Self-Publishing Terms Made Simple

Whenever you start something new it can feel overwhelming. And #self-publishing is no different.

While it’s fine for people like me, who work in the self-publishing industry, it’s not so appealing for aspiring authors like you who just want to get their books published and ready for sale in the quickest and easiest way possible.

That’s why I’ve put together a handful of basic self-publishing terms to help you over the first hurdle. Because the last thing you want is to get disheartened by the self-publishing process and give up on your author dream before you even start.

Self-Publishing Terms Made Easy

Formatting 

• If you want to publish your book on Amazon Kindle amazon.com/ it will need to be formatted correctly so it looks good, flows well and adds to your reader’s enjoyment. Formatting is the term for presenting your words on the page and includes everything from creating a style for your chapter headings and body text, adding a clickable table of contents (and checking they all link to the right places), ensuring all chapters start on a new page, inserting images correctly and adding clickable hyperlinks if you want to drive traffic to your website or get people to sign up for your freebie or follow you on social media, for example. A well-formatted book can make all the difference between a four- and five-star review.

Typesetting 

• Self-publishing in print? Then your manuscript will need to be typeset. Pick up any book off your bookshelf right now. Open up to a random page and see how well it’s presented. Look at the headers and footers, the margins, the start of each paragraph (is it indented or does it start at the left margin?) the way the body text looks and the chapter headings. That's typesetting. It's about making your book look beautiful.

ISBN 

• (International Standard Book Number) â€“ this is your book’s unique number and a way for it to be recognised amongst the book-buying and book-selling worlds. If you self-publish on Amazon Kindle, you don’t need an ISBN. If you self-publish your printed book using Amazon KDP you don’t need to purchase an ISBN either. You can accept their free offering. There are restrictions, however. Check out Amazon’s insights here: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834170. If you want to find out more about ISBNs, check out Joel Friedlander’s answer to 20 questions here: https://www.thebookdesigner.com/2010/03/isbn-for-self-publishers-answers-to-20-of-your-questions/comment-page-7/ One last ISBN point, if you’re in the UK and you want to purchase your own ISBNs, I would recommend you make this your first point of contact: https://nielsenisbnstore.com/

Print-on-Demand 

• This simply means that copies of your ready-to-print books (which are stored in a cloud in electronic format) are printed (either via KDP, Lulu, Lightning Source or A.N.Other POD platform) when someone orders a copy. Yes, even just one copy. Gone are the days when you have to purchase a 1,000 copy print run from a printing company.

E-books

• This is the shortened term for ‘electronic books’ so anything you read online which isn’t in physical form is an e-book (Kindle, for example).

Blurb 

• Pick up that book from your shelf again and turn to the back cover. The writing here is your blurb. If you are self-publishing in e-book format only then you won’t need a blurb but you will need a description (which is roughly a blurb with a few extra keywords in and a call to action added, ie something like: Use the ‘Look Inside’ feature to see the opening pages of this gripping novel’. 

You will stumble across many more self-publishing terms as you dive deeper into your indie author (independent author) adventure, and down the rabbit hole of self-publishing but for now, these should shed some light on the most frequent ones.

I can help with all aspects of self-publishing, so if you’re serious about realising your author dream (and you prefer writing to learning a whole new skillset) then do get in touch.

Whether you want help with proofreading, editing, formatting or typesetting or you want a professional to upload your book to the Amazon bookshelves (and feel confident that it’s all been done correctly) I’m your girl.

Happy self-publishing, and good luck!

Michelle

www.michelleemerson.co.uk

Self-Publishing Services for UK Independent Authors