As a self published author you have to be prepared to be more than just a writer. When you don’t have a traditional publisher behind you. You have to take care of a lot of things by yourself. You have to be a publisher yourself. You have to get your work edited and formatted properly, so it doesn’t look bad and can be competetive to the best selling books on Amazon. You also have to create an appealing to the reader cover, that will attract readers, rather than putting them off. You have to take care of the marketing part as well, this means launching strategy, spreading the word and various promotions after that so you can maintain solid sales.

Sounds a lot, right? Don’t worry, you don’t have to do all of these or to become an expert in any other field rather than writing. The thing is that is good for you to know a little bit about everything, so you can choose the best outsourcers for each job and to get the most for the money you are going to invest. The basis of all is of course to have a great product to offer at first place, this is essential, there is no marketing or cover design, that will compensate if your ebooks isn’t good. So at first place focus to have this in place, professionally edited and well formatted.

The best thing about being self-published is that you are the BOSS. You decide what to release, when to release it how it should look. But be careful as they say with great power comes great responsibility. So learn a little bit about each step ofthe process prepare well everything and then release your new book. Don’t be a perfectionist either, this is not the goal here, your book has to be good enough for the readers, it doesn’t have to be perfect!

Where to Self-Publish?

There are a lot of places to do that, you can even use an aggregator for the job, that will post your work to the major resellers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookStore, Sony Reader, Kobo, etc. Such a website is www.lulu.com for example, there are many others of course that you can use. For a first time publisher the best place to choose is Amazon, they are the largest reseller. The advantage of others like the iBookStore is that it supports the new EPUB 3 format about which you can learn more here (http://idpf.org/epub/30). That allows you to create more interactive ebooks. The down side of publishing to iBooks is that you need an ISBN assigned to your ebook. (if you have one book and you have to buy only 1 ISBN it costs 125$, if you getmore they get a lot cheaper) You can learn more about ISBNs  here: http://www.bowker.com/en-US/default.shtml (for USA based authors) and http://www.isbn-international.org/ for international authors.

For more information on the advantages why to self-publish your ebooks check out our welcome article: http://www.ebookadvisor.net/ebookmarketingadvice

Thank you and come back to the home page for more valuable tips about self-publishing.