4 SELF-PUBLISHING MISTAKES TO AVOID IN 2022

Self-publishing is always a good step that you can take towards your literary career.  Self-publishing has its pros and cons but the pros greatly outweigh the cons.  Now you may be thinking that self-publishing is easy to master and there are no complications to this publishing process and you will be right 99% of the time, but this blog is for that 1% of uncertainty and complexity which involves self-publishing.  Now when we say complexity, we do not mean that this is some sort of rocket science. What we mean by complexity is simple self-publishing mistakes that you can hope to avoid in 2022.  With that being said these mistakes are quite easily identifiable and rectifiable.  

Badly optimised book description

There is a saying that we should not judge a book by its cover and we agree with it, but the readers and audience surely do judge a book by its description. You must avoid a badly optimised book description for your self-published book and this is because this is the second most important thing that the audience looks at, the first being the title of the book.  Therefore, you must work equally hard on the description as that is the main avenue for a reader to start your book and you can also take inspiration from others of the same genre to see what kind of a description is captivating.  As we at Orange Publishers like to say, there is no harm in learning from the competition. 

Poor market research

India is slowly and steadily becoming one of the biggest book markets in the world and that means there is a market to study and understand.  One of the biggest mistakes new self-published authors make is that they do not do market research before launching a book and that can be devastating to their sales.  One simple thing you can do before publishing your book is to do some simple market research on the genre of book that you are writing and that you are willing to publish so that you may understand the market trends and perform accordingly.

Wrong timing for book launch

This may seem like a no-brainer but timing is really important for a book launch because publishing a book is also a financial endeavour where you spent your hard-earned money.  Newcomers in the self-publishing literary sphere do this mistake of launching their books at inconsequential times and this may hamper book cells and can destroy the potential of the book reaching a wider audience.  Let’s take an example, let’s say you have written a book about the history of India’s independence, so 15th August would be the perfect time to launch that book as queries for people who want to understand and learn about India’s history increases dramatically during that time. 

Too high or low pricing

Pricing is one of the factors that influence book sales directly and there can be a lot of factors that can influence the pricing of your book.  There may be pricing for newcomers and higher pricing for people already established in the industry, the prices may also so be dependent on demand and supply.  This is where novice authors make the mistake that they keep setting their prices too high or too low and here is why that can make a difference.  And they may have this idea that their book deserves any price that can be set and therefore without any market research that tend to set a higher price and that can deter readers from buying the book, likewise they can set the prices low to compensate the fact that they are new in the book publishing world and that to can deter readers as they may seem that the book does not have sufficient value because of the low price.  Therefore, the best way to judge the price of a book is to study the competition and take notes wherever possible.

These were a few of the common self-publishing mistakes that new authors make and solutions to these problems may seem complicated but they are not. We at Orange Publishers, India’s most trusted self-publishing book house, make sure that our authors concentrate on creating their masterpieces while we take care of the legal, financial and logistical side of things.