Self-Publish Your eBook. Reason #2

Bookshops groaning with Books.

There’s never been a better time to self-publish your own ebook. There are so many ways to promote your books through social media, publish them through major online retailers and make them available to libraries. And it cuts away at the monopoly of the big High Street retailers.

So what’s wrong with the big High Street retailers, Barnes and Noble in the US, or Indigo in Canada, or Waterstones in the UK? 

Well, not much really, except that they are limited by the size of their stores and the flexibility, or otherwise, of their central buying teams. These venerable institutions are in terminal decline because they simply cannot represent the scale of opportunity afforded online to the consumer. And, to make it worse, in an attempt to compete with the internet they are trying to reinvent themselves with non-book items —  fluffy toys, stationery — and so reducing the amount of already limited space available to books. A book store with 40,000-50,000 books used to be a reasonably typical size. This sounds like a large number, but with the publishing industry regularly pumping out over 150,000 new titles and reissues every year, you can see the problem. And Amazon has around 1.8 million books available.

Publishers, be they the powerhouses of Penguin, HarperCollins and Random or the plethora of indie outfits, all have a tough time selling their books into the limited space on the shelves of the big retailers. And they also sell to supermarkets, garden centres, chain stores etc, and these retailers have even less space for books.

So, as a self-publishing author, using Createspace, or Smashwords, or Lulu, or making and uploading yourself to Amazon, Apple, B&N’s Nook and Kobo, you will control over your own selling space. You can build on it and promote it. You can let it grow at a pace that suits you, you can publish one book every two years or five every other month. It’s your choice, not someone else’s, and, as long as you create something that’s professional and promotable, you will be the prime beneficiary.

And did I mention that you can change the price of your own book? Or alter the cover, or update the book without having to wait for the next print-run? Well, that’s for another post!

Coming Soon: Do You Need an Agent? and How do I Find a Good Proofreader?