Hi all. I'm getting a bit confused about the self publishing information I'm reading. I was under the impression that to self publish is not the best thing to do. You pay too much money out and get hardly anything back. But in a back post and also in Adrian's last one it seems that Amazon is ok. Is Amazon a self publishing agency? And if it is ok, why is it different from the other ones?
Hi Jonathan. Thanks for the info. It has made it a lot clearer how going down this road works. I was getting a bit lost with reading, what I thought, was conflicting information. Cost wise Amazon is the better deal, but it seems that there is a lot of hard work connected with it. I was just curious as to how it all worked. Thanks again
You can self-publish an Amazon Kindle ebook title completely free of charge. Of course you must format the manuscript correctly so it's readable when converted into a Kindle file, provide a cover image, write a blurb and set a price. Sorted! Oh, you'll also have to promote it yourself, or no one will find it amongst the zillions of similar ebooks Amazon list. You can do the same with Smashwords who distribute ebooks to a wide range of online booksellers, including Apple's iStore. There are companies who will format ebooks for you if you don't want to do that yourself, but then there's a cost.
Amazon can also provide hard-copy publishing via their Createspace brand, but that's not free. You'll pay setup costs and for per-copy printing - like many others it's a print-on-demand service so no expensive stockholding needed.
Whatever you choose to do there's a cost. Self-pubbing means you bear that, in terms of money or time. Trad publishing means the publisher bears it all, but you lose control of everything and will probably still be expected, as a newbie author, to do much of the promotion yourself.
Hope that helps.