Over several years now digital eBook publishing has allowed independent authors to sell their books online with great ease. It has even created a following for self-published eBooks, for many readers like to download books at cheap prices, thus helping the digital publishing revolution. This opens up many possibilities for self-publishing and if you take the right steps, you can write, publish and sell an eBook in a week.
Step one: Market research
Spend some time on the Amazon Kindle marketplace, browsing top sellers, along with book descriptions, reviews, everything. Gather all the information you can about which genre sells the most, and which subgenres end up as the top ten sellers of the day, week or month. Use this information to choose which genre you will be contributing to. You should choose what you want to read, but you must realize that, sometimes, your literary choices might not be what the world likes the most.
Step two: Promote the eBook
Promote the eBook before even writing it? Yes, that’s correct. If you want to write an eBook that will sell well, then this is what you have to do. Put feelers online and see how many people will be interested in buying it. Self-publishing basically turns the tables around on the traditional publishing, where the books first get written, then promoted through the media to create the necessary enthusiasm for a successful launch of the book. Self-publishing authors, on the other hand, have to go the other way around: first get people to be interested in their book before they publish it online. Create relationships with your future readers by posting about your eBook on your blog, and see how much interest you will gather. This helps you establish a sense of belonging in a community through the social media.
Step three: Create the eBook
This can be the easiest or the hardest part of the process if you’re not comfortable with writing. However, there are many ways that you can go around this issue. If you have an idea that you know it will sell, you can always get a ghostwriter to write the book for you. Before you do that however, make sure that the ghostwriter signs away all the rights to the book before you hire them and signs a non disclosure agreement. Make sure to create a good outline for your book, and choose the layout of the chapters. The easiest way is to break the chapters down in beginning, middle and end, however, since this might not work for everyone, decide what works best for you and use it to make the writing process easier.
Step four: Design a title and a cover
This would be the last step before publishing your book. Creating a catchy title and an amazing cover is what will draw the reader’s eye to your book more than any other promotions and marketing techniques. Make sure that you’re not repeating what somebody else has done before, and be original! While nothing is new under the sun, people still strive for original approaches on known topics. Use that to your advantage to create a title that is new and extraordinary. The same principle applies to the cover. Make it look beautiful and original, or, if you cannot do it yourself, you can hire a freelancer that will put your ideas into a beautiful illustration that will draw the reader’s eye.
Step five: Format and publish the eBook
Converting a word document into Kindle format is really easy with Amazon’s conversion tools. Keep in mind that the file has to be less than 50 MB. Use Amazon’s guides that help you format it the right way, from the table of contents to the cover of the book. Get friends and relatives to leave early, pre-release reviews. The price of your book is also a major asset; with $0.99 to $2.99 being good prices for self-published works. If your eBook is nonfiction, then a higher price can be appropriate. Giving your book away for free in the initial days is a good way to jumpstart your sales. Think of it like a free promotion, and if the product is good enough, it will spread through social media and word of mouth from your readers, after which you can alter the price accordingly.
Editor’s Note: This article was first published in December 2014.
Georgina Roy wants to live in a world filled with magic. As a 22-year-old art student, she’s moonlighting as a writer and is content to fill notebooks and sketchbooks with magical creatures and amazing new worlds. When she is not at school, or scribbling away in a notebook, you can usually find her curled up, reading a good urban fantasy novel, or writing on her laptop, trying to create her own.