What's up, my friend? Abbie here, and today we are talking about indie publishing. A couple weeks ago, I posted a video all about why I chose to go indie with my debut novel, 100 Days of Sunlight, and it was like one thing that was a deal-breaker for me. Not the money, but the control. I chose to go indie because I wanted full control over my books. More on that and the pros and cons of indie versus traditional in that video. If you haven't seen it, check it out. So a few days ago, I posted on my Instagram asking you guys to throw out some suggestions, some requests for videos that you would like to see about indie publishing, and you came up with so awesome topics, like so many that I want to cover them all. I decided to cover them all. Not today, obviously, but in the future. So in today's video, we're going to breeze over the whole process of indie publishing, at least what my process looks like. We'll go over everything real quick so that you can get an idea, like the general idea of what it looks like, how much work goes into this process. And then over the weeks to come, we will break it down more into in-depth, more step-by-step type videos so that you can make your author dreams come true. Okay, ready to dive into this thing? Let's go. So before we begin, I just want to say there are many different methods of indie publishing, depending on where you want your book to be available and how you want it to be available. What I mean by that is there are a lot of indie authors who just want to crank out content really fast and most of their readers are Kindle readers so they just produce e-books only and go Amazon exclusive, as we call it in the indie world. Now, there are other benefits of going Amazon exclusive. But that idea always scared me because I want my book to be available everywhere from every retailer, in every format. So I decided to go wide as they call it and have my book available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and iBooks and all the other retailers.

Not only in e-book format, but also in paperback and hardcover as well. If this is the path that you're interested in taking with your book, then good news because that is what I'm going to be breaking down today. Like I said before the intro, we won't have time to go super in depth today, but I will definitely be going more in depth in future videos on every step of this process. So in today's video, we're just going to go rapid fire over everything, the whole process, what it takes to professionally publish, self-publish a novel. Obviously, it starts with having a good book edited and formatted. If you haven't sent your book to a professional editor, I would definitely recommend doing so. If you've been watching my videos for any amount of time, you know that I'm a big advocate for editing your own work a lot. But there comes a time when you need a professional to look at your work and maybe give you some constructive feedback if you don't have beta readers in your life. While your book is being edited, is a good time to write your book blurb, video coming on that in the future, and design your book cover. If you don't want to design your own book cover, you can certainly hire someone to do it for you. There are tons of creative amazing freelancers out there. Sometimes you have to get creative and experiment with things, but it does not have to break your bank. I'll be making a video on book covers soon as well. So watch out for that. Other things you'll need is a professional author bio and photo and an author website. You can check out mine for inspiration if you'd like. And if you want me to do a video on making your own author website, then comment below and tell me. Okay, so after your book is edited, you'll need it to be formatted. That means you'll have to have an e-book file, a PDF file for paperback and a PDF file for a hardcover if you're doing hardcovers. I use a software called Vellum to format my e-books. It's unfortunately only available for Mac.

But it is such a good software. It basically does the work for you. And all you have to do is just go in and fix anything that looks weird or doesn't look perfect. Vellum also offers an upgrade for formatting print books, but I prefer to format print books in Microsoft Word, because it just gives you more control over the actual formatting. Microsoft Word allows you to create documents of any paper size, which is great. And it also allows you to change the font or formatting anywhere you want, wherever you want throughout your entire book. So I went with two different sizes for my paperback versus my hardcover. You can see when I put them next to each other. The paperback is just a tiny bit smaller than the hardcover. This is just a small detail. It's an industry standard with traditionally published books. In a bookstore you pick up two versions, the hardcover and paperback version of the same book you will notice that the hardcover is slightly bigger than the paperback. So that's just one of those small things that makes your indie published book seems super, super professional. But before we talk about print books, let's stay with e-books for a minute. The first place I upload my e-book is Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP. This is Amazon self-publishing arm. You've probably heard of it if you've looked into anything at all indie publishing. Amazon is the most well-known retailer so I knew it was important to get my book up there and available for pre-order 90 days before the release date. That is the maximum amount of time that KDP will let you have your book available for pre-order. Amazon also lets you create a paperback version of your book right within KDP. It's called KDP Print now, it used to be called Create Space but now it is referred to as KDP Print. The only unfortunate thing about KDP Print is that Amazon doesn't allow you to have your paperbacks available for pre-order. So lame. You can go into KDP Print and set up your paperback with all the necessary files and information and keywords.

But you have to just save it as a draft and publish it on the day that you publish your novel. So where do hardcovers come in? And how can we get e-books and paperbacks on other retailers other than Amazon? Well, for my ebook, I went to the self-publishing arms of all the retailers that I knew I wanted to be on. So that's Barnes & Noble Press, Writing Life Kobo, and iTunes Connect for Apple iBooks. There is a one stop solution to getting your e-book on all retailers with one click and that is IngramSpark. IngramSpark is a book distributor that prints paperbacks as well as hardcovers and distributes them to all the major online retailers, as well as makes them available for bookstores and libraries to order wholesale. This is a must have if you want your book available in libraries and brick-and-mortar bookstores as IngramSpark allows you to offer a wholesale discount up to 55%, which lets bookstores buy and sell your books at a profit. But more about pricing and wholesale discounts in the future. I wish I could talk about everything right now but I can't, so stay tuned. Now IngramSpark does offer an e-book publishing service which publishes your e-book to all online retailers including Amazon, but I haven't researched enough about this to know if there are any caveats to bypassing Amazon KDP altogether. I'll definitely be learning more about this in the future and sharing what I've learned, but for now, if you know something about this, if you have knowledge in this, definitely comment below and share it with the rest of us. So the thing I love most about IngramSpark is their printing quality. Colors are always spot on. The paper texture is better. It's like almost silky. The ink quality is better too. Not that KDP is like bad printing because it's not, it's really not. But when you hold a IngramSpark copy of your book in one hand and a KDP Print copy in the other hand, you can really tell the difference and not just because this ugly Amazon watermark that they put on the proof copies.

We'll definitely talk more in the future about the actual setup process in the Ingram, how to make paperbacks, how to make hardcovers and how to order proofs and how to distribute them. There is a lot of little details in the actual setup process on Ingram, things that you can't get wrong. I'm very excited to make a video about that helping you with it. Also, I have a lot of people asking me, how did you get a hardcover printed? Because most people will go to KDP Print and they just see all you can do is a paperback. IngramSpark is where you get your hardcovers. And IngramSpark is a must if you want print books available across the board to all online retailers, and if you want libraries and brick-and-mortar bookstores to order them. Look how beautiful this hardcover is. It's just gorgeous. It is gorgeous. Inside leafs. That whole process of designing jackets is a whole other thing. Designing these little leafs, making sure that the bleed doesn't go over the edge. I'll help you with all that. Okay, we'll get to that eventually. So now that the technical stuff is over, the next thing to do is announce your book launch and get ARC readers. As many of you know, I used a site called NetGalley to deliver my book to my ARC readers. NetGalley is an amazing service that allows you to give readers a free pre-publication copy of your book in exchange for an honest review. This is where your hard work starts to pay off because the key to making your book really take off on NetGalley is having an awesome cover and an amazing blurb. My novel 100 Days of Sunlight did so good on NetGalley. Within the first six days on the site, my book ranked number two most requested in the Teen & YA category, and the very next day, it ranked number one most requested in the Women's Fiction category. Yes, ahead of highly anticipated traditionally published books. It also reached number nine most requested book on all of NetGalley.

Yeah, the entire site. I'm not saying all this to toot my own horn. I am just saying this to show you what is possible for an indie author, a debut indie author at that if you use the right tools and use them well. I am so excited to make a video all about NetGalley and how to use it to hype your book launch. It's such an awesome tool because not only does it connect you to readers and reviewers, but it connects you to librarians and educators and booksellers and bloggers and media professionals. Everyone is an influencer on some level but these readers are especially influential. When a librarian leaves me a five-star review and says that she's going to make sure they get my book in her library, I stop everything and do a happy dance. It's amazing. But more on NetGalley and all its awesome features coming soon. Let's get back to the indie pub process. Next on the list, blog tour. If you don't have a blog already, I highly recommend starting one, it will serve you so well in your author career. Write articles about topics that you know your audience will be interested in. It's never too late to start a blog, just start. Just start somewhere, anywhere, and then host a blog tour. Book blog tours are another video that I have to make. Book blog tours are just like real book tours. But instead of traveling around the country to various bookstores, you are traveling around the world virtually to various blogs. You can do interviews, giveaways, guest posts, and of course, let your blog tour participants be ARC readers and post their view on their blog. If you're already an established blogger, it will be much easier to get blog tour participants as you can just put out a post or a video calling for blog tour participants, give them a survey to fill out, collect the information in a spreadsheet, figure out who needs what and when and start email communications. It will be a lot of content to create, a lot of things to do. But remember why you're doing it.

You're trying to create as much conversation around the world about your book as possible. If you're a new blogger or you just don't have that much of a following, no worries. You can absolutely still pull off an awesome blog tour. But it will probably take more time as you'll have to reach out to bloggers that you probably never talked to before and ask them if they'd be interested in participating in your tour. I really want to make a whole video about book blog tours and I'm going to. But for now, I just want to leave a few links in the description box below that are links to databases of book bloggers, bloggers who would be interested in doing and participating in your blog tour. That's a great place to start, lots of information. If you want to check it out, the links are below. Okay, so the next few weeks leading up to your book launch will be super busy ones as you answer a lot of emails, talk to a lot of people, do a lot of social media promotion, respond to a lot of interviews. When you're positive that your book files are flawless, you can then distribute your books through IngramSpark so that retailers can start to fulfill orders as soon as they come in. Last but not least, there is paid promotion or ads. This video is getting super long and I don't want to overwhelm you. Even though I probably did. We're going to make a separate video all about paid promotion and ads. But for now, I just want to say, it's a really, really good idea to start doing paid promotion before your book goes on sale. I've done promotion to get the word out about my book. I've done promotion to send specifically librarians and teachers to NetGalley to ARC read my book. I've done promotion to get in front of people who I think will be interested in pre-ordering my book or at least interested in reading it when it comes out. Paid promotion does not have to be expensive. Seriously, I have not. I have not spent a lot of money on it yet. That's because I got super focused with targeting and created really good ads for my audience.

There's so much to talk about with promo and ads. So we will save that for another video. Now, before you know it, the book will be out. Scary, right? Yeah, it's so scary. My blog tour for 100 Days of Sunlight will last the whole month of August. And I recommend making your book blog tour last four to six weeks as well. The more your book is talked about, the better. Keep up with promoting your blog tour participants blog posts on your social media and make sure that you keep up with comments that people will be leaving on these posts specifically for you. After your blog tours over, it will be time to jump into creating a long-term promotion plan which will include paid promotion. It'll include reaching out to media professionals and influencers, making your book go even further. But we won't talk about that now. That right there, everything I just went over is my indie publishing process at a glance. Not too much work, right? I'm being sarcastic. It's a lot of work. But if I can do it, so can you. So I'm obviously going to make a lot more videos going more in depth on every part of the publishing process, that's coming in the future. I'll be sharing what I've learned personally, in my experience, and some of the pitfalls that you want to avoid. I'm excited. This is going to be awesome. I hope this video has helped you to get a better understanding of what exactly goes into the indie publishing process, all the work, time, energy involved, which to me is more valuable than money, which I know we haven't talked about. We didn't talk about like the expense of everything in today's video. That's another video for another time. I'm thinking of making a video just about the expense of everything. So tell me if you want to see that. Comment below and tell, me are you indie? Do you want to go indie? Are you interested in it? Are you scared to go indie after watching this video? I hope not.

I hope I didn't scare you. There is nothing to be scared about because I am going to help you through this whole process with these videos. That's what these videos are all about. That's why I'm here making this content and I am just so thrilled to be able to help fellow indies with this process. Smash that like button if you like this video and be sure to subscribe to this channel if you haven't already because I post writing videos and publishing videos every single Wednesday, and I would love to have you here in the community. Also, be sure to hit that little bell icon next to the subscribe button so that you are the first to know when I release a new video. Until next week, my friend, rock on.