Let Me Tell You About Self-Publishing ebooks

Tweet

Since a lot of people are getting interested in it lately (from what I have seen through posts) thinking that it might be the next best thing when it comes to earning money, let me tell you about my experience through Kindle. I have been over there for about 4 months now and have read a lot of the community topics on their forums. So here's the parroted advice that I have learned from the authors who have been there for a large number of years: If you want to just publish or write to have fun, go for it, but don't expect to earn much going in. If you want to write to earn money, you should have accumulated about 10,000 hours of experience through writing. Not social site writing either, but actual formatting, story telling, structure, technical, etc writing experience. Otherwise it will be tough on you, because you will be forced to work hard to make it. People who self-publish are called Independents, or Indies. Most Indie writers make very little. I didn't sell anything for over a month. Visibility and increased exposure requires publishing multiple times or having a decent network or else your book will disappear into the 5 million ebooks over there on Amazon (if that's where you are going). There are many different sites to publish, but that's the one with a lot of exposure. If you enroll in KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) Select, then you can get $0.0047 per page read from their Kindle Unlimited platform. The more pages read, the more money you make. Obviously, larger books benefit more. Most Indies make very little. I see many that have gone months without a single sale. Of course, a large number of these Indies lack quality work. They enter a book in hopes of a quick buck and the writing is horrible, the format is bad, and the attractiveness of what they are writing is nonexistent. Plus it is overcharged. Pricing an ebook is hard, but typically it has to be pretty low if you want to sell at all, and many authors can't accept a low price when so many hours went into producing it. So how much do people make if they aren't successful in landing a hot topic or a well-promoted book? As one of the author's there said, "If you earn a few hundred a year, you are lucky. If you earn a few thousand a year, you are very lucky." From my own experience, luck is a factor, but so is hard work. If you can write and produce a book every few days (short stories that run anywhere from 3,500 words to 15,000 words) then you will definitely get exposure and a following. But if you stop for over a week, they'll forget about you. So if you think you are ready to write like mad to profit, go for it! If it's just the satisfaction of seeing something you wrote there, go for it! If you just want to write a book and hope to be a millionaire for it, you'll get disappointed really fast. But by all means, try it if you think you have what it takes. Good luck!