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Hank Quense Self-Publishing Starter Kit

Common Self-Publishing Misconceptions

By Hank Quense

Self-publishing a book for the first time can be a daunting project because it presents two problems to the new author.  The first is that writing a book doesn’t prepare you for the publishing work which requires a skill set that is quite different from writing the book.  The second problem is research.  The internet is filled with inaccurate information and in some cases, erroneous information.  Encouragement to publish your book The Lazy Way is an example of this erroneous information.

Here is an example of The Lazy Way and what you may find on the web. I once read a post from a writer who put up a message like this on LinkedIn: “I finished writing my manuscript.  Now, what do I do?”  Someone answered with, “Upload it to Kindle.  It’s easy.”  This is the worst possible advice you could possibly get.  It recommended the writer to publish the book the Lazy Way.

Let me make three comments about advice like this.  If the manuscript was uploaded to Kindle, no one would buy it or read it because it’s a piece of garbage.  Books published this way are the reason self-publishing has a bad reputation.  People who make recommendations like this have no concept of what self-publishing means.

What self-publishing means is the self-publishing author must do all the work a publishing house would do if the author had sold his manuscript to it.  this is self-publishing the professional way.  In short, that means getting a unique cover, having the manuscript professionally edited and formatting the ebook.

This last task confuses many inexperienced self-publishing authors.  What they see on their computer screen is suitable for a print edition of a book, but requires a number of changes before it can be an ebook.

Here are a few of these formatting changes:

• No page numbers
• No page breaks
• No paragraph indenting using the tab key
• No paragraph indenting using the space bar
• No centering using the space bar or the tab key

With ebooks, the indenting must use the indent command, not the space bar or the tab key and centering must be done with the alignment command.

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For those who are considering self-publishing a book, but aren’t sure how to go about doing it, I recommend you check out my Self-publishing Starter Kit. The Kit is a bundle of four lectures to get you going on the right track.

Self-Publishing Starter Kit

You can find the Self-Publishing Starter Kit by using  this link: https://bit.ly/2OVOgjp

You can also visit the Fiction Writing and Self-Publishing Solutions page at https://padlet.com/hanque/rph7u51miayn

Hank Quense Self-Publishing Starter Kit