Hello everyone,
I am here with another group of self-publish advice. This time it is about the formatting of your book: ebooks, paperbacks, and hardcovers. All of these depend on how much money you're willing to spend and what your distributors say.
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Hello everyone,
I haven't given advice in QUITE SOME TIME. So, I feel that is it only fair to give advice now. This time, about cover design! You've heard people say "don't judge a book by it's cover!", but let's be real, everyone does! It's what captivates us and gets us engaged. I definitely do it - I can't help it! If the cover grabs my attention, I look at the back cover to see if I actually like it. Sometimes the great cover will make me buy the book anyway. Sometimes a bad cover will make me put the book back. In that regard, COVER DESIGN IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS THE MATERIAL INSIDE. Hello everyone, Starting out as a self-published author, I had to learn quickly all of the different things that my books would need. One of the things that all books need nowadays are ISBNs. ISBNs are the little code you see on books that have 13 digits following it. These help to identify our books from others. An example of Missing's ISBN is below: 979-8-9859309-1-7 Depending on what website you are joining to distribute (a whole different topic!), they may offer different choices for you. Most websites will offer to give you a FREE ISBN that they will pay for. The ONLY time you would want to take this offer is if you ONLY plan on selling your book on that website. Most stipulate in the terms and conditions that if you use their free ISBN, you CANNOT sell your book anywhere else. That may be okay to some, but many like me, want our books to be sold at many different places. DO NOT TAKE THIS OFFER IF YOU WANT TO SELL YOUR BOOK IN MORE THAN ONE PLACE.
If you are in the United States, you need to go to Bowker.com. Once you register, you are able to buy ISBNs. It is currently the ONLY place that is reputable to buy ISBNs. They have multiple packages bundles: (as I'm reading it currently, this may change).
Ebooks are different. You do not need an ISBN for an ebook. However, I have ISBNs on all of my ebooks so that they can be sold in different places (libraries, book stores, Kobo, etc.). I do not go through Bowker for my ISBNs for ebooks. Instead, I use Smashwords. After reading their terms and conditions, it seems that their ISBN is free, but also doesn't tie us down as they distribute their ebooks through Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and others. Is there any other advice you may need help with? If so, comment down below. I may not know everything, but I'd rather share my advice than keep it to myself and watch others make the same mistakes I did. - Amy The need to continue looking at reviews just as I did the comments on those websites had grown. I was obsessive with it. I looked at Amazon and GoodReads every day for reviews and ratings. Did people like it? Did people not like it? I already knew what I thought about my books, but I wanted to know what other people had thought.
With Innocent, more family and friends had bought the book. I knew, though, that they didn't actually read it. Most of them weren't huge readers to begin with, but wanted to support me by buying the book. (Thank you!) In saying that, I didn't really get the reviews and ratings except from my mom. She was honest in her review, but she could have just given me a good rating because I was her daughter. I would never know. Missing was the gamechanger. Almost none of my friends or family bought this book so I had to rely on advertising and marketing to get what I wanted. I reached out to influencers, bloggers, instagrammers, TikTokers until I started getting responses. There are about 20 of them who were interested in my book and then I listed Missing in a giveaway. People were buying! Reviews and ratings weren't coming in nearly as fast as I wanted, but I still checked every day. Until I got that one star rating... |
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