Does anyone know where I can publish with a copywrite for free?

I'm writing a fantasy/mystery webnovel and I'm having trouble deciding on where to upload, right now my thoughts are on webnovel.com or tapas.io but I want to hear the opinion of others.

Where is the most ideal place for me to upload my webnovel and why?

Next month, the second book from the series comes out. Along with it, the first book will receive an update, a few chapters improved, cover changed and in-line editing. The book has only got 8 ratings across the first month (7x5 star and 1x4). Should I unpublish and republish the first one, given the update is quite big, or should I keep rolling with it?

Edit: Thank you for the responses! Great help, appreciate it!

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I just noticed that I needed to use my own ISBN rather than Amazon's free ISBN. But I already used Amazon's free ISBN and published my book, and I want to publish my book via Ingramspark, Barnes & Noble, etc.

I heard that if I unpublish my book on Amazon, I may lose my reviews (which, by the way, is 27!)

So I talked to an Amazon agent about this issue, and she said, "After the paperback is re-published, if the metadata, meaning, the author name, title, subtitle and language matches, they will automatically get linked on the Amazon site within 7 days from publication date.".

She said this because I also have an ebook version of the same book published on Amazon.

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So, has anyone had this same experience? Can I trust the agent?

I don't know if this is the right place for this question but I need help. For a school project I need to order only a couple copies of what will be a hardcover "photo book". As this is a school project, I have limited time and budget. I need something that would be $30 per copy maximum and ideally arrive within 2 weeks of me ordering (but I can stretch it to 3 if I really have to). So far the only options I've found is barnes and noble for the budget aspect, but I've read quite a few reviews of peoples books taking forever to arrive and the quality being poor.

Does anyone know any places that do what I need? am I just screwed and need to change what im doing?

Hey guys, i have created an account on IngramSpark and filled out all the information required by IngramSpark, it's been 14 days i am getting the following error:
"We're still processing your account and will need to finish before you complete the setup of your first titlte. This could take 3-5 business days, so please check back soon."

Can anyone here tell me the solution ? so then i am gonna start publishing for one of my client's book.

Without the 55% discount no book stores or retailer will even look at your book, if you are not by chance already super successful. This, in addition to offering returns puts you in a position to sell your Hardcover book for ~25$ to make any profit essentially.

Deducting printing cost and tax, you end up with like 1,50$ profit per book. But nobody will pay 25$ as a regular listing price if you do not have any social proof. I think even 20$ is too much to ask for, which puts you already in a net-negative per book sold.

Am I missing something here or do I need to focus on either wholesale or individuals and price my book accordingly?

Hi everyone, I am currently in the middle of writing my second novel. My first is in yet another editing stage after trying to query it in trad pub for almost a year without success. Indie publishing is becoming a major draw for me, however I have very, very little funding to put toward it. I know that a website would be helpful for me and I have social media accounts on various platforms, and have recently started a tiktok as well. However like I said I can't afford much at all for a website and if I do manage to save anything, it'll go toward marketing/ads.

I'm extremely fortunate to have a dev editor who is working on my first manuscript for no charge to build her portfolio, a friend who will help with formatting and my partner is a designer who can create my cover for me, so a lot of big expenses are already covered/handled.

Is it necessary to have a paid website vs. a free one? What's the difference? Does a free website affect the URL/domain, and does that matter? Any and all advice would be much appreciated, thank you!

The person I talked to said because I marked that there is explicit content, it won't show in search results. Do I just go change that from yes to no?

I hope it’s ok if I ask this question here, I am a writer and an artist and I’ve seen some posts in this community about illustration or covers. I have thought about doing illustration in the past but I do traditional work and whenever I look into illustration now it seems like the preference among authors is for digital. I am curious if you think that is because it is more available or truly is the preference. I’m not trying to get work as I’m not really ready for that I just would be curious to know if in your opinion it would be worthwhile to think about. Thank you for your insights I truly appreciate it.

Recently I talked to few authors about how they do book events and one of the authors stated something very bold.

He stated “Poor authors can't do any author events or book signing events, unless financial sponsors come forward. As I know and I observed, No Author is Wealthy not able to meet publishing charges. Authors are always poor in financial aspects, because authors spend much more time in a day and never earn any amount. So, your question above is NOT suitable and. relevant.”

What are your views on this?

Hi! I know Getcovers is a low-cost subsidiary company of Miblart where new designers are trained, but in their portfolio I have seen very interesting covers.

Is it worth paying for a Miblart cover or is Getcovers enough for a first book? Is there much difference between the two?

Howdy!

I want to publish an edition of my book with a discreet cover, but I want to keep the original cover up as well. I’ve seen authors do this, so I know it’s possible, I just don’t know how.

I feel like it’s so easy to get in trouble with KDP, so I’m hoping to avoid that.

But I’m still not making money. Earned about $2,000 in commissions this year but spent more than that advertising. I know my ads work but just not well enough, any strategy tips for improving efficiency aside from just moving dollar values based on CTR?

I had several pre-orders for my novel (yay) but after it released today those sales didn't reflect in my dashboard.

None of them were cancelled on the pre-orders tab so I'm just wondering how this works?

Thanks!

Has anyone heard of or had experience with Rebecca Hamilton's program that is supposed to help indie authors make seven figures?

there's a group on Facebook, which is where I heard about it. But I'd love to know if anyone is in that group or has actually paid for that mentoring.

just curious, as I couldn't find much online when I did research.

Any recs for good premade cover businesses that can create a series based on the premade cover you choose? TIA!

I just wanted to drop a quick note about this Discord server a friend of mine created not too long ago. It's all about collaborative writing and art creation where we work together on Stories and really get to merge our styles and ideas. I've found it's a pretty neat way to connect with other writers who are eager to blend their voices and possibly work toward publishing stories together. Right now it's just me and that friend but I thought it would be nice to have other people on board for the case they would be interested too.. So if you're into writing and looking for a group where you can share and grow your own ideas, this might be a great fit for you. Let me know if you're interested and I can share more about how to get involved!

Hello, I'm editing/formatting a children's book for my mother. I've come across a couple issues along the way. We are publishing the book through KDP, and have received the author's copy to view it physically. In the physical print, we noticed lines, or slightly different tinted rectangles where the interactive text box or png's transform guides would be in illustrator. In other words, it should be completely transparent, but something I'm doing wrong is making their printers print very slightly noticeable rectangles around certain paths or images in the pdf file. (not all pages have this issue, just a few)

I thought the solution was to convert all text to shapes and flatten the transparency on all shapes and png's, of which I've done, but even after doing that, we ordered another author's copy- and nothing really changed. I think doing so fixed 2 of the 6 pages. What else am I missing? I've embeded all png's too. The only thing I can think of is that I'm saving a copy of the illustrator file as a pdf with the wrong settings? Right now I'm doing the following compression:
Color Bitmap Images: Do Not Downsample, Compression: Automatic (JPEG), Quality: Maximum

Grayscale Bitmap Images: Do Not Downsample, Compression: Automatic (JPEG), Quality: Maximum

Monochrome Bitmap Images: Do Not Downsample, Compression: ZIP

Compress Text and Line art Checked and "None" selected for PDF standard

I've tried searching all over the web for what could be the issue and I keep getting the same results or searches that don't relate to what is happening to us. KDP's own support articles don't help me either. Which is why I've resorted to asking reddit. Please, what am I doing wrong? Please let me know if I'm not making sense too. Note: I can't see the rectangles in illustrator or pdf itself, only in the physical print. The rectangles are exactly where the interactive guides would be on those objects in illustrator- which leads me to believe its a transparency problem- but I thought I solved that issue when having them send us the second author's copy. Strange stuff, but to be expected as this is my first time ever publishing a book. I'm probably doing something incorrect that is very obvious to veteran publishers.

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I mean, most people seem to write under pen names. Once you slap your face onto your work, people will be like “oh that’s XXXXXX I worked with them!” And then everyone knows who you are, and the pseudonym is worthless to keep your identity hidden.

The last thing I want is someone to know my pen name lol. I don’t write erotica or anything like that, just fantasy, but I still don’t want the public to know my real identity.

Also stalkers. As a woman that’s also an issue.

I know everyone has different opinions about reviews. Some people believe authors shouldn't look at them at all, and I understand that and I am trying, but right now starting out, I'm honestly just looking to see if my books are getting ratings or reviews at all. So when I see it has a new one, I can't help but be curious.

To state, I can take bad reviews. I never engage with comments or write about them online. However, sometimes you just feel... bullied? In this case, someone wrote a review on my book wrongly assuming where the idea for my book came from, as well as the characters. It made me really salty because they could not be more wrong. It came off very condescending, and part of me wants to call them out on it subtly, but I know it's not the best move.

What do you guys do when this happens?? How can I get past this??

EDIT: Thank you everyone for your input and advice. It's very healing to talk about these things with other writers/authors and I appreciate everyone's feedback. I have decided to let it go. Though I have been writing for 20 years, I am still a baby author, and I think I just have a lot of room to grow. I will work on taking a break from reviews, and hopefully get to the point where I don't read them at all. Thank you again for your help :)

Hey there, I’ve finished my book, rewritten parts till I’m really happy how the story plays out and many parts of my book I have read so many times and still don’t find it boring (took me lots of work cutting out the unnecessary stuff).

I have improved the prose to the best of my abilities and I think I’m realistically now at a point where I’m either getting blind for my own mistakes or change the same thing over and over again just to realise in the end that I have changed it back to the original.

It’s my first book and of course I’m a bit at wits end here, and that’s why I wanted to ask more experienced self-publishers what are the next steps they would recommend.

I have considered to hire an editor that looks at grammar, punctuation and cleans up formatting—but I don’t want them to change my wording / prose. What would be the title of such an editor? And given a project of 115k words—what’s a realistic price?

What are other things you would recommend to do before uploading on Amazon? (Btw once uploaded, can I upload a v2 (just in case I find mistakes later which I want to correct?)

Many thanks!!

My book crossed the one hundred thousand words and is now sitting pretty at over 135000. The second in the series is also fast approaching a similar word count. If I split each book strategically in two, I will end up with four books. They will all qualify as full-length novels, but each first half would end with a cliffhanger. I wanted to know if I should keep it at the current word count as a single novel or if I split each book. Please share your thoughts.

I understand that readers don't like cliffhangers however, I'm not a fast writer and I have a day job. My intent is, if I split, I'd have the opportunity of rapid releasing four book instead of two, that would also keep thoughts of me and my work in the minds of readers rather while I work on another book.

What would be a best practice in this scenario? And how will it affect KU readership.

Thank you all.

I've made videos and posted pics to promote my book on tiktok, instagram, YouTube, facebook and Snapchat... and I'm worried it's not enough.

I've read that one of the best ways to promote your book is to start your next book. I've definitely started, but is that true?

Does anyone have any tips or tricks for me?

Hi everyone. My mom wrote a book and has a list of places she is considering using for advertising it. I've been trying to find any sort of consensus on whether these places are worth it, so any advice you have using these places would be greatly much appreciated. Her book is also available as an ebook, so it will still work for ereadernewstoday.

They are:

Digital Book Today

Best Book Monkey

Book Doggy

HotZippy

Pretty Hot Books

ebookhounds.com

ebooksoda.com

ManyBooks

Reading Deals

Bargain Booksy

Hello Books

Written Word Media

ereadernewstoday

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If you have used any of these, please let me know what your experiences are and if you feel it was worth it.

Thanks so much!

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So I have been charged with the task of looking into how to go about self publishing a book for the organization I work for. I work for a history Children's Theatre, and in the 90's an alumni wrote a biography about the theatre's founder. It had a short run of publication, but now hasnt been for awhile, and we are hoping to publish it again. The author himself does not have ownership of the book, but the founders daughter does, who we will be speaking to to get the rights to publish in order. My main question is that since the book was in publication previously, is they any extra steps to get it published again?

Edit: The original publication was done as a self publication.

Hi, So I have an e-book for an out of print book and I'd like to print it myself and make my own copy.

I'm really struggling with indesign though and trying to figure out how I print this thing correctly. I have the book in the software and I have pages 1-252

but I'm so confused as to which pages need to be next to each in other in order to print so I can glue it together in the correct order.

I did double sided printing and that was fine for pages 1, 2 and 3 but then 4 was on a different A4 sheet? I've created a video here as well to show you what I'm dealing with lol. I'm a noob sorry.

https://youtu.be/HWjIE76YFso

Has anyone successfully gotten their ebook onto Google Play? It keeps saying I need to verify my bank info but when I try I get an error. I tried contacting support with the god and they essentially said "I don't know what that code means, I'll have to escalate" 🤦🏻‍♀️ I only have the one bank account so it's not like I can enter anything else. I've deleted and reentered the banking info only to get there same error code.

So my first book, after ten years of work, is close to being put out into the world. I've been using Lulu for self publishing and already did one prototype of my book which gave me a lot to work on, now I have two more copies of Version 2, one for me, one for a beta reader.

I want to know if this is a normal way of going about checking your books on how they look and how they read before I pull the trigger on publication to the masses?

That said, what are some ideas for that beyond trying your hand at a company? Could just getting several copies of your book to sell at stores a viable idea? I'm open to suggestions on what others had done that work.

Let me know.

Are there any affordable marketing tactics that have proven to be successful for authors with limited budgets?