How to Self-Publish Your Book Online: The First 3 Steps

There’s no shortage of advice about how to self-publish your book online. Instead, as an indie author-to-be, you run into the opposite problem—there’s too much self-publishing advice floating around out there. Sorting through all the conflicting ideas about how best to go about self-publishing your book can be enough to make you reconsider the entire endeavor.

I know what that’s like since I’ve been there myself. I started my own self-publishing journey with very little idea as to what the process would be. It took a ton of research, but I finally gleaned enough knowledge to successfully publish a sci-fi novel and a dark fantasy book on Amazon KDP (one of which is also on Fictionate.Me).

As someone who has self-published a few books and completed a heap of yet-to-be-published drafts, I can offer some of the lessons I have learned through firsthand experience. Here are 3 of the first steps of how to self-publish your book online.

Brainstorm

The first step of writing a book is coming up with an idea. If you’ve chosen to self-publish your book online, there’s a good chance you’ve already done this. But even if you have, you still owe it to yourself to spend some serious time brainstorming that idea before you start writing. Really think the idea through and whether you think it’s strong enough to support an entire novel. Try to convince some of your friends to listen to you explain your idea—if you can give them a coherent idea of what your book will be about, you’re on the right track.

If you find yourself having trouble with the strength of your idea, there are plenty of ways for you to build it up a bit more. One is researching the subject matter, and another is building a playlist based on the kind of story you want to write. Check out this post on brainstorming for more tips.

Outline

You may be the type of writer that’s commonly referred to as a “pantser”—a “fly by the seat of your pants” writer who dives right into a book without any sort of plan or outline. This method works extremely well for some authors, Stephen King included. But in my experience, it is not the best way of going about things when you plan to self-publish—especially if you want to post your book chapter by chapter online.

I posted a novel chapter by chapter on FictionPress.com when I was still in high school without any sort of outline. By the end of the writing process, I had over a thousand pages of meandering scenes that never needed to exist. When you are posting chapter by chapter, you owe it to your readers to present them with a well-paced story without any filler. An outline will help you to stick to your plot without straying off into superfluous territory. This post is full of advice on how to go about outlining your novel and includes links to several helpful outline templates as well.

Choose Your Fiction Platform

 A lot of writers wait until they already have a completed manuscript before they begin to consider which fiction platform they want to use to self-publish. And that’s totally fine, especially if you’re going to publish on a site like Amazon KDP or Smashwords. These are platforms where people tend to self-publish already completed, polished manuscripts.

 But no matter what you ultimately choose, it can be very beneficial to start thinking about platforms before you even start writing. The big question is, do you want to publish a completed book, or in chapters or episodes? A lot of indie authors these days choose to go the chapter-by-chapter route. Sites like Wattpad and Fictionate.Me make it easy to connect with your readers through comments and social media. Even Amazon has options like Kindle Vella for serialized stories.

I hope taking these preliminary steps in the self-publishing process will help you to build a strong foundation and prepare you for the road ahead. Self-publishing can be scary, but it’s also a chance to write with complete creative freedom. So always remember to have fun and enjoy the ride!

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Created on Oct 26th 2021 13:43. Viewed 238 times.

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