Question: Can an amateur author make their book available online for download to the Kindle and the Nook?
Basically is there any way to digitally self publish?
Answer:
Well, of COURSE there is. But why would you limit yourself to Amazon and B&N?
The Holy Trinity of Self-Publishing is:
Answer: Well, your question starts off with an incorrect assumption.
Self publishing does work. It’s worked for hundreds and hundreds of years. Poor Richard’s Almanack was certainly a success – it was printed starting in 1732. William Blake was very successful self-publishing his work starting in 1783. Jane Austen was pretty successful – although, to be accurate, she went vanity press before there was a vanity press. Walt Whitman? Successful. Marcel Proust? Another success. Virginia Woolf? Success.
More successes include: Alexandre Dumas, Amanda Hocking, Anais Nin, Barbara Freethy, Beatrix Potter, Carl Sandburg, D.H. Lawrence, David Chilton, Dean Wesley Smith, Deepak Chopra, e.e. cummings, E.L James, Edgar Allen Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ezra Pound, George Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, H.M Ward, Henry Thoreau, Hugh Howey, Irma Rombauer, J.A. Konrath, Jack Canfield, James Redfield, John Grisham, John Locke, K.A Tucker, L. Ron Hubbard, Lisa Genova, Margaret Atwood, Mark Twain, Michael J. Sullivan, Richard Evans, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Stephen King, T.S. Elliot, Thomas Paine, Tom Clancy, Upton Sinclair, William E.B. DuBois, and Zane Grey.
Oh. My. Goodness.
My favorite author has just spanked the Emerald City Doorman hard enough that it’s going to leave a mark. And Mr. Maass is going to have a severe limp for quite awhile!
It’s no secret that I am an indie-publishing heretic, posting often and everywhere about how every author should look into getting themselves published without getting ridden hard and put away wet by a legacy publishing dinosaur (that’ll give you a limp for sure!). But no one – NO ONE – takes the publishing industry or their flan-boys to task better, cleaner, and more beautifully than Mr. Konrath.
Beth Reekles penned an article at The Guardian about how indie publishing via online writing communities and ebooks can provide valuable feedback, and even set you on the path to mainstream success.
Yep. Since 2007, the self-publishing part of the ebook pie has been sizable. In just a few years, the self-published author has gone from zero to hero, owning 25% of the top 100 ebook market, as reported by Amazon. No matter how many reports traditional publishers put out – saying people are eschewing ebooks, that kids don’t like ebooks, and that ebooks are the bane and scourge of the publishing world – it appears that those bought-and-paid-for ‘statistics’ aren’t based on the cold hard numbers generated by their greatest imagined enemy: Amazon.
