At one time, if you wanted to be an author and you weren’t picked up by a publisher, vanity publishing was your only (expensive) alternative. Actually, they shouldn’t call it vanity “publishing”. Vanity printing, instead, would be a better fit. To publish, after all, is about more than just printing a bunch of copies. A publisher is supposed to actually do something about the distribution part of things as well. Authors who vanity-publish need to sell their books themselves. Authors tend to want to write, not sell things. So, vanity authors generally lose interest after the third bookstore they visit to sell them on selling their book gives the author nothing but a blank stare. Thankfully, the way modern ebook retail is designed authors no longer need to be accused of vanity for wanting to see their work published. Self-publishing ebooks really works.
There are many reputed print-on-demand publishers now who are happy to accept any manuscript and to display it at their online stores as if it were printed and ready to sell. When a buyer orders a copy, the publisher has a perfect, high-quality one-off copy printed out and sent to him. An author who takes advantage of this kind of self-publishing never has to pay anything – since there is no printing that’s done before a customer buys a copy.
As marvelous and as inexpensive as all of this technology is, paper books aren’t the best way a first-time author might find success. A novel of average length still does need to be priced at around $15 to cover costs and leave room for a reasonable profit margin for all involved. 
It wouldn’t make sense for a new author to expect readers to pay for his book the kind of price they would usually only pay for books by established authors. Ebooks tend to be a far better bet for a first-time author.
Since ebooks don’t need printing and since they come with no distribution costs, you could really price these very cheaply and still leave room for a reasonable royalty. For instance, if you were to price your first novel at $3, this would be a really attractive price point for anyone willing to try you – a new author – out. The first time around, you could even price your book at $1 and still make a decent amount of money. There are studies published at these self-publishing companies that prove that low prices can translate to bigger profits. You could never pull this off with a printed book.
Ebooks may not have been that popular when you had to have a special Kindle-like device to read them. These days, people seem perfectly content reading their ebooks on their smartphones. The smartphone makes the ebook a far more viable format than it ever was. Self-publishing ebooks really is a viable way to launch yourself today.
There are three basic questions that probably come to mind when you think about self-publishing ebooks:
* What is the cheapest and best way to get your manuscript turned into an ebook?
* Where do you go to have it distributed?
* How much of the price of a sale do you get as author?
The thing about self-publishing ebooks is that the services that allow you to do this – names like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing or Barnes & Noble PubIt – offer entire platforms. Not only do they take your manuscript and turn it into an ebook for you, they even offer you the world’s largest ebook store to display it in – the Kindle Store, the Barnes & Noble Nook eBook Store and so on.
Amazon typically takes 30% of whatever your book generates. The rest, you get to keep (since there’s no one else involved). If you decide to bring other creative artists in to create a book cover, a proper book design and so on, you might need to pay them too; if yours is an entirely DIY project though, you do get to keep the entire 70%.
You don’t really need to stick with the major names though. There are many perfectly competent little companies out there that cater to authors interested in self-publishing ebooks.
There is SmashWords, BookBaby and Lulu, to name a few of the best companies. Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble certainly do have their own distribution platform. The others, though, have arrangements with all the online bookstores to have your book distributed.
If you have a great book that you would like the world to see, you couldn’t have asked for a better time to test it on an unsuspecting audience. The production and distribution channels are exactly in place. But it would be a good idea, really, to learn how self-publishing ebooks works before you go try this out. You could do the research and read a few books.
Creating a ebook cover-to-cover is a lot easier than ever. You have to check out Ebooks Made Easy Software. It has everything you need and more.
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