#090 - How to Self-Publish Your Book

I received a question that said, how do I progress from here to self publish my book? My name is Shelly hitz from ChristianBookAcademy.com and the first step is to finish your first draft, your ugly, messy first draft. So inside Christian Book Academy, we take you through what we call the kingdom writers path. And step number one is your first draft. Then, then once you get that out of your head onto paper, you can do so much with it. But if you don't have that first draft, you're really going to stay stuck. Now the second step is the final draft and that's where you do your self editing. And we have a self editing process that we recommend and we outline it for you inside Christian Book Academy. And then you hire a professional editor. Even an editor needs an editor. So you want to make sure you have a quality, quality product. And we do have affordable recommendations for editors you can hire Inside Christian Book Academy. And during the final draft stage, you're also going to make sure you have all your references in there and that you have, you know, any images or you know, your front matter and your back matter. And we tell you and give you instructions for all of that in the academy. So once you have your final draft, that means you have everything you have from the very beginning of the front matter. Your title page, your copyright page, if you're doing a dedication, your table of contents, you have all of those things written out, doesn't have to be formatted exactly right, but you have the content. And then you have an edited version of your book in chapters and you can have it. Usually editors will work with you in Microsoft Word, but whatever word processing document you're using, but you have all the content there, it's been edited and now it's ready to be formatted. That's when you move into the self publish stage of the kingdom writers path. And then you make some decisions. Are you going to have a print book, an ebook, Are you going to record an audiobook? Like there's different versions and you can start with a short Kindle ebook, you can start with an ebook and then you can always add the print version later. You can add an audiobook later. There's no pressure when you're self publishing, you can just take a deep breath. You don't have to get everything exactly perfect right now typically with traditional publishing, you do have to get everything exactly the way you want it because they're going to order a bunch of copies and then they're not going to go back typically and redo a book. But you can, as a self published author, you can go back and make updates and changes or add another version later. But we walk you through the steps of self publishing your book. Whether or not you want to just do a Kindle ebook only, whether you want to do Kindle and print, whether or not you want to do full color. We will walk you through all of the steps of how to do that and who you can hire to help you. So you're going to want a team, you know, to hire an editor, to hire someone to format your book, to hire someone to do the book cover design. And so you know those are the main things that, that you'll need. And then we recommend using the site kdp.Amazon.com you'll upload your files to that site. It doesn't cost anything to upload your files and you'll be able to publish to Amazon and other retailers. You can also use a site called ingramspark and it's a great option as well. But to be honest, we have published most of our books through KDP because it's just easier to work with Amazon that way. And a majority of our sales come from Amazon. But we have published a few books on ingramspark and we talk about that and we teach you how to do that in the self published module in Christian Book Academy, but also tell you some reasons why you might want to consider using IngramSpark and when we have done that. So I hope that this has been helpful. The first step is to get that ugly, messy first draft out of your head onto paper. So get that done and we would love to help you. We have resources to help you get that first draft done. We have virtual writing retreats every month, a two day virtual writing retreat. We have 15 minute challenge where we challenge you just to write for 15 minutes a day, once one week, like for five days every month. And then we have all the training that you need for each step. So after this self published step is the book launch. And then finally in the kingdom, writer's path is on ongoing marketing, which we call impact lives, that you'll continue to impact lives ongoing. And so we have training for you across the whole spectrum and we are here for you. But I hope that this was helpful for you. And I know that the enemy often wants to stop you and to stall you. And so I encourage you to keep moving forward and take the next step to get that book out of your head onto paper and then finally be able to click the publish button. Amen. Amen.