The question is no longer 'should', but 'how'. Self-Publishing Tips

Whitney Lyons
Mar 21, 2017
2 min read

After reading Ryan Galloway's blog post about self-publishing, you might not be wondering how to go about that. For me personally, my first question was: Where do I even start? It's actually not as daunting as you think.

The step you need to take is to figure out where you'd like to self-publish. There are a lot of great sites out there that will assist you in self-publishing a book and they guide you through the entire process. Once you have your title and content, it's all up to you to confirm you have publishing rights, set your price, and publish it. However, there are some top ones that people have great success with! Here is a list of some sites that will help you out:

www.lulu.com
This site is great if you want options. Want to have a copy of your book in hardcover, paperback and ebook? Lulu can take care of that for you. It also offers great tips for how to self-publish. Also, importantly, it gives you options for where to sell your self-published book. Lulu gives you great resources and walks you through all of it.
www.createspace.com
Createspace is a self-publushing site run by Amazon and what I like best about it, is that it gives you access to publishing experts. It's not free, but it can put you in touch with someone who can really help your book. If you decide not to go that way, Createspace will still help you publish your book in any format you wish and you have options on where you'd like to publish as well!
www.smashwords.com
This is a great website that reaches a lot of distributors. They also offer a lot of tools and tips on how to best promote your book! Something I loved about them, they strive to make their ebooks public to libraries - which would help you get your book out to a wider audience!
www.bookbaby.com
This is also a great site with a lot of great options for how you want to publish. It offers a complete package for self-publishing - everything you will need! I also like that this site offers print on demand! When someone buys your book, you can have them print it then and send it out instead of having to print a number of them before hand!
www.kdp.amazon.com
Amazon is great because it takes you step by step through the entire process, however, this publishing tool only goes to Amazon! While this will reach millions of people, it doesn't offer options to publish anywhere else with this tool. However, what's really nice about this site is you can set your own price and change it at anytime. Actually, you can even change your book at anytime. So nothing is set in stone!