Five Reasons you should become a Published Author

Back in the 90s, as a teenager, I was hooked on the alt-rock music of that time, most of the time. MTV used to play music all day!?

Officially, I was in training (reluctantly) with my business tycoon dad, who used to make me run errands and take me to strange places, like a lawyer's office, almost every week.?

I vividly remember that self-obsessed lawyer, who used to shout at his secretary (sitting in a different cabin) from his office. I asked my dad why we wait for him to see us, every time. My dad said that’s because he is a busy man and has the knowledge, position, and leverage to do things that we ourselves cannot do.?

He had some forms and applications locked up in his locker. In those days, there was no internet, so the forms could not be downloaded from government websites, at least in India. These documents were highly sought after and extremely difficult to obtain. They couldn’t be photocopied either, as they had serial numbers. One mistake in the filled-out form set us back by weeks.

It was as if things were designed to be hard.?

Fortunately, the knowledge hoarding and "scarce resource" monopoly of that time is gone. We no longer feel the need to buy a CD with 12 songs, because, for that amount of money, we can get Spotify for a year and get about 50 million songs.?

Traditional book publishers are like my dad’s lawyer. They are from an age when things were not accessible and were deliberately complex. These people are soon to be history.?

A book publisher typically goes through hundreds of manuscripts before committing to spending resources on a few of them that look promising (from his ‘expert’ view). Small-time publishers typically charge a hefty amount to publish a book, and both kinds of publishers do not offer any tangible, long-term marketing and promotion benefits. After publishing a book, most authors are on their own.?

We mistakenly believe that getting our book published is the final step of the cycle. It’s actually the first step.?

SELF-PUBLISHING?

Many of us have personal journals, academic writings, a half-finished biography, or an attempt at a good story lying on our laptops, sometimes for years. We think they are not good enough to be published. We are wrong.?

Traditional book publishing cannot keep up with the number of great stories and other content that budding authors have written, which could have a potentially large market. Their limited mindset and profit mentality only allow them to greenlight ‘safe’ content that they think will do well. Skip this old tollgate and go for self-Publishing.

Self-publishing is now an increasingly common and accepted form of getting published.?

E-PUBLISHING

Like Reels, YouTube videos, Spotify Podcasts and many other platforms that let you ‘broadcast’ your creativity, e-publishing is a great way to swiftly reach millions of readers.

Here are five reasons you should take the e-book route and e-publish your content right now!?

1. Save A Tree, Save Everything: According to Google, the United States uses 30 million trees per year to publish all the print books that are sold. The unsold ones aren’t counted in the figure. That’s a lot of trees. Ebooks, on the other hand, do not require cutting down millions of trees. Each printed sheet of paper takes up three gallons of water to manufacture, so that’s another thing to ponder. You also end up saving a lot of energy and cost that would otherwise be required to paginate, print, pack, and transport a printed book. One estimate is that having an e-book only model saves 10 billion dollars a year in the US alone.?

2. No logistical issues: I remember the time when Amazon only used to sell printed books, and nothing else. E-books weren’t published in those times, and a printed book used to take weeks to reach India from the UK in 2002. Any business model that requires road, sea, and air transportation suffers during war or other global crises. Thankfully, this is the age of digital consumption, which remains unaffected by war, famine, climate change, and other crisis situations. Case in point: Netflix, a digital-only service, added 16 million new subscribers in the first quarter of 2020, even though they don’t have any new content.?

When we e-publish a book, anyone across the world can download/buy it and start reading it within a few seconds on their favourite device, like an iPhone, iPad, or Kindle Reader. An E-book means Instant Availability, with no friction or time gap between paying for the product and consuming it.

3. Make Money While You Sleep: A successful digital product coupled with a secure payment gateway, configured online, has the ability to earn you thousands of dollars while you sleep. This will make you wonder why people do back-breaking jobs for peanuts. Imagine waking up and getting a notification on your phone that fifty people bought your e-book while you were asleep. True freedom is when you have the money and time to do what you want. You don’t need to rush anywhere. Get up and do relaxing Yoga. While you breathed in and out, people would be buying your ebook.?

4. Post-publication editing: One of the major headaches of my corporate job at a major publication house(SAGE Publications) was that the authors and journal editors fuming over wrong, incomplete, or inaccurate information being published in paper form and in some cases, already distributed around the world. It was always something like a name or title misspelt or a wrong caption below a figure, that was often overlooked and approved (by them only!) in the earlier stages. The ‘e’ part of that content, available online at various paid portals and premium websites, was easily corrected, but the gripe was always the printed form, which would now remain incorrect forever. E-publishing skips over this problem as it is digital content, easily controlled, edited, and updated even after years.?

5. Published Author Status: E-publishing your book, suddenly provides an individual with the coveted ‘Published Author’ status. Even if the e-book is just a free download on Apple iBooks, the exposure that one gets with a good body of work helps accelerate one's career in multiple ways.?

Take The First Step.

Vikram Arora

[email protected]