Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Self-Publishing with Amazon

First off, let me just say that Amazon.com is amazing, and I love that website.  Seriously, if I could do all my shopping there--and I do mean all--I would.  Their prices are almost always unbeatable, they have excellent customer services, and their sell-back prices for textbooks are like 1000% higher than the BYU Bookstore's sell-back prices (that may or may not have been a slight exaggeration).  One of the coolest new things from Amazon is their self-publishing feature.

There are two ways to self-publish with Amazon: publish with CreateSpace or publish with Kindle Direct Publishing.  CreateSpace is a more traditional method of publishing.  You sign up with CreateSpace through Amazon.com, upload your content, select your royalty, and they begin creating your product.  Kindle Direct Publishing is the same basic concept, but instead of actually creating a physical book you simply create a digital copy of your novel.  I have to give it up to Amazon.com for being awesome enough to create the opportunity for authors everywhere to get their works published and into circulation.

Although Amazon.com started their self-publishing deal fairly recently, many authors have found success using this option.  Check out this article from USA Today to read about Amanda Hocking's stellar success story.  Of course, Hocking used a lot of tactics and didn't simply rely on publishing for success.

In the non sequitur of the year, Projecct CCC's (the crowd-sourcing novel project) ultimate goal is to publish  a novel and hopefully sell copies of said novel to people other than our moms.  Self-publishing with Amazon.com is only the first step for our group's project, and we will need to make full use of our promoting skills, but self-publishing will be an extremely important first step.

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