Discussion

By Joe Webb on Sep 21, 2018

There are many "authorpreneurs" who are doing quite well creating books that support narrow areas of subject matter expertise. One of the great resources in this area is the Author Marketing Institute https://authormarketinginstitute.com/ They have an excellent podcast. My experience with self publishing books has been more hobby-like, and every time I do it I become more and more impressed at the proofing tools that Amazon has created and continues to develop. Every step used to be on a knife-edge of precision, but now their software automatically adjusts images and other graphic elements, making printing your book easier and easier. My latest is at http://a.co/d/405RAna Strangely enough, publishing e-books for the various formats is still hard! Amazon's PDF conversion is quite unpredictable, and sending HTML files seemed to make it better. But the free office suite LibreOffice now includes the ability to save in the .epub format, which makes publishing in Kindle format much easier and much more predictable. https://www.libreoffice.org/ LibreOffice comes in all flavors Mac, Windows, Linux. This was quite the welcome addition to the software. For many self-published authors, the technology barriers are gone, and the costs of printing have become more economical with far less financial risk. They still have challenges with marketing and distribution, and a cottage industry of services for self-published authors has developed as well. It's a fascinating marketplace!