I have plenty of experience in publishing.
I’m the author of 12 books, including two New York Times bestsellers.
The most recent of my 12 was self-published, and I was very pleased with the
experience. I’ve also published five free eBooks.
I’m going to share with you what I’ve
learned, and how you can use my experience to your advantage.
Most of what I say will have to do with
eBooks, but I’ll have some recommendations for print books as well.
First of all, understand that although
self-publishing yields an author much higher royalty percentages, it also
involves costs. You have to spend your own money on things a traditional
publisher would take care of for you. The benefits are obvious – complete
control over your product, and a much higher royalty rate – but we should
remember that self-publishing has drawbacks, too. Yet, having released my first
self-published book in 2014 after publishing 11 other books the traditional
way, I am very much of the opinion that the benefits can outweigh the
drawbacks.
Here’s a bad reason to be skeptical of
self-publishing: without the marketing muscle of a traditional publisher,
authors fear, they will be on their own in getting the word out about their
books.
Self-published authors certainly are on
their own, it’s true, and they need to be creative and energetic if they’re
going to promote their books. But the objection is based on a misconception:
most publishers have little to no marketing arm worth speaking of, and of those
that do, they expend their marketing resources very selectively. Most authors
who write for a major publisher like Doubleday, for instance, are in effect
left hanging out to dry. Doubleday focuses its energies on the small number of
titles it expects to sell well, and everyone else is more or less in the same
marketing position as the self-published author. I myself have been lucky:
Random House and Regnery Publishing pushed my books hard, and I’m really
grateful. But that is the exception to the rule.
In other words, if you’re worried that
you’ll miss out on the great marketing campaign that a traditional publisher
would have given you, don’t be. Publishers are very stingy about those.
When it comes to selling a digital product
like an eBook, you have two main choices. You can go with Amazon, which is what
I do, and produce a book for the Kindle. It will be sold in the Kindle store,
and you’ll have the advantage and the prestige of being easily found in the
most recognizable book market in the world.
There are drawbacks to this approach,
though to my mind not big enough to make me abandon Amazon. First, you’ll keep
only 70 percent of the revenue from each sale. This is not a problem, as far as
I’m concerned, because the traditional author royalty for a physical book
released by a mainstream publisher is a paltry 15 percent, and even that rate
kicks in only after you’ve sold 10,000 copies. (More on traditional royalty
rates below.) To have the Amazon name behind you, with its ease of use,
excellent reputation, and longtime familiarity to nearly everyone online, is
certainly worth a 30 percent cut. If you had told authors back in, say, 1995
that they would earn “only” a 70 percent royalty, they would have been dancing
a jig.
Second, if you decide to sell your book
through Amazon’s Kindle Store, you won’t have the option of giving away free
copies. To give the book away to someone you will actually have to purchase a
copy through the Kindle Store. When the recipient claims the book, you will
receive your royalty. So you’ll wind up paying, on net, 30 percent of the
book’s price to give a copy away.
Your other option is to sell your eBook
directly, without going through Amazon, by using a service like gumroad.com.
With gumroad.com you receive 95 percent of the purchase price, as opposed to
the 70 percent you’d earn with Amazon. Also, you’re perfectly at liberty to
give copies away to select people.
I still prefer Amazon, though, because (1)
it’s so much more familiar to most people, (2) most potential buyers already
have their payment information on file with Amazon, so ordering is fast and
easy, and (3) justified or not, the availability of your product through a
well-known and respected company like Amazon makes both you and your product
seem more legitimate.
How to Do It
Here are the steps I followed.
I wanted both Kindle and print editions. I
do a lot of public speaking, and I sell a pile of books after my speeches. Even
though I knew I would be emphasizing the electronic version of this particular
book in my promotional efforts, the print edition is great for public events,
and to sell on Amazon to people who – like me, to be honest – just prefer the
old-fashioned print book.
I did not use an editor. But in this case,
don’t do as I do. I’ve written a dozen books and many hundreds of articles.
Although practically anyone can benefit from the services of an editor, it
didn’t make sense in my case. My book was a collection of previously published
articles, to be pitched to my existing audience rather than marketed to the
public at large. Editing services would have been a waste of money.
What I’m about to say I don’t mean as an
insult, but as a simple observation based on the years of experience I have as
both a college professor (where I graded thousands of student papers) and a
magazine editor: most people cannot write to save their lives. The worst
writers are the ones who think they’re great. They think good writing means
using big words and composing long, convoluted sentences.
I can’t know if you’re a fantastic writer –
but chances are, neither can you. One thing is for sure: you don’t want to be
like the American Idol contestant whose intimidated friends all tell him what a
great singer he is, leaving him to discover the awful truth on national
television. Check out the editorial services you’ll find with a
company like Xlibris and see if they might benefit you.
Your Print Book
Let’s get print out of the way first. To my
mind, the clear way to go is through Amazon’s CreateSpace
program. They could not make the process easier. Once I signed up, I received
an email from someone at the program asking when I’d be available to chat on
the phone to discuss my project. This had to be a form letter from a robot, I
thought. It was a form letter, to be sure, but when I wrote back with a time, a
real person wrote me a personalized reply. This was true throughout the entire
process: CreateSpace
was right there to help me every step of the way.
CreateSpace offers a variety of style
choices for the font and layout of the interior of your book. If your book
contains no charts, graphs, photographs, or anything other than ordinary text,
you can order one of their basic packages for (as of this moment) $199.
Otherwise, you’ll have to get a fancier package starting at $349.
The Book Cover
As for a cover, CreateSpace can design one
for you, or you can go to an outside designer. I took the latter approach.
Don’t skimp on your cover. Forget the old adage that we shouldn’t judge a book
by its cover. The fact is, people do judge books by their covers. And if
yours looks like it was designed by the editor of the homeowners’ association
newsletter, it’s going to hurt both your sales and your credibility.
If you’re on a very tight budget, the world
will not end if you use a designer at Fiverr for your cover. But if you can manage
it, a more professional option is vastly preferable. Damonza.com
is a good option: high-quality covers, but also unlimited changes (so you can
get the cover just right, and not have to settle for something you don’t like
just because you ran out of change requests), and two different cover designs
to choose from. They also don’t make you pay for stock images. They can design
covers for both print books and eBooks.
The eBook
For my eBook I used Kindle Direct
Publishing.
You’ll need to follow their guidelines for formatting your book file in
one of their “Supported Formats.” I myself didn’t feel like figuring it all
out, so I posted a job on Upwork, a freelance site, and within 24 hours
someone had done it for me for next to nothing.
The Case of the Free eBook
There can be very good reasons to give an
eBook away for free, and I’ll discuss them in a moment. But the steps I follow
in preparing a free eBook, as opposed to an eBook for sale, are different, and
I want to lay them out for you here.
First, though, why free? How can
anyone earn money on free? Like it or not, free is what makes the
Internet go round. People have come to expect all kinds of content for free. The
true entrepreneur is the person who figures out how to prosper in the world of
free.
I’ll give you four reasons I give away free
eBooks.
1.) I believe in the ideas expressed in these books, and I want to see them
gain a wider audience. In the case of the free eBook I released on how to
create a blog or website even if you don’t know anything about programming or
web design, I thought it could do a lot of good for a lot of people. (You can
get that book here, though I think our own guide to starting a blog or website is
even more thorough.)
2.) Some of these books contain affiliate links, which can earn me commissions
if people click through and order something. (Warning: do not insert
Amazon affiliate links into any eBook of any kind. It is technically a
violation of the Amazon Associates program’s rules, and you do not want Amazon
kicking you out of that program.)
3.) Some of these books incidentally promote some of my paid services.
4.) The books are a great premium to offer as an enticement to get signups to
my email list. Email lists are important, for reasons we explain on some of our
other resource pages here. They allow you to communicate with site visitors
again and again – visitors who may otherwise have visited your site just once
and then be lost to you forever. If you wind up producing products or services
– including books! – for sale, you have a built-in audience of people who are
interested enough in what you do that they shared their email addresses with
you. That’s valuable.
It’s not easy to get people to give you
their email addresses. They don’t want to be overwhelmed with email. They get
enough as it is. You’ll need to offer them something to overcome any hesitation
they have in sharing their email with yet another website. A free eBook is an
excellent way to go.
(To learn exactly how to start, build, and
effectively use an email list, check out our guide to building an email list.)
Incidentally, you may wonder what to put in
a free eBook. Here are two ways to make the process as easy as possible on
yourself.
I myself host a weekday podcast. As one way
of promoting the show, I give away free eBooks. I create these eBooks from
transcripts of some of my episodes. I find transcripts with a theme in common,
and I collect those transcripts into an eBook. (For the transcripts themselves,
I hired relatively inexpensive transcriptionists via Fiverr and
Upwork.)
At the end of each transcript/chapter of
these eBooks there’s a link to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes and Stitcher,
the two most popular podcast delivery systems. The appendices of these eBooks
promote my subscription services. They also promote my most recent book. That
book, in turn, promotes the show – one section of the book contains transcripts
of some of my most interesting episodes. It’s this kind of synergy, in which
much of what you do involves cross-promotion of other things you do, that can
get you serious traction online.
Chances are, you don’t have a podcast and
transcripts. But once you start your blog, and produce content for it
regularly, before you know it you have more than enough material for an eBook.
Each blog post can be a separate chapter. Easy.
Remember that eBooks – especially the free
kind – can vary widely in length, and can be much shorter than traditional
books. You’re giving this book away, after all, so no one is in a position to
complain that your book isn’t longer.
I myself don’t worry too much about the
layout of a free eBook. I make it as attractive as I can, but I don’t hire
anyone to do fancy typesetting or anything like that. The book is free, after
all. If people are complaining about the font, they are not worth your time.
As for a cover, remember: the book is free.
Don’t spend a fortune. I myself did a search for eBook cover design at Fiverr
and found a whole bunch of designers who do quality work inexpensively. As of
this printing, you can have a quite serviceable cover designed for five
dollars, as I have.
For an extra five dollars, you can
generally get a 3D version of your book cover, with your book standing at an
angle and looking like a real book with a spine. I recommend buying this, too,
because the 3D image, while not usable in your book itself, will look very
sharp in your promotional material.
And that’s it. Just upload the finished
product to your site and you’re done. You can then link to it so people can
freely download it, or, as I recommend, make it available only to people who
sign up for your email list. (Again, find out how to do this, and the exact
tools I’ve had such success with, in our guide to building an email list.)
Tom Woods [send him mail; visit his website],
is the New York Times bestselling author of 12 books, and a senior
fellow of the Mises Institute. Become a smarter libertarian in just 30 minutes
a day by listening to the Tom Woods Show, available on iTunes or Stitcher, or at TomWoods.com/podcasts.
Get Tom's free book 14 Hard Questions for Libertarians -- Answered, and
several other free books, at TomsFreeBooks.com.
