We’ll soon have a guest post written by a successful self-published author and she can speak in greater detail about the complexities of self-publishing through KDP, but for now I want to touch on the basics.
So you’ve decided to forgo a big publisher. Maybe you have confidence in your ability to sell the book to your own engaged audience, maybe you don’t need or want to sell tons of copies, maybe you believe in your skills as a marketer and you want to maximize profits, maybe you just can’t be bothered to go through the entire process of querying an agent, writing a proposal, and negotiating a book deal. If you want to self-publish there are a number of platforms available to you, and this post goes through some basic pros and cons of each. There’s also something called hybrid publishing where you don’t have a publisher attached but there is a distribution platform behind you (though this is an emerging model and has a lot of variations depending on who you work with).
Let’s assume that regardless of how many copies of the book you hope to sell, you want it to be as great as it can be. There are a few key people you’ll need to work with to make this happen:
A developmental editor
A copy editor
A proofreader
A book designer
Optional: researchers
Optional: fact-checkers
Optional: cultural sensitivity readers
Optional: test readers
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