Truth be told, even if you’re approaching it via the sponsored blog posts publishing route, it’s always going to take a bit of a while for your blog to start gaining the kind of traction which would have you referring to it as a success, or a gradually growing success at that. So it’s only natural then for any blogger, who is a writer at heart, to want to maybe look towards other avenues of generating an income with their writing skills.
For any blogger who is serious about their craft there are perhaps few embellishments better than being able to put a badge on your blog’s info section which proudly displays your achievement as a published writer or author. It gives you that much more authority to display a screenshot of your published book’s cover, perhaps even linking to the check-out page on Amazon’s platform.
This swiftly brings to light the discussion of this post, which is to self-publish or not. It’s extremely easy to self-publish a book and instantly become a published writer these days, ISBN and all and the most popular self-publishing platform is indeed that of Amazon. Your book can be made available for download in the electronic Kindle format or it can be printed on demand as a hard or soft cover version for those classic book lovers who want to be able to feel and smell a physical book in their hands.
You can go one step further and even publish the book as an audio-book, but naturally that takes a little bit more work than just writing the book and uploading it in the requisite format for evaluation and publication.
Now, it is because of just how easy self-publishing is which kind of makes it a double-edged sword. For one, if you’re a published writer belonging to the Amazon stable then you still kind of have to prove yourself as an author with the actual content readers will be consuming. It’s one of those scenarios where the cliché of “if it was easy then everyone would do it” carrying a lot of rather ironic truth in that it is that easy and so everyone is doing it!
Some authors aren’t real – they use pseudonyms and while there’s nothing wrong with that, the problem which comes into play is that of how your high-quality content (hopefully) is thrown in a pool with a lot of average and low quality content, so it can very easily be misconstrued to be of the same low or average quality.
So my advice is if you can get a traditional publisher to publish and subsequently market your book, then do so. Self-publishing should be a last resort, but this is not to say that you cannot make a success out of self-publishing. You’ll just have to brace yourself for some additional marketing work for your work to stand out and be given a fair chance of evaluation.
Established authors find it easier to self-publish as well, so that’s yet another side to the coin to consider…