There are three basic types of self-publishing forms; hardcover books, paperbacks, and eBooks.

Self-publish Hardcover Books

The hardest form is hardcover although every author wants their book to be a hardcover book, it isn’t always cost effective and most authors get caught up with vanity publishing. Most vanity publishers crawl around taking advantage of every possible author. It’s the way that they make money! At first they’ll usually contact you by mail. Who, me, you think! The ego is stroked and author after author is taken advantage of costing them thousands of dollars, and going nowhere fast. The world is promised to you and sold!

When you want to pay to self-publish hardcover books I suggest going about it professionally. First, make your choices in size and appearance, then make contacts in your states book printers and compare a few of their prices. Ask how many for what and if and when… Do your due diligence gathering the facts, leave nothing to chance. Produce small quantities at first providing you are equipped. You will need to be ready to knock on doors to sell your books; schools, libraries, small books stores and maybe even some of the chains. Another service you may want to look into is Lighting Source a POD, print-on-demand service and offer hard covered books plus ship anywhere on the globe 

Self-publish Paperbacks

For paperback books self-publishing I always suggest CreateSpace for a few reasons. First, they print what you sell or better stated they are POD, print on demand service, 1 to whatever number you need. Second, there is no upfront cost or fees. Third, you can receive an ISBN number for free. Forth, you have distribution throughout the Amazon network available to you. But understand you have to be the one out there marketing your books, working for a small percentage of the sales and let me tell you it might sound easy but…

CreateSpace offers forms to you based upon your print size. I do suggest using their document forms. Once you book is written turn your book into a PDF form. PDF offers much more stable electronic file environment.  They also offer forms for your book covers too, again based on size and number of pages. You might use them; they will make your life easier!

Self-publish eBooks

The fastest growing segment online is eBooks. I do suggest self-publishing your book as an eBook too. That said self-publishing eBooks is a bit of a task. Most of the information seems to be hidden and you can spend countless hours trying to research it. Let me tell you, I did! From font size and types to image sizes the information I found was hidden from the main sites and it did seem like they wanted you to pay to find out how, especially at Kindle!

Kindle you will need to work with font size 11, font type Times New Roman.} Interior images must be 512px wide and not greater than 600px in height for eBooks. These are keys to your success at Kindle. There is free software available online for creating eBooks so don’t get caught up in all of the hype! Sigil is the best free open source software for producing acceptable ePub files for all of the eBook self-publishing sites; Kindle, Smashwords, and of course Book-Spot.com. There is one difference between the sites here at Book-Spot.com we allow all of the font types that are available in Sigil keeping your books presentation exactly as you want it to be for the reader.

ISBN number

You will need to have an ISBN number to be printed on your book. ISBN numbers can cost up to $125.00 per ISBN number! There are a few ways around the cost. Many of the print on demand publishers online offer ISBN numbers free. Book-Spot.com is working on the issue of ISBN numbers but will have to charge a modest fee. It is still being worked on we want to offer them as cheap as possible to our self-publishing authors.

Pricing Books or eBooks

Pricing a book or an ebook to generate sales as an indie author can be difficult. The best method of pricing a hardcover or paperback book is to go into stores and see what prices that are selling books for. Then based on the number of pages choose a price that best suits your book. For ebooks pricing is another story. There are certain proven best selling prices. It is tricky because many of the self-publishing sites restrict the percentage base upon price and it is the best selling prices that get hit the hardest. The best selling price ranges for indie authors are $0.99 to $2.99. You will sell more units and earn more revenue than those in any other price ranges.

The 7 best sites for self-publishing

1.         CreateSpace – no set up fees but a distribution percentage split through Amazon, of whom owns the company plus you have to wait to be paid for the sales from your book plus you do all of the marketing. They are good for printing paperbacks and a POD service.

2.         Barnes & Noble B&N's 65 percent is close to Amazon for ebooks. PubIt includes a free conversion tool that takes your Microsoft Word, TXT, HTML, or RTF files and automatically converts it to an EPUB file, which you then upload to Barnes & Noble's eBookstore

3.         Smashwords – no front money, but here too there is a percentage split plus you have to wait to be paid and you do all of the marketing. Earn 60% of List Price from Major eBook Retailers and 85% Net at Smashwords.com

4.         Kindle / Amazon – no front money, but again there is a percentage split plus you have to wait to be paid and you do all of the marketing Amazon's Kindle pays 70 percent royalty for ebooks, (Amazon also has pricing restriction to get its highest percentage rates). I understand that Amazon’s Kindle is changing soon and you will be making much less. One has to watch out for Kindle Select as that locks you in with them alone and can prevent you from using other sites to have your ebooks available to everyone.

5.         BookBaby charges up front for self-publishing. Upload your eBook with them and pay just $99. Sell your eBooks worldwide. Get paid 100%!

6.         LuLu.com, is one of the bigger online self-publishing sites.

7.         Book-Spot.com – is unusual they have no fees, and no percentages, they are an author based free self-publishing site with a store. There is no middleman taking all of the money. Indie authors and publishers are paid directly upon the sale of their books. Although you still have to market the books yourself, but we offer easy to use free marketing tools too.

Marketing Self-published eBooks or Books

This is a business that you are in and you will need to make discussions and they should be taken seriously. You want to weight out time vs money, the work and what are your rewards. Between all of the main self-publishing sites most do not offer much other than advice and costly services to market your books. For online marketing I suggest Book-Spot.com they offer many free easy to use tools for most of your marketing needs right here for your book marketing purposes plus selling your books through them you retain 100% of the earnings for all your hard work marketing, which does make sense.

free self-publishing Book Spot