5 Good Reasons for Self-Publishing

If you are considering self-publishing your novel or non-fiction book, you are not alone. Lots of people consider self-publishing to be one of the best ways to get books out there these days. That’s because there are some really compelling reasons to self-publish. Let’s take a look at five of them.

Self-Publishing Means Higher Royalties

You actually get higher royalties when you self-publish; like a lot higher. For example, if you go with a traditional publisher, you could get a royalty between 10-15%. The publisher gets to keep the rest. But you don’t even get to keep that 10% yourself. Besides taxes, many traditional publishers will not even read your manuscript unless it comes from an agent – a practice known as only accepting solicited manuscripts. But self-publishing does not require an agent and your royalties will be a lot higher. For example, as long as your digital book is priced at $2.99 or higher, Amazon will give you a 70% royalty on every sale and only keep 30%. That’s a huge difference.

You Still Have to Promote Yourself

Even if you decide to publish traditionally, you are still going to have to do your own promotion. Publishing houses rarely do promotion these days and they never do it for brand new authors. The most promotion that you might get as a new author is a listing in the Baker & Taylor or Ingram catalogs, which goes to schools, libraries and bookstores. But you will have to do book tours yourself, as well as any other advertising.

People Read Self-Published Fiction

In the past, one of the major disadvantages of self-published fiction is that people wouldn’t read it. That’s because there was very little of it that was worth reading. But self-publishing today has created some major bestsellers, and even some of the biggest authors in the world have self-published work, so people are much more open to the idea of reading self-published fiction.

Self-Published Books Can Look as Good as Traditional Ones

Another advantage to be aware of is that you can make your self-published book just as good as traditional ones. You can get an amazing cover from a professional book cover designer at a fair price these days, and you can use the same formatting for the interior of the book as traditional publishers do. You can even hire an editor to make your book as good as possible before you publish it. Self-published books can be just as high quality as traditionally published books.

Self-Publishing is the Future of Book Publishing and a lot cheaper

You might also not be aware that self-publishing is going to be the way the book publishing is done in the future. For one thing, digital books have basically taken over the reading world. People read books on devices now much more often than they read physical books. Plus, even authors that have been traditionally published for decades are starting to move towards self-publishing because they make more money and have more creative control over the content.