Back in the old days if you wanted to earn a living as a writer you needed to get your book selected by a large publishing house. This was an extremely difficult and frustrating process that kept a lot of brilliant people from being about to share their gifts, stories and knowledge with the world. Luckily, it 2015 and things have change a lot…

These days bookstores are closing up left and right and more and more people are buying books and eBooks over the Internet from websites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And the really amazing part is that a lot of these books are “self-published”, meaning that the authors are putting their books up for sale without the assistance (or interference) of a third party publisher.

There are some great benefits to self publishing a book, rather then trying to get a publishing deal, including the fact that you stand to keep a much, much larger cut of the profits.

However, self-publishing is not without it’s drawbacks. Because self published books are released without the support of a publishing house, the responsibility for getting the word out and marketing the book falls upon the author, who typically will not be experienced in such endeavors. This is one reason why the majority of self-published books don’t sell well.

The trick is finding a way to get customers without driving yourself crazy in the process, and luckily there are resources available online to help you to do exactly that. One resource is a training program called Anik Singal’s Publish Academy which is full scale home study course on how to set up and run a successful publishing business. This course goes way beyond teaching you how to sell a book on Amazon, as it includes advanced training on setting up “sales funnels” and other business building skills to maximize profits that may or may not be of interest. However, when it comes to learning how to market a book or eBook there is a great deal of training provided on this, as well as training on how to get online traffic to come and check out your book.

However, depending on your goals, a course like this may be overkill, and there are lots of short Kindle books that you can pick up on how to get started with self-publishing that may include all of the info that you need.

If you are serious about self publishing I think that the important thing to remember is that it will take time and dedication to see results. It’s undeniable that there are many great new opportunities out there for would be authors, but these opportunities still do require serious effort in order to prove viable.