Digital Marketing

6 desktop publishing skills to get your book self-published and distributed worldwide

Now that you have your manuscript, you may be wondering which are the best desktop publishing companies to hire. Or how to publish your own book without incurring too much cost?

If you’ve never published yourself before, let me suggest that you try publishing an e-book on Amazon first. From there, you can migrate to publishing on other e-reader platforms, such as Barnes and Noble, IBook, Kobo, and finally to other e-reader resellers around the world.

Technically speaking, once your book is on Amazon, it will be available worldwide. But there are many readers with other electronic reading devices besides the Kindle, which is why it is not a bad idea to distribute it to other electronic readers.

Once you’ve finished distributing your e-reader, it’s time to get your book in print. We will discuss how to print your own book in another article.

Certainly, books and publications have been a hot topic these last ten years. With the publishing of Kindle and Amazon opening the doors for anyone to publish a book on their own for a low cost, if you have the technical know-how, there is no excuse not to do it yourself.

There are a few things to keep in mind when you want to post on your own.

If you know how to do these 6 easy things, you should be able to publish worldwide in as little as a week, and there is no need to pay thousands or even hundreds of dollars to desktop publishing gurus. Your book can be distributed worldwide with just a few clicks of the button. And there is no need to pay anyone for this.

Desktop publishing costs these days have plummeted and you shouldn’t be using a desktop publishing house to help you accomplish these simple tasks, such as:

1. How to format your manuscript from a Word document to Kindle’s.mobi version.

And it is not as difficult as you think. Some programs require you to download them to your computer and may be free like Caliber, others are for a small cost like Jutoh.

But I really like the free cloud-based software that Draft2Digital provides. I’ve tried a few free and paid services, including Amazon’s KDP converter, but Draft2Digital is still my favorite. They are a UK company. If you have problems, please email them and they will get back to you in the morning if you are in the US.

2. How to set up a website and blog. Because these days you can set one up for $ 5 a month or even free. No need to pay thousands of dollars in developer costs like I once did. The technology is simple and free if you know where to look and how to do easy drag-and-drop things, similar to copying and pasting into a Word document.

Some programs allow you to create landing pages on your WordPress website, but others like Wix offer you the option to create a landing page even without having to buy any plugins. I actually created a homepage for my 16 Princess books using Wix, and I really like the flexibility this technology gives me. For the non-techies, Wix is ​​easy to use. Nothing to download or upload to create the site pages.

3. How to get your e-book (mobi format) to upload to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) – a question of filling out forms. I am not kidding.

4. How to set up an Amazon Author page so that you can direct your readers to it, so they can simply click on your name and access your bio and other website presence you have from your website, your blog , to your Facebook fan page and all other social networks, all from the Amazon book site.

5. How to format your eBook for non-Kindle readers, with a click of a button, for free.

6. How to distribute your e-book worldwide in e-reader bookstores, from Australia, Italy, Japan and beyond. And with Amazon, you can even take your books to libraries in the US.

With the way things are set up for desktop publishing, all you need these days is a good editor and cover design. Everything else shouldn’t cost you thousands as it did in the past.

But as in everything in life, you must know where to look.

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