What Is The Best Software For Self Publishing?

What Is The Best Software For Self Publishing?

Depends on your goals, resources, and ambition. Self publishing is a murky, unregulated business that many find difficult to navigate. It’s fairly easy and inexpensive to produce a document and put it up for sale on the virtual market, but producing one to the quality readers expect is a far more expensive, time consuming, and daunting prospect with mountains of conflicting advice. Do you need a professional editor, how to commission your art work, how to format for multiple ereading devices, do you need ISBNs and if you do, how to apply, etc. The upside is, if you have the resources and the will, no one can stop you from producing and selling the exact book you want. In the traditional route, however, you have a lot of gatekeepers taking their share of the risk in this business endeavor. Agents and publishers have the contacts and expertise to make it happen, but t don’t work with just any old chump with a word processor and delusions of grandeur. You have to convince a lot of people you can deliver the goods, and if you do, t take your goods and make it their goods. You have no say in the cover art, no say in the blurb or the formatting, if t don’t want to make your book available on certain platforms t won’t and if you don’t want to force a cheesy character into the story because the market is hot for it right now, tough bananas. But, and this is a huge but, you don’t have to worry about any of those details and you don’t have to pay for them, and anyway, most of the time t know better than you. I have an acquaintance who wrote a memoir, her working title was BORN FOR THIS. It was a clever use of a cliche given the content, but her publisher changed it to the very on the nose A MIDWIFE IN AMISH COUNTRY. T slapped a pic of a random baby in a Mennonite bonnet on the cover, even though it was culturally inaccurate and she’d never met that particular baby in her life, but that book flew off the shelves so fast it made her head spin. Amazon shut her down because she had too many positive reviews, and she got a second printing which is absurd for a debut author with zero prior media presence. Then again, there are lots of stories about people being rejected by the publishers, only to self publish to great success. Others were screwed over by their publishers, so much that self publishing is no longer as stigmatized as it was. By far, however, the most common story both traditionally published or otherwise, is dismal sales on one to three books before the author throws in the proverbial towel. It’s a saturated market out there, a tough business competing with streaming, gaming, social media, etc. To answer directly, if you think your work could be competitive with the giants of the industry and you want to just write, go traditional. Write your manuscript(s), query some agents, and steel yourself for the deluge of rejections you will statistically incur. If creative control is important to you, you are more artistically minded, or are approaching this with a hobbyist mindset, find a community of self publishers who can help you with the myriad decisions you will need to make.