For Authors: 5 Tips for Self-Publishing a Book

Hey there, it's Julie Broad. So you want to self publish a book? Get ready. It's gonna be fun. Alright, so you may or may not know that I chose to self publish my book. More Than Cash. The real risks and rewards of Profitable Real estate investing. It was a wild ride and we've had a lot of fun. And taking it to number one on Amazon CA was quite a journey. And I've had a ton of questions from people looking for a little assistance to help them with their self publishing journey. The first thing you have to figure out is why are you doing it? Because there are some really easy ways to get a book out there, but that may not be the best way for you to achieve your objective. And I'm not a complete expert on this subject, but having gone through it, I've learned a few key lessons and I thought I'd share those with you, starting with this video. All right, so why, why are you self publishing? For many people it's an ebook or a print book that they want to use as a business card, a marketing piece perhaps they have speaking gigs or they have booths at vendor things, clients that they want to give books to. As a marketing piece, that is a fantastic way. And the good news for you is that publishing a book for those purposes these days is so easy. So that's the good news. Okay, but the channel that you're going to choose to do that is probably going to be different than if your objective is to sell it online through a vendor like Amazon, or if your goal is to make that book a bestseller on some bestseller list, your strategy is going to be different. Now I'm not going to take you through all the different options for each of them because there are plenty. But keeping it simple, if you just want to do an ebook for your own purposes, just create that sucker in a PDF. Go on a great website called fiverr.com f I v e r r dot com, hire someone for five to forty bucks to format it, make it look professional and put that thing on your website. Website. Okay. Now I would still recommend you hire someone to edit it if you don't have some people in your business or in your household that are great at editing and catching typos and, you know, checking content, because there's nothing worse than creating a marketing piece with typos. But besides that, very simple, very straightforward. Now how you put it on your website, how you distribute it, totally different subject for another day. Print is even still quite simple even for Canadians. You have a ton of options and there's plenty of local printing places who will do runs books. So if you want to get 500 printed, 1000 printed, the pricing is fairly competitive. If you just want one off printing, you'll have to do a little bit shop, a little bit shopping around. But there still are some great printing options for that. I found one on Vancouver island that would have been an option for me if my book was simply a marketing piece. Now if you just want to sell your book online so you want it available for people to purchase and again you can choose an ebook route and go Kindle for Amazon or or Ibooks for Apple. Although there's a little trick with Apple you need an ein number because you have to do it through an American version. Whereas through Amazon there's still some fun American tax forms that you have to fill out. But Amazon will actually submit your taxes for you and hold it back and submit on your behalf. Oh yeah, it's good times. As a Canadian, there's a few little hurdles you'll have to overcome. But overall, if you just want to sell online, using CreateSpace is a great choice. It is a very easy to use, very user friendly way to get your book onto Amazon and even it will help you create a Kindle version. I didn't go that route for the Kindle version, but I did actually publish on CreateSpace just to test it out. And you can order copies for yourself as well. And it was quite a reasonable price and great quality printing. I was very pleased with what I got out of there. So that'll get you on Amazon. The challenge is if you want to do anything other than Amazon with CreateSpace, it's going to be trickier. While possible, it's trickier. Okay, I won't go into all of that. It's not the best choice. If you want the option of selling in chapters, you want to get it in some local bookstores and you want to have more of a reach than Amazon. Ie you're looking to make that baby a best seller. You can focus on Amazon. That's what I did at first. I got to be number one on Amazon ca by selling my book only in paperback and only on Amazon. And that shot the book up through some promotional stuff, which I'll talk about in a different video that shot it up to number one. But if you want a bestseller overall in Canada, then you're going to want to have as many channels as you can. And in my case I just wanted to make the book as widely available as possible. Writing my book was. Well, it has some marketing and some get my name out there benefits. My goal was really to communicate a message to all real estate investors and a little bit to the publishing industry because they turned me down. I had to self publish because they didn't think that the book I wanted to write was really going to be a marketable book. They didn't think there was a strong enough marketing platform for it or for me. So I kind of have a little bit of that behind me too that I want to sell the heck out of it to kind of prove a point. But I also really want to get that message out there. So I went with the option that was going to allow me to put the book in as many places as possible. So I went with Lightning Source and there's still a lot of hurdles to go through. And if that's the route you want to go, plan to sign up for your Lightning Source account at least eight weeks before your book is ready to go because it will take a while for it to get on your Canadian Canadian sites like Chapters and Amazon ca. I'll talk about that in another video. But for now, think about why you want to self publish, because your options there's lots of options at every route and I've just covered one or two. But your options change when you know exactly why you want to publish your book. The best option for you is dependent on what you're trying to do, so hope that helps you navigate a few things. If you have a specific question, I'm happy to shoot more videos and help you out, so go ahead and post a comment on this. If you're watching it on juliebroad.com, go ahead post a comment here. Otherwise, if you're watching on YouTube, give it a like makes my day thumbs up if you want more videos like this. Those thumbs up encourage me to keep going. But you can also write your questions and comments below this video and I'll do my best to to help you out.