Hey, what's up, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
Today I’ve got a bit of a question for you from, from you, from those of you that have
emailed me questions here and I’ve got a question that’s more on the entrepreneur
side which is how to self-publish a book.
This is actually something that most—whoever you are you should think about this because
it is so easy today to publish a book more so than any other time in history.
In fact, not only can you self-publish a book and sell it and create an audio version but
you can have it printed on demand.
This is an awesome opportunity especially if you’ve taken my course on How to Market
Yourself as a Software Developer which you can check out here, and if you’re watching
on a mobile of course the link will be below.
If you’ve taken that course you know that one of the ways I talk about promoting yourself
that really works really well especially for building authority is a book.
When I released my book and you could check out my book here, Soft Skills: The Software
Developer’s Life Manual, actually it just got translated in Japanese.
I just got the Japanese version today so that was pretty cool.
Anyway, when I did that book I gained a lot of authority.
It really helped me to get—I get tons of speaking engagement requests now and a bunch
of things happen that’s beneficial.
Usually you don’t make a lot of money when you go traditional publishing route but self-publishing
you can.
Anyway, a short question here, he says, “Hi John,” and this is from Rick, he says, “I
know that you went through a publisher, Manning Publication for Soft Skills, I’m going through
the process of self-publishing.
I wanted to ask where did you get your book cover proof read, who designed your book cover,
would Upwork be a good place to do this or do you have some other tips you might have
for someone that is self-publishing?
Thanks, Rick.”
Rick, this is a good question.
There are few things to consider here, I think.
I’m going to sidestep your question slightly and I’m going to go to the bigger perspective.
First of all, with my book I did it traditional publishing so Manning was my publisher.
They did the cover, they did the editing, they had the staff to do that.
That’s part of the reason why a publisher takes 90% of what you make from a book.
But if you go into self-publishing what I would do and I’m going to tell you right
now because I’m actually writing another book right now and I’m planning on self-publishing
it at least at first.
I might eventually sell this to a publisher but because of the success of my first book
I think self-publishing is definitely an option for selling a lot of copies.
What I’m doing right now is I’m actually writing up the post and I’ve got an editor
that I’ve hired that edits the posts at Simple Programmer and as I’m writing up
those posts I’m putting them as blog posts for free on the blog and they’re doing the
editing right there.
I’ve got an editor already lined up that’s already going to edit it as I’m writing
this book.
It’s also keeping me accountable because I’m producing these blog posts.
You can check it out if you’re interested, click here and you’ll go to either the email
page or the sign up page or landing page or something for the new book.
It’s basically going to be about—The Complete Guide to a Software Developer’s Career.
Title might change.
Anyway, what I’m doing is I’m piecemealing it together.
I’ve already got the editor in place and so—and you can just hire an editor by the
way.
Upwork is a great place to look for an editor and you just find someone that’s—there’s
usually a lot of editors that could queue this so I would recommend that on Upwork but
I wouldn’t recommend necessarily the cover design on Upwork.
I’ll tell you why, it’s hard to hire good people off of Upwork.
You’ve got to do a lot of leg work.
I think on editing you might have a little bit easier of a time.
What I would do for the book cover is I would go to 99designs.
I’m not an affiliate of them or anything, I’m not getting paid to say that, but I
have done a few contests through 99designs and I found that especially for book covers
which really are important in selling a book, people—you say, don’t judge a book by
its cover, that’s what people do.
They’re going to judge your book by its cover.
I would go there and that’s really the basics of it.
We could go into detail—if you’re interested put a thumbs up, leave a comment below and
let me know and l can go into more details about what kind of the next steps would be
like if you’re trying to—how do you actually sell the book, how do you put it in the Kindle
marketplace, creating an audio version that kind of stuff.
The basics is—I don’t want to get you too tangled up in all that.
The most important thing is that you do the work.
Sit down, write the book.
Get an editor, you can pay someone to edit that book.
Get the cover and then from there now you worry about the next set of problems which
is how to sell it but that’s really cakewalk once you have the book.
The hard part is actually sitting down writing the book.
Too many people plan out and they spend so much time trying to figure this stuff out
instead of just going and do this stuff.
Once you get the book done that’s the hardest part, now you can figure out the rest of it.
But yeah, spend good money on getting a good editor and getting a good cover design probably
from 99designs and that will be well worth it.
Anyway, great question, thanks for asking.
If you have a question for me, email me at john@simpleprogrammer.com.
If you like this video, if you haven’t subscribed to the channel already, do it, do it now.
All right, talk to you next time.
Take care.