What I've learned about publishing so far

My experience with the publishing industry can be summed up in one quote.

“Trial by fire.”

Now that’s not to say the whole process has been painful. Moreso, educational. When I first got serious about publishing my book, I literally knew nothing of the publishing world.

“Oh, I need to reach out to agents?” “Oh, I can publish a book by myself?” “Oh, Amazon publishes books?” “Oh, lots of places publish books!”

You get it.

So it was very much a trial by fire when I started to learn about all the steps necessary to successfully publish something. How you need to properly format your pages, adjust line spacing, create a table of contents for eBooks, get a professional author photo, create a bio . . . the list goes on and on.

But the greatest thing I’ve learned thus far, and what I wish to pass on to any budding writers reading this is; make sure you know how much money your distributors are taking from each book sale.

This has been the most important takeaway for me.

You want to make money but so do these companies who keep your books in stock. Be mindful of the percentages each company takes. Every company does it differently and you’d be doing yourself a disservice to sit idly by. I learned this the hard way.

Like I said, trial by fire.

Now, this is in no way my attempt to bash other companies for their practices. At the end of the day, everyone is trying to make money. Even me, a first time author. Of course, I’m more concerned with exposure than I am turning a profit right now, but its all good information to keep in mind, regardless of where you are in the publishing phase.

Hopefully you can take this simple but very important piece of information and apply it to the things you do in your own creative endeavors.

Thanks for stopping by!