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Step Four - Distribution

Maybe you have a clear idea of how you want to distribute your book or perhaps you haven’t given it much thought. Either way most new authors choose to go down the route of self-publishing as it is the quickest and perhaps simplest option to get your book out to the masses.

At one time the dream for authors would be to send the finished manuscript of their work to publishers in the hopes of getting that one acceptance offer. But now most publishers state on their websites that the waiting period for them to go through the manuscripts that arrive at their doors, may set your novel back anywhere from 6 months to over a year, after which you still may get that dreaded rejection letter. What's more, most publishers won’t even give your manuscript the time of day if it has not come from an agent.

After researching into an extensive list of publishers I decided this route was not for me. Perhaps I was too impatient but I had a finished book in my possession and after years of perfecting it I just wanted to get it out there. So I decided I would self-publish on Amazon.

Now I know that I have said this is only step four and you might be thinking why should I worry about publishing when I haven’t even started writing yet? But there is a method to my madness I assure you. When I decided I was going to self-publish I had to go back through the entirety of my 124,000 word novel and start reformatting it from beginning to end, tailoring it to the guidelines that Amazon gave me.

This was an extremely tedious task and if I had known the route that I was going to take at the beginning of this I could have set up the margins and table of contents as I went along. So it is just something to think about.

You might be wondering what a table of contents is? Well if you are not familiar with what that means (As I wasn’t when I first read that I should be inserting a table of contents into my book.) It is basically the contents at the beginning of the book with your chapter numbers and page numbers. It makes the navigation of your Kindle E-book a lot easier to customers as they can traverse the pages without having to flick through them one by one.

For the links of the chapters to work you have to type them using heading on Microsoft word and then when you update the table contents it should hopefully be able to pick them up.

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