Julie Broad covers five self-publishing scams: companies that keep your rights, fake guarantees, hidden royalty cuts, controlling your ISBN, and inflated printing costs. Get your original files in writing, verify testimonials, buy your own ISBN, and maintain direct access to print-on-demand platforms like CreateSpace and IngramSpark.
Chapters
Alright, if you're self publishing a book, you want to pay attention because I'm talking about five scams that you should avoid. Covered those scams in a previous video. So go back and watch that and then come back because I'm going to talk about what you can do to avoid those five scams. Stick around. Hey there, I'm Julie broad of book launchers.com if you're self publishing a book, you're probably thinking of hiring some companies to help you because it's a lot of work. It's smart to hire help. But you want to avoid five scams that can trip you up cause you to spend more money and not make as much money and maybe not own the rights. So I covered the five scams in a previous video, but now you might be wondering what do I do about them? So the first one was own your rights. So what do you do? Make sure that any company you work with gives you all the files and that any contracts you sign explicitly state that you own everything. What do I mean by all the files? I mean make sure you've got any word documents, any indesign files, epubs, any jpegs, charts, graphs, anything that is involved in your book. Make sure you get copies of the original even though you probably don't have the programs to edit them. Doesn't matter. You want to own all your files and own your rights. Number two was watch out for the big promises, the big guarantees. So, so what can you do? Well, one of the easiest things is to google the name of the company, Google it with reviews, Google some of the authors that they have supposedly worked with, check out those testimonials and even reach out to them and see if they're actually as happy being that award winning author or that best selling author as the testimonials make them out to be. Check into them and if everybody does seem legitimately happy, then maybe it is good enough to be true. Number three was who gets the royalties? Well, it's really simple to control that. Read the contracts you're signing and make sure that you're getting all the money for the books that get sold in all the different distribution channels. Number four, you need to own your ISBN. So guess what that means go and buy your ISBN. Number five was figuring out what it cost to order your own book. How much are you going to pay to order copies of your own book? Well, one of the simplest things is to get access to your own print on demand account. And again, if you've got the materials you've got the rights. Then you can upload it to CreateSpace or IngramSpark or Lulu or any of these print on demand companies yourself and order your own copies and pay the lowest price on the market. Simple as that. So now you know the five scams to watch out for. And now you know how to avoid them. If you got questions, let me know. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any other tips. See you in the next video. See you. See you again next time.
