Self Publish a Children's Book

Self Publish

Why Self Publish
I have been trying to get a book published for many years and did not like the self publish idea. My wife and my brother both tried to convince me to self publish and get the process started. I resisted and kept sending manuscripts and proposals to multiple publishers. Most of the big name publishers don't respond to phone calls or emails and from what I heard they fill landfills with thousands of manuscripts everyday. The one letter I got back actually suggested that I try to self publish and if there was any success they would pick up the book and republish it. Many of the smaller publishing houses advertise on the internet and will accept your manuscript, but their proposals are for you to give them a large amount of money and then if you make any money they get a large cut of the money (they are essentially offering you a self publish deal only they get some of the profit). Currently there are some decent options for self publishing that can fit within your budget but don't give away the the rights to your work.


Self Publish Options
The easiest self publish option is a form of an e-book. If you do all the work to get the book reading ready you can sell the book in a digital format from your own website. The downside of ebook self publish is that it is hard to control the dissemination of the book (in other words people can share the book without paying for it). You can also prepare a self publish version of your book for Kindle Reader and sell the book through amazon. This has some more control to it so that it is not as easy to have someone cheat you by making digital copies of your book.
The other option is to self publish an actual print copy of the book and do low runs of the book so that you are printing as you go. This is more expensive per copy but avoids the outlay of thousands of dollars on the front end. A variation is to self publish with a company that has a print on demand machine that will print and bind the book when it is ordered. These are not real popular yet but seem to be growing in popularity.