I’m in the process of writing my first book so I was really excited when Guy Kawasaki send me a copy of his 12th book APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book earlier this week. The book is released on Monday (Dec 10th) and was co-authored by iOS developer Shawn Welch.
Over the last few months I’ve read a few books and countless articles on how to self-publish your first book. I can say with conviction that APE towers over the rest. In short, it’s THE BOOK on publishing and I have no doubt that in years to come the book will be referred to as the bible of self-publishing.
The book is divided into 29 chapters and spans over 300 pages. As the title suggests, the book is split into 3 sections: Author, Publisher and Entrepreneur. In the early chapters they give a brief overview of how books are published, past and present. He also talks about writing tools and getting your book financed. I’ve used OpenOffice and LibreOffice in the past to create ebooks but they strongly recommend everyone uses Microsoft Word as it’s the de facto standard in the publishing world and converting documents into other formats always creates problems.
The ‘Author’ chapters are the heart of the book. You are walked through how to edit your book, design the cover, convert the book into appropriate formats and distribute the final product. Every step of self-publication is explained within these chapters including the pros and cons of setting a high or low price. It really demystifies the whole process and shows you how straight forward it is.
In the last part of the book they explain how you can effectively market your book online using social media and pitching to high profile bloggers to build awareness of your book online. Guy explains how modern publishers are stuck in their ways and still catching up with how to market books online. As such, it’s not worth spending money with these companies.
The book comes with a lot of useful resources for writers too including the Word template the book was written on, the InDesign template and a contractor template.
If you are thinking of releasing an ebook through your website or through a store such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iBookstore; I highly recommend you get this book. I’ve read dozens of articles on self-publication over the last few months however all the information was spread across the web and seemed incomplete. To have everything you need in one book is a great time saver.
Kevin
Link: APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book