You maintain control of the final product. These are small, simple changes, but if you don’t have any knowledge of formatting, you’ll have to pay somebody to do it, and this goes back to point 3.ĥ. Or, at the very least, you’ll want to update booklists, be able to adapt back matter, add in affiliate sales links per sales channel, etc. Fixing those inadvertent typos that slip through your editor or beta readers. Part of self publishing means that you should be updating your books. You will want to be able to make changes and shouldn’t have to hire out to do that. If you’re on a limited publishing budget, your money needs to go to the important things you can’t do yourself, like cover art and editing.Ĥ. I published my first ebook with only $50 out of pocket (for cover art) and every single publishing expense I’ve had since then came from profits. I say bollocks to that (because, really, I don’t have enough opportunity to say “bollocks” in real life). This has changed somewhat with the advent of self publishing, and there are people out there who say you can’t self-publish without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars. There’s this saying in publishing that the money always flows to the author. Formatting doesn’t have to be one of them. Self publishing does not come without expense. While you can do it that way, you don’t have to (and, dear God, why would you want to?).ģ. I can’t count the number of folks I’ve talked to who were under the impression that they needed to be able to do complicated code in order to format ebooks. This comes under the heading of formatting being not hard. It does not take knowledge of CSS or other coding. If you can read instructions, you can learn to format ebooks.Ģ. Formatting ebooks can be many things-a gigantic pain in the butt (depending on how many egregious formatting mistakes you commit in drafting), tedious, headache-inducing-but not hard. I’m here today to tell you why you should, too, even if you opt to hire someone. I have bullied (insulted?) more than one author into taking the plunge and educating themselves. If you happen to have seen me around since the early days, chances are you heard me railing against the latter.
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