Currently, virtually everyone realizes that Amazon has completely changed the way books are published. Not only is Jeff bezos' company getting into transitional publishing, with the ebook Kindle platform (not to mention competitors' products such as Kobo, Nook and so on), people who want to become writers are no longer at the mercy of immense New York publishing conglomerates. And there are more alternatives, not just vanity publishing, in which you have to spend a lot of money before the printing process begins 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 start collecting payments via Amazon's distribution system.
It's not going to be that straightforward, though. Unwary writers will still deal with a lot of difficulties on the way to success. To begin with, there must be hundreds of thousands of people who are writing and uploading ebooks these days. What does this mean? Well, having your work noticed is going to take a bit of sweat on your part. 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. If there's one thing that makes a book stand out, it's a well-executed, eye-catching cover. And a shoddily 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 good 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 someone who is technically challenged will have to either figure this out or else engage someone to do it for them.
But you don't need to fret. There are services out there that can facilitate all of these issues. And they needn't cost all that much. Depending on the degree of help you could do with, 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. If 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. You can also find cover artists who can be contracted for a similar amount. Alternatively, there are reputable companies that will provide some or all of these services as a package deal, thus saving you both money and time... time that you can then spend on getting your second book written.
Author Resource:-
If you are a writer looking for tech support for websites, conversion to Kindle & other self-publishing platforms, etc., Writer Tech Help can handle the details while you focus on your manuscript. Best-selling authors know that success lies in concentrating on their strengths. Writertechhelp.com - a self-publishing writer's secret weapon and best friend.
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