How to publish a book (II): Selfpublishing First part

What do I need to self publish?

As I will always give my point of view on this, as self-publish is not an easy task and want to do it on paper costs soar.

If you are a novel author and want to self-publish, trust me and start editing in Ebook, That way you will avoid high economic expenses and your target audience will risk before making the decision, because you can sell it at a very low price. Let's not fool ourselves; no one is going to consume a product they do not know.

The steps we must follow are:

The first step is the most logical, we must write our manuscript. Although it is a first draft, it is always best to do it in the right format so that you do not have more work in the end.

We will be able to see the number of pages and it will facilitate the creation of the index.

The best thing is that the work is not large, not to give such a high responsibility to the prospective buyer. Imagine you have to choose a 1000 page book from someone you have not read, Would you buy it? I do not think so, it's a very big decision, because if you do not like it then it will not matter.

Give it a suitable and standardized format like Openoffice or Microsoft Word, This is to facilitate printing, If you give them more work to format also will be charged, No one works for free.

Secondly we will talk about the record, for me the most important step after writing. If you have decided to get it for sale, Publish some chapter so readers can browse, etc. It is very important to have it registered. There are people who can take advantage of your work without your consent.

In your city you have a registry of the property, you do not need to go very far. On their website you can consult the headquarters. The format they request is the one of all the life, DIN-A4 and bound.

Now you are looking insane so much security, But at some point, the work will pass through hands that are not yours.

In another article we will talk about the necessary documents, If you need more information do not hesitate to consult me.

Once registered, we can start with the third step. Improve that first draft, as discussed in “How to write a book”.

Once you believe that the work cannot be improved and corrected, I recommend that you speak with a philologist in the language in which you write your book, They charge about € 100 and we guarantee that there is no spelling error.

Fourthly, with our finished work ready to begin reading, we need the cover. This step you can do at any time before, Although it is always better to do it with the finished novel so that it has a correct meaning.

There are several ways to make your cover, if you have notions you can use programs like Photoshop or Gimp. However if you do not have much idea, do not worry, Amazon has an editor, canva is another option and searching the internet you will find thousands of programs and websites free and paid. In addition to being able to contact good designers.

Now that we have everything, We must check that we have filled in all the necessary information on the first page, which we will disaggregate in the following article.

Although not my recommendation, if you have decided to publish physically, You need to calculate the PVP, for this I have been fed by the information available in escritores.org. I did not want to touch the information of the article since it seems very complete, which indicate the following:

To do this calculation first you have to calculate how much it has cost each copy to you including all the expenses of production, Transport, as well as make a forecast of distribution costs depending on the size of the area that you intend to cover during the years in which this edition is in force so as not to end up catching your fingers.

You're not supposed to just place your books in the corner store, Although that would be your best option to start whenever the editorial line coincides with the genre that you offer and manage to capture the grocer.

It illustrates the calculation with a very realistic practical example. As long as you do not say anything else the prices we mention will be without VAT and this is 21% in Spain.

Suppose you have a 240 page book and the on-demand print service for an order of 30 copies leaves you at 6 euros plus 7 euros of postage which we will consider as 8 because the VAT on transport is 16%. We assume that you are charged 5 more books for legal deposit and you will spend another one for the registration of the property of the definitive version.

That is, they print 35 but you will have 29 to market. The expenses (transport + 6 books) will be (8 + 36) / 29 = 44/29 = 1.466. That is, each copy to you has cost you 6 + 1,517. Let's take a 7.52 euro total cost per book for that first run. The next rolls will be cheaper because you do not have to spend those 6 extra books but you have to work with those figures to avoid catching your fingers. If you make a new edition, a new legal deposit with its corresponding expenses is generated.

Now suppose that you conform with a minimum benefit for you of a few euros, We left another 3 as a margin to not catch your fingers with the expenses of distribution because what you can not do is to charge later a different amount to other stores based on a transport and distribution expenses that you will have to assume as part of the facet of Distributor of your own work. You must act professionally as another distributor and once you mark a PVD and a PVP you will have to maintain them indefinitely during that editionDoing it otherwise is not well seen.

You are not going to sell books one by one, so do not spend too much time for that concept. I think for a self-publisher and for a small-scale distribution 3 euros per book are enough. Do not accept orders of less than four copies at distribution price because a book-to-book order management would entail higher expenses.

In any case you must take into account the time of trying to place your work and give up the areas that suppose a higher expense than you have budgeted. That way everything you save in distribution, will also be for you. The real benefit would range from 3 euros for small orders to remote areas and 6 euros for the corner store.

That is, your PVD = 7.52 + 3 + 3 = 13.52 Euros.

Now you can leave a profit margin to the grocer of 30%

In other words, your PVP = 13.52 * 1.30 = 17.576 euros. That is about 17.55 euros. (The last two figures of the price try to be five or less than five)

All these are indicative figures so that you have a reference. I did in my first volume a very bad calculation, but nothing happens. You have to make the final calculation once you have the books in your possession. The price you will give to the ISBN agency can be varied and does not compromise you, but try to give an approximate price.

The PVP is a necessary data to fill the application of the ISBN in the national agency. It is a free essential procedure to be able to offer your book to the stores. Stores need to register the books in their catalogs and if they do not have ISBN they cannot do it.

You must do a commercial job in person to open the market. It will surely be the most difficult part of this whole business. Book fairs are interesting events to be able to contact many potential clients.

I think for today has been enough, more information in the second part.

Do you think something is missing? Do you have other methods for self-publishing? I await your comments.