and still match the prices of the professional publishing houses.
Ebook sales are even more money. You will make more actual money per book on your ebook sales in comparison to physical book sales. With ebook sales, self-publishers are ahead of the game on making money per book and keeping their sales below the cost of traditional publishing houses ebook sales. You can easily get your sales up to 54 cents an ebook and still be competitively priced against the prices being sold of the larger publishing houses. This is because as a self-publisher we have done the majority of the work and marketing ourselves and are now using Amazon as the outlet to sell our books.
The next option that you will have is preparing your "internal documents"
----------------I will continue this write-up another evening--------------------------