Complete guide to self-publishing for beginner

This guide to self-publishing covers every single aspect of self-publishing from start to finish. If you’re new to self-publishing, then this guide to self-publishing can give you a rough idea about the publishing process.

You can use the guide to self-publishing to publish any book you want. Everything that I write here is based on my own process in publishing my novel. But the process will be much shorter if you’re publishing a nonfiction book, cookbook, photo book or any books that are using less text.

Rather than turning this post into one giant guide to self-publishing, I decided to link the individual posts in this guide instead.

Doing that allows me to talk about these publishing processes in-depth. This type of post structure can also help you to pick which part of the publishing process you’re interested in learning.

The posts in the guide to self-publishing are organized in the chronological order. You can use this guide as a reference for you to get started.

Have any questions about publishing your book? Feel free to ask me through email right here. I’ll do my best to answer your question to the best of my ability.

Software to write a book

If you want to publish a book, then it’s obvious that you must write the book first. This step should be a no-brainer to you.

With that said, do you need specific software for writing a book? Should you get this software at the early stage of your author career?

When it comes to writing a book, there are many ways you can do that. But if you’re like me who prefer to write a book on your computer, then you do need software that can do that for you.

At this point, I bet that you already guess what software I’m talking about. But do you know that there’s another writing software you can use to write a book?

In this post, I list down all the software that you can use to write a book and the type of writer that is best suited to use this software.

And yes, that includes this mystery software too.

Everything you need to know about book editing

I hope you’re not thinking about publishing your book right away without doing any book editing.

“Is it necessary for me to do a book editing? Isn’t editing about checking for the grammatical errors and typos?” You ask.

Well, book editing is more than just fixing grammatical errors and typos in your manuscript. Book editing can do so much more than that. It’s not just crucial for novels and nonfiction books. It’s also crucial for other types of books too.

If you always think that book editing is about fixing grammatical errors and typos, then this post will help you understand what book editing really is and where to find the right editor for your book.

If you want to edit the book yourself, I also share with you my personal tips on how I approach self-editing in this post too.

How I do copyediting and proofreading

Just like editing, copyediting and proofreading is also another crucial step in the publishing process. And it’s something that you should do after you’re done with editing your book.

You can hire someone to do copyediting and proofreading for you. But you can also do this yourself as long as you have the right tool to do it.

Thinking about doing copyediting and proofreading yourself? In this post, I’ll share with you all the things I use to do copyediting and proofreading for my book.

While this post talks about how I do copyediting and proofreading myself, I also share with you where you can find the right copyeditor and proofreader for your book too.

I admit that doing copyediting and proofreading is just as hard as editing the book. You need as many different options as you can when it comes to publishing a high-quality book that sells.

Ebook formatting for beginner

I tend to do the ebook formatting way before I begin writing my book. But I believe that not everyone will think about doing an ebook formatting first before they begin writing their first word.

If you have yet to do any formatting prior to starting writing, then ebook formatting is something you should do right away after you completed the editing process.

Okay, I get that the word ebook formatting sounds intimidating for you.

But the good news is doing ebook formatting isn’t as hard as you thought. What’s even better, there are many ways for you to do the ebook formatting without driving you insane.

In this post, I’ll show you all the option you have to do the ebook formatting. I’ll also share with you how I attempt ebook formatting for my books too in this post.

All about book cover design

I don’t want to be the bearer of the bad news. But people do judge a book by its cover.

No matter how great your story is, people will never bother to pick your book if you don’t have a professionally-designed book cover.

If you can only spend on one thing, then get a professional book cover design.

Now that you already know how important it is to have a professional book cover design, where you should look for a book cover designer? What else you should know about book cover design before hiring a designer to do that for you?

In this post, I’ll share with you all the things you need to know about the book cover design and where to find someone who can do just that for you.

Don’t have the budget to hire a book cover designer and thinking about doing the book cover design yourself?

Well, I also talk about how you can design your own book cover in this post too.

The beginner’s guide to creating a print book

The process of creating a print book isn’t that much different from creating an ebook. But it still has its own set of requirement. If you do it wrong, you will end up with an awful-looking book right off the gate.

Because of how confusing the process is for some people, I decided to create a post just for creating a print book. I feel that this part of the publishing process deserves its own post.

If you’re interested in creating a print version for your book but don’t know where to begin, then this guide can help you with that.

This guide covers everything you need to know about creating a print book, from what trim size you should pick to where to hire a book cover designer for your book.

You can choose to skip this step if you want. But doing that will leave the money on the table since many people still prefer to read any books in print.

And I’m sure you already know that some books are better off in print format rather than in ebook format.

Where to sell your ebook and print book

You already completed the necessary publishing process. Now it’s time to unleash your book to the world.

But now, another question pops into your head: how are you going to sell the book? Is there a way for these big retailers like Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Apple Books to carry your book? How you can get them to sell your book?

What about the print book then? Do you even need to get the book printed and fulfill the order yourself whenever you receive an order?

Here’s the good news. It’s not hard to get these retailers to sell your ebook and print book.

Even better? You can do it with a click of a button. The same concept more or less also applies to the print book as well.

Does that sound like a pipe dream to you? Well, the answer is not at all.

In this post, I’ll share with you how to get these retailers to sell your book.

If you already created a print version for your book, I’ll also share with you the best way to create a print version of your book without having you to print your book in bulk and do the fulfillment yourself.

Heck, you don’t just have your book available for sales on Amazon but also bookstores and retailers all over the world too.

Can I just hire someone to do it for me?

I get why you feel like you just want to pass all these tasks to someone else. After all, writing a book is already hard enough. And now you have to think about the other tasks that you’re not good at. You find these tasks to be complicated and you don’t have time to mess around. You want this book to get published as soon as you can.

To be honest, I’m not a big fan of hiring someone else to manage the publishing process on my behalf. But I understand that some of you will prefer to have someone to do it for you while still retaining the right of your book.

If that’s you, then I recommend you to take a look at BookBaby. With BookBaby, they can help you with publishing any books you want while still allowing you to retain the right of your book.

Remember that self-publishing doesn’t mean that you’re doing everything yourself. Even this guide to self-publishing already proves that you’re not doing everything yourself.

Want BookBaby to handle all aspect of publishing for you? Well, that still counts as self-publishing too. But not in the traditional understand sense of self-publishing.

What about the other service?

To be honest, I can’t really say much about other companies that offer a similar service like BookBaby. If you prefer to use a company other than BookBaby, then I highly recommend you to take a look at Alli Watchdog List before hiring them.

The reason why I recommend you to take a look at the list is that some companies are a downright scam. They’re charging people a lot of money but they underdeliver their promise.

It’s true that self-publishing requires an upfront cost to publish a book. But it shouldn’t be so costly that you have to take a loan or selling your house just to get your book published.