Writing a Book? Reasons Why You Should Self-Publish

Writing a book? Not sure whether to go the publisher vs. self-publish route? Don’t know the benefits of either? James Altucher, an author who’s dabbled a bit in both, has written a great article over at TechCrunch that can help clear a lot up before making your decision. While the focus of the article is more towards entrepreneurs, the information is useful for any author.

Much like the music industry, if you have a publisher in the book world, you can expect to see very little of the revenue going to your pockets. Instead, your publisher will retain the bulk majority, and for what? Not much, according to James. When he was with Penguin publishing, he saw no publicizing of his book taking place, had no control whatsoever on the cover art, and made 15% off of each sale. With self-publishing, though, he had total control over everything, and 100% of the profits were his.

I have pondered the idea of writing a book before and also self-publishing, but I didn’t know what to expect. Just how much hassle would something like that entail? Surprisingly, not much, and James gives a breakdown of the steps he takes. The general steps are A) writing the book, B) using a service to create it into something usable, C) format and edit it, D) use the same service as before to approve it and choose an ISBN number and then E) profit!

Within days of doing all this, you could have your very own book published on Amazon and even have it made available for Kindle. From that point it’s up to you to help promote it, and for that James recommends giving out free copies to help get the word out.

Entrepreneur or not, if you’ve ever wanted to write a book, you really, really have no excuse not to. It’s easier than ever and who knows? You might just have a success on your hands.