- Hey there, it's Julie Broad.
So you wanna self-publish a book.
Get ready, it's gonna be fun.
Alright, so you may or may not know
that I chose to self-publish my book,
More Than Cashflow the Real Risks and Rewards
of Profitable Real Estate Investing.
It was a wild ride and we've had a lot of fun
and taking it to number one on amazon.ca
was quite a journey
and I've had a ton of questions from people
looking for a little assistance to help them
with their self-publishing journey.
The first thing you have to figure out
is why are you doing it
because there are some really easy ways
to get a book out there
but that may not be the best way for you
to achieve your objective
and I'm not a complete expert on this subject
but having gone through it, I've learned a few key lessons
and I thought I'd share those with you
starting with this video.
Alright, so why, why are you self-publishing?
For many people, it's an eBook or a print book
that they want to use a business card, a marketing piece.
Perhaps they have speaking gigs
or have they have a boost at vendor things,
clients that the wanna give books to as a marketing piece.
That is a fantastic way and the good news for you
is that publishing a book for those purposes these days
is so easy so that's the good news, okay?
But the channel that you're going to choose to do that
is probably going to be different
than if your objective is to sell it online
through a vendor like Amazon
or if your goal is to make that book a bestseller
on some bestseller list,
your strategy is gonna be different.
Now, I'm not gonna take you through
all the different options for each of them
because there are plenty but keeping it simple,
if you just wanna do an eBook for your own purposes,
just create that sucker in a PDF,
go on a great website called fiverr.com
F-I-V-E-R-R.com
Hire someone for five to 40 bucks to format it,
make it look professional
and put that thing on your website, okay?
Now, I would still recommend you hire someone to edit it.
If you don't have some people in your business
or in your household that are great at editing
and catching typos and checking content
because there's nothing worse
than creating a marketing piece with typos
but besides that, very simple, very straightforward.
Now, how you put it on your website
and how you distribute it,
totally different subject for another day.
Print is even still quite simple.
Even for Canadians, you have a ton of options
and there's plenty of local printing places
who will do runs of books
so if you wanna get 500 printed, a thousand printed,
the pricing is fairly competitive.
If you just want one off printing,
you'll have to do it a little bit of shopping around
but there still are some great printing options for that.
I found one on Vancouver Island
that would've been an option for me
if my book was simply a marketing piece.
Now, if you just want to sell your book online,
so you want it available for people to purchase.
And again, you can choose an eBook route
and go Kindle for Amazon or iBooks for Apple
although there's a little trick with Apple.
You need an EIN number
because you have to do it through an American version
whereas through Amazon,
there's still some fun American tax forms
that you have to fill out
but Amazon will actually submit your taxes for you
and hold it back and submit on your behalf.
Oh yeah, it's good times as a Canadian.
There's a few little hurdles you'll have to overcome
but overall, if you just wanna sell online,
using CreateSpace is a great choice.
It is a very easy to use, very user friendly way
to get your book onto Amazon
and even it will help you create a Kindle version.
I didn't go that route for the Kindle version
but I did actually publish on CreateSpace
just to test it out
and you can order copies for yourself as well
and it was quite a reasonable price
and great quality printing.
I was very pleased with what I got out of there.
So that'll get you on Amazon.
The challenge is if you wanna do anything
other than Amazon with CreateSpace,
it's gonna be trickier.
While possible, it's trickier, okay?
I won't go into all of that.
It's not the best choice.
If you want the option of selling in Chapters,
you want to get it in some local book stores
and you want to have more of a reach than Amazon,
i.e. you're looking to make that baby a bestseller,
you can focus on Amazon.
That's what I did.
At first, I got to be number one on amazon.ca
by selling my book only in paperback
and only on Amazon and that shot the book up
through some promotional stuff
which I'll talk about in a different video.
That shot it up to number one.
But if you want bestseller overall in Canada
then you're gonna want to have as many channels as you can
and in my case, I just wanted to make the book
as widely available as possible.
Writing my book was well, it has some marketing
and some get my name out there benefits.
My goal was really to communicate a message
to all real estate investors
and a little bit to the publishing industry
because they turned me down.
I had to self-publish because they didn't think
that the book I wanted to write
was really going to be a marketable book.
They didn't think there was a strong enough
marketing platform for it or for me
so I kind of have a little bit of that behind me too
that I wanna sell the heck out of it
to kind of prove a point
but I also really wanna get that message out there
so I went with the option that was going to allow me
to put the book in as many places as possible
so I went with Lightning Source
and there's still a lot of hurdles to go through
and if that's the route you wanna go,
plan to sign up for your Lightning Source account
at least eight weeks before your book is ready to go
because it will take a while for it to get
on your Canadian sites like Chapters and amazon.ca
I'll talk about that in another video
but for now, think about why you want to self-publish
because your options, there's lots of options in every route
and I've just covered one or two
but your options change when you know exactly why
you want to publish your book.
The best option for you
is dependent on what you're trying to do
so hope that helps you navigate a few things.
If you have a specific question,
I'm happy to shoot more videos and help you out
so go ahead and post a comment on this.
If you're watching it on juliebroad.com,
go ahead, post a comment here
otherwise if you're watching on YouTube, give it a like.
Makes my day.
Thumbs up if you want more videos like this.
Those thumbs up encourage me to keep going
but you can also write your questions and comments
below this video and I'll do my best to help you out.