Writing a book is only half the battle won! The other half leaves you at the mercy of literary agents, traditional publishers, distributors, reviewers and marketers. But writers need lose no heart because this age offers respite, courtesy the hyphenated phenomena of self-publishing!
Let’s look at top publishing solutions that can help you package and market your words to the widest possible audience.
CreateSpace:
An affiliate of Amazon.com, CreateSpace is a platform for new, unknown writers which allows free-of-cost publishing at a reasonable fee, in which case CreateSpace designs, formats, prints, and publishes. One can also publish books for free, which means the writer will be doing all the hard work; beginning from designing, formatting, creating the cover, and converting files to PDF. It makes your book available for sale through Amazon.com with the same detail page as a traditionally published book.
Lulu:
Launched in 2002, Lulu has enabled people in more than 225 countries to self-publish nearly two million publications, including 1.5 million books via print, e-readers and tablet devices. Lulu.com is available in six languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Dutch. While Lulu publishes your book for free, the distribution is limited to their site. However, one can get full distribution for a resonable fee.
Smashwords:
Smashwords converts word files into ebook formats and distributes them globally to various ebook retailers.They pay 85% of the net profit to the authors for each book sold. The author also retains all rights and complete control of the book, its sampling, pricing, and promotion. Authors can even publish it elsewhere, if they like. Smashwords publishes the eBook for free. It provides the ebook a page on their website, and sells it there for free. It generates income through commissions from the sales of written works. Smashwords publishes everyone’s content —self-published authors, unpublished authors, authors of out-of-print books for whom the rights have reverted, authors under contract with big-name publishers, provided they have the digital publishing rights to their work.
Smashwords:
Smashwords converts word files into ebook formats and distributes them globally to various ebook retailers.They pay 85% of the net profit to the authors for each book sold. The author also retains all rights and complete control of the book, its sampling, pricing, and promotion. Authors can even publish it elsewhere, if they like. Smashwords publishes the eBook for free. It provides the ebook a page on their website, and sells it there for free. It generates income through commissions from the sales of written works. Smashwords publishes everyone’s content —self-published authors, unpublished authors, authors of out-of-print books for whom the rights have reverted, authors under contract with big-name publishers, provided they have the digital publishing rights to their work.
Aventine Press:
Aventine Press publishes the book with a little tweak in terms and conditions. They generally hold the pricing decision of the book, and base it on the finished page count. They claim to be the fastest in layout, design and formatting process among book publishing companies, and in most cases the book is ready in three months. Aventine Press is a relatively small publishing house, but because they partner with LightningSource Inc., a subsidiary of Ingram Industries Inc., they claim to offer authors delivery channels to more than 90% of all retail bookstore outlets in the USA. Paperback and hardcover royalties are 80% of the payments received from sales of printed copies of the book.