Unless you've been completely cut off from the outside world for the past few years, you know that the book publishing game is changing. You probably also understand that Amazon has been at the forefront of this revolution. Not only is Jeff bezos' company getting into transitional publishing, with the ebook Kindle platform (not to mention competing products such as Kobo, Nook etc.), authors are no longer at the mercy of large New York publishing houses. Nor is the only other option vanity publishing, where you are forced to spend a lot of money ahead of time to pay a company to print, bind and stock your books (which may or may not sell). At this point, it's no problem for neophite authors to write a manuscript, upload it and commence collecting payments via Amazon's distribution network.
It's not going to be that simple, though. Unwary writers will still have to deal with a lot of traps on the way to success. First, there are tens of thousands of people writing and uploading their ebooks nowadays. Of course, with such a extensive amount of competition, getting your work noticed necessitates a decent amount of effort. And this is where a lot of new writers are falling down on the job. They seem to think that once the manuscript is done, they're finished. But there are still a lot of things to do.
Number one: get a good cover made. Nothing makes a book stand out from the competition more than an eye-catching cover. And a poorly done cover will limit sales, because few people will bother to take a chance on a story when the author hasn't bothered to get a high-quality cover made for it.
Second, there is the technical process of formatting the manuscript for Kindle, Kobo and so on. Each device has a different standard, and just putting an MSWord document up on Amazon is going to create a Kindle book that has odd spaces, line breaks, chapter breaks, etc. In extreme cases, this lack of formatting can render the manuscript all but unreadable, and even in cases where it's not that extreme, bad formatting will leave a bad taste in the reader's mouth. Along the same lines, you should employ a professional proof-reader to give your work a once-over. Misspelled words, run-on sentences and the like will drive away many readers, and if your book should happen to get reviewed by a blogger with a large following, you can bet that technical English issues will draw criticism. Unfortunately, all too many authors neglect this vital aspect of publishing, resulting in books that are, in a word, unprofessional. If you plan to sell your books, that means that you are going to be a professional writer. So you should uphold the standards of professionalism as much as you can.
Finally, there is uploading the manuscript to whatever website or service you're going to use to distribute it. Again, many authors simply don't want to deal with the hassle of this step. But even the technically challenged will have to either figure this out or else employ somebody to do it for them.
Luckily, there are services out there that can help with all of these problems. And they needn't cost all that much. Depending on how much help you require, you can get, for instance, a guide to upload books on Kindle, complete with snippets of HTML code already written out for you, for as little as a couple of dollars. Assuming you have a manuscript that is of normal length (somewhere around 90,000 words), you can get an editor to look at it for less than a hundred bucks total. And there are cover artists who can be had for a similar amount. Alternatively, there exist reputable companies that can supply some or all of these services as a package deal, thereby saving you both money and time... time that you can then use to get your next book written.
Author Resource:-
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