How to write your 1st Technical book? Part 3
Publishing and Marketing your book
If you’ve been following my posts, you must be aware that I recently wrote a book on Generative AI which is going a bestseller
I’ve already shared my publishing journey in previous two posts that covers
The last & the most important step in this journey is how to publish and market your book. We will divide this into 2 parts
Choosing your publishing partners
Publishing using Amazon KDP
Marketing the book
Choosing the Publishing Partner
There are many online platforms where you can publish your technical book for free. Some of the major players are:
Amazon KDP : The biggest and I assume the only major player in this domain. This will enable your book on Amazon platform hence a wide audience
GumRoad: Not specific to books, it is a underrated platform for selling digital goods, including books. Setting up GumRoad is super easy
Google Books: Platform offered by google which enable your book on Google Play Store.
And many other players which are mostly paid.I published my book on all these 3 platforms and would be talking about them in a little detail.
Amazon KDP
As mentioned, its the biggest player with a huge margin. Some of the key features KDP offers compared to others is
Offers your book in Kindle, Paperback & Hardcover options with you doing nothing. So, for printed editions, all the pain is taken care by KDP
Assign a free ISBN numbers to different formats of your book hence this overhead is also taken care of. But using this free ISBN, the book can be published only on Amazon. For publishing on, say GumRoad, you need to have another ISBN which you need to take care of
Mostly compatible with .doc file.
Provides you promotional offers to apply for your book hence helping in the initial boost.
If chosen, the book can be read for free by Kindle members and you will get paid for the pages read (hence an additional income). Though, this is usually lower compared to your book price
Though, there are many issues as well you need to consider
The payments are a pain to manage. You need to have specific bank accounts for respective countries to get paid for the sales done in that country. The way around to this is Payoneer which you can explore.
The formatting may get disturbed when you preview it before publishing. So the formatting you did on using your drafting tool (say Google Doc) may not look the same on KDP Preview and you need to again reformat things.
If you choose your book to be available for free to Kindle Premium members (you get paid for pages read), you can’t publish the book anywhere else for 3 months
The cut on sales by Amazon is huge (range from 30%-70%).
It don’t support Paypal and other stuff. You need to provide bank details only.
It doesn’t support PDF versions of the book.
You can set different prices for different regions. I set the price quite low for India !!
GumRoad
The easiest platform to get started. I remember setting up my book in just 10–15 minutes max.
The cut is comparetively lower (20%).
It supports any version that you can sell, be it epub, pdf, doc and whatnot. No hardcopies though.
Google Play Books
Quite easy to get started similar to GumRoad.
The best perk is it helps with the SEO on google search and your book may listed on top when someone searches for the topic.
It also doesn’t support hardcopies.
I chose all the three to publish my book but with a major focus on Amazon KDP due to its bigger presence. Hence, all my marketing links were directed to Amazon KDP.
Publishing on Amazon KDP
You need to be ready with a few things before getting started with KDP
Book title and subtitle.
Description: This will play a huge role in your book’s ranking in SEO.
Categories (Book categories) & Keywords (sort of hashtags).
A cover page (different for different formats) which you can design using KDP itself else Canva would be better.
For paperback, choosing the print quality. Do remember this will heavily affect the cost of your paperback.
Price you wish to set in different countries. The dashboard is quite intuitive and is seamless to be honest.
Once you’ve published, this might take about 3–4 days to finally show up on Amazon’s catalogue. After this, you can create your Author Page as well (you will get a mail).
Even if you’ve made a mistake or you wish to change something (mostly the price if it becomes a hit), even this is allowed and most of the things are updateable !!
Enough about publishing, Let’s jump onto
Marketing your Book
I read somewhere on Reddit
“90% of writing the book is Marketing”
And I can’t agree more. Tell folks about your book wherever you can !
Talking about my book which is Data Science and ML specific, I decide for going with 0 money on marketing rather using my own network for the sake of marketing.
Using my own channels
I’ve been active in this space for quite some years now and hence got a decent network to get started with baseline marketing. A few things I decided straight up was
- Short ad about the book in every new YouTube video published on my channel
- Amazon book integration in my Medium blogs
- Posts and statuses on my personal profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Insta, Whatsapp, etc.
Other communities
- I posted messages on discord & slack tech communities (that are relevant) alongside Kaggle discussions.
- A special mention to Reddit. What a beauty of a platform it is for tech guys. I assume I drove some orders from there as well.
- Other Data Science specific forums.
The idea that I followed was to use a different ad/post about the book every time on regular intervals so that it doesnt appear spamming. Also, you need to know your audience. If you post about a tech book in kids forum, it will yield you nothing.
So this was my entire journey of writing my 1st book on Generative AI and it was anyday a very wholesome experience. Hope you write yours soon !!
