How hard is it to self publish? My publisher is getting out of the business and she has offered to transfer my book to me and I would have to republish it. I am new to all of this and I was wondering is it a hard process to do this? She mentioned I would loose all my reviews and my Amazon standings.
Hi Rick, there is a learning curve to self-publishing, but really anyone can do it. Only thing is, the publishing game has been revolutionized over the past decade. So get an up-to-date guide on how to self-publish or just look it up on the net. You can easily signup to Amazon as a publisher and they can guide you with getting your book for sale online. You can do e-book or hard copy or both. For e-books you don't even need ISBN numbers I think. If you want to do hard copies you will need to get ISBN numbers for your books. Unfortunately ISBN numbers are assigned to publishers, so as your book now has a new publisher, you need a new number. This is why you will lose your Amazon reviews. New ISBN number = new item on Amazon. You might contact Amazon and see if there's a way around that. I just looked you up on Amazon and see your book is rated 5 stars! So yeah, that would be a huge drag to lose that!
a friend of mine has self published two books on amazon. seems to have had an easy time of it. if you go that route it might be worth it losing your reviews...you'll get new ones.
An excellent book is the Well Fed Self-Publisher. ISBN numbers can be purchased in short or long blocks. I don't know if it's still the case, but it used to be that larger publishing houses or book vendors could see how many ISBN numbers you purchased. So some people would open their tiny publishing house and buy 100 ISBN numbers up front to look bigger than they were. I don't know if that sort of game still works. Seems expensive. But I think a small block was like 3 or 4 ISBN numbers for $20 or $50 each. I'll have to crack the book again and see how it looks.
