

Ask HN: Writing a book – Where to publish? - redxblood

So i´m almost done writing my first book ever, and I was wondering if anyone had any experience using services that publish your book for you? As in, they sell your book in epub, pdf and other formats online.<p>I´ve heard Amazon is pretty good, giving you 70% revenue and other benefits, but honestly i have no idea how to tackle this.
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Stoo
I've published a series of short stories through Amazon and I find their
service to be very good. Quite straight forward to set up and get started.
Smashwords[0] are also supposed to be quite good. They have similar terms to
Amazon and will spread your book to other sites such as Apple, Kobobo[1] and a
few others.

Things you may not have thought about:

1\. Get a good quality cover image, pay for one if you have to,

2\. Write an interesting and compelling blurb,

3\. Have other people read your work before you publish, if you can afford to
hire an editor.

1 and 2 are the first introduction to your book so need to catch the eye of
the potential reader. 3 is vital, especially in longer works, as you will miss
things.

What's the book about?

Oh and good luck!

[0]: [http://www.smashwords.com/](http://www.smashwords.com/)

[1]: [http://store.kobobooks.com/](http://store.kobobooks.com/)

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redxblood
Thanks so much for the explanation! The book is about the rise of depression
in our society, my personal experience with it, and how to deal with it in a
healthy way. i´ll be sure to take into account your advice :)

~~~
Stoo
Sounds like a worthwhile book to finish and publish!

There's a few things I forgot to mention.

You will have to do your own marketing. None of the self-publishing services
will help you with that.

A Good Reads[0] account can help with that, but I haven't had much success
with it myself. If you figure out a good marketing strategy please let me know
:)

If you're outside of the US and are charging for the book then both Amazon and
Smashwords require you to fill out US tax forms as they're both US based.
Amazon have a wizard which will help walk you through this. It seemed really
daunting when I did it (I had to phone a US tax office for an EIN number) but
was actually quite straight forward.

If you've got any specific questions, let me know.

[0]: [http://www.goodreads.com/](http://www.goodreads.com/)

~~~
redxblood
Damn, the US tax form will be annoying. I´ll be sure to tell you my experience
when i go through it all :) Thanks!

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adzicg
I've self-published several books.

I primarily use lightning source for print books (both for getting copies for
myself and delivering to conferences and for distribution to retail and
amazon). I used Lulu for my first book and was disappointed by their
responsiveness in case of problems (note this was in 2007/8, so things
probably changed since). I've published two books through lightning source and
those got into Amazon very quickly, and have been selling quite nicely.

For e-books, I use a mix of things. The Kindle store is #1 in terms of revenue
for me, and I guess not having a book there is akin to creating an IOS app and
not publishing it on the AppStore. Having a book there is a must for
discoverability. I still use Lulu.com to get things on the apple iBooks store
and other lesser ebook stores, and to sell the PDFs online. The amount of
money I earn from those places isn't enough to justify bothering with each
individual submission. For the Kindle store, the submission process is pretty
straightforward and there is no need to pay Lulu commission.

My two latest books are in progress on leanpub. I think this is a pretty good
early-access channel. They now have github support and will generate PDF, MOBI
and ePub, so this fits nicely with my workflow and toolchain. Leanpub didn't
do anything special in terms of discoverability or promotion for my books, but
they were a good channel to republish stuff frequently and let people buy
early versions. I plan to re-do the PDF completely for print publishing, but
I'll use the MOBI and ePub they generated to sell the books directly on the
Apple iBooks and Amazon Kindle stores. I think that's going to be better than
just keeping it on Leanpub, again because of discoverability. So if the book
is already done, I don't think you'll get much from them.

Smashwords.com is another option that looks popular with fiction writers, but
I never really did anything there so I can't provide much more than a pointer.

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macguyver
I have used Amazon and Smashwords for over 2 years now. Both services have
grown, expanded, and improved, in terms of my user experience (checking
reports, accurate payments). I had up to 10 books available at one point,
still have 7-8 in circulation.

70% of my book sales come from Amazon. Smashwords gives me more $ per sale.

If you had to go with one service first, I'd recommend Amazon Kindle Direct.
Once you get comfortable with how the process works, branch out to Smashwords
if you like. It took me less than a day to get set up and they have pretty
good documentation.

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phantom_oracle
Another alternative: [https://leanpub.com/](https://leanpub.com/)

