There are many benefits to self-publishing a book. You don’t have to convince anyone to publish it for you. You also don’t have to continually submit your book to publishing companies and get it rejected by some. You will have more freedom over the content of your book. Self-publishing is a great way to quickly get your message out to your audience. It can be a great way to build a business and generate a client base.
Publishing a book gives you authority. People tend to start viewing you as an expert when you publish a book. Many people use their books as marketing tools for their business.
Use Amazon’s Publishing Company
Let’s face it, when you are looking for books online, the first place almost everyone goes is to Amazon. Amazon has a publishing arm. It is called CreateSpace. Publishing through CreateSpace is free. The great thing about publishing through CreateSpace is that it is going to be print on demand. You will not be purchasing hundreds of books and trying to distribute them to your target market. Books will only be printed when someone orders them. This is an amazing convenience.
As someone who has self-published through a publishing company who promised a bit of marketing on my behalf and who also published through Amazon, I prefer using CreateSpace. It makes selling the books so much easier!
Use Your Own Pictures or Artwork
CreateSpace has templates for your cover. You can upload your own artwork, a picture of yourself or a picture of whatever you want. If yo
u don’t like your own photos, you can find stock photos online at flickr that you can use without being sued!
Editing!
This is where you would probably want to spend some money when you are self-publishing your book.You want your book to read well. However, this blog is all about finding free opportunities and taking advantage of them. One thing that you can do to get your book edited free is offer to edit someone else’s book free. You can have family members review your book. Other people in book writing groups may be willing to review a chapter for you while you review another chapter for them. It may take longer to get your book edited this way, but it will be free.
If you do decide to go this free route and have other people who aren’t professional editors review your book, I highly recommend purchasing a copy before the launch and making sure that you are comfortable with how it looks and reads. If not, edit it again until you like how it looks on paper. Keep in mind, how it looks on the computer and how it looks on paper are going to be very different.
Marketing Your Book Free
When you self publish a book, you are going to have to work your butt off to market it. You don’t have the connections that the publishing companies do with bookstores. You are going to have to get your own interviews and set up your own book launches. Don’t worry. You can still do many of these things free, it just may take a bit more time.
The first thing that you will want to do to market your book is to create a plan of action for your book launch. You will want to join groups that may be interested in the type of book that you wrote. For example, if your book is for entertaining people, you would want to join groups that like other works like yours. If your book is for travel, you’ll want to join travel groups. This is a great way to see what your target market is interested in and talking about.
Network with other people who have a large following of people who are interested in the same things that you are interested in. Other people promoting your book give you a lot of leverage. There are people who have a lot of exposure and can drive sales. Having someone like Oprah promote your book will get you sales almost instantly because she has such a huge following. She may not be open to promoting your book, but you probably have a lot of people in your own network that would be willing to give you some reviews of your book and tell their audience about your book.
Think of a giveaway for your book launch that would incentivize people to purchase your book. Other authors may be willing to allow you to give away a digital exerpt of their book. Being a part of a book launch can be good publicity for some businesses. If they have a digital product that they are willing to give away during your book launch, this can be used to your advantage. You can offer these freebies during the week of your book launch.
Give to charity! Donating some of your profits to charity will incentivize some people to purchase the book and share your link on their facebook page and within their facebook groups. This can be a great way to get the word out about your book.
Give the Kindle version away free. I have used this strategy many times to sell more books. Most people think that by giving away their information free they will lose money. However, whenever I give away the digital version as part of a campaign, I see a spike in the paperback sales.
Conclusion
Self-publishing your book can be a lot of work. If you are smart, you can do it free! It can be a lot of fun if you do it correctly. The best way to do this is to find some great groups online of other self-published authors. I purchased Alicia Dunam’s course Bestseller in a Weekend to learn how to self-publish my book online. It wasn’t free, but there are a lot of free methods that we learned to do in order to market our book that I’m happy to share with you!
