♥!The Young Adult Book Club!♥ discussion

What are some of your favorite indie/self-published books?

Self-publishing sometimes gets a bad reputation but there are definitely lots of high quality books worth reading out there! Usually at a great price. Share the ones worth reading!

Also if anyone has any great links to info about self-publishing leave those as well for any aspirating authors.

Also big fans of Amanda Hocking and Tammara Webber when they were self-published. These series are still self-pubbed by them.



For those that are interested in learning about how to self-publish a book I recommend this post by Beautiful Disaster author Jamie McGuire. There are a lot of great tips and she explains how the process worked for her. http://www.jamiemcguire.com/for-writers/

Laura DeLuca is a great author

David Estes and S.M. Boyce! :3

Shannon Dermott, Jessica Park,David Estes, Jamie McGuire, Tammara Webber, Janelle Stalder, A.M. Hargrove, H.D. Gordon, Krystle Jones,Penelope King, Randi Cooley Wilson, Nancy Straight, Charlotte Abel, Nikki Rae, Holly Hood

Just to name a few off the top of my head.

Flat Out Love - Jessica Park, Anything from Tammara Webber, Colleen Hoover - when she first self-published, and Losing It - Cora Carmack. There are so many out there, but those are my favorites!

Tijan books

Dandelion Man the four loves


Self publishing has been around for quite some time and many famous authors have used it as an avenue to jump start their careers, authors you have no doubt heard of and perhaps even read including:
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
John Grisham, A Time to Kill
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Beatrix Potter, the Peter Rabbit stories and others
Arthur Agatston, The South Beach Diet
The list of famous self-published authors is impressive and includes: Margaret Atwood, William Blake, Ken Blanchard, Robert Bly, Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Pat Conroy, Stephen Crane, e.e. cummings, W.E.B. DuBois, Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy, E. Lynn Harris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers, Spencer Johnson, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L'Amour, D.H. Lawrence, Rod McKuen, Marlo Morgan, John Muir, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Irma Rombauer, Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi, and Virginia Woolf.
The list is impressive but don’t be fooled. Like anything else for every success there are countless authors who didn’t make it.
There Are Lots of Options
Amazon is the largest seller of books in the market today and they make it easy to self-publish. Barnes and Noble is the second largest seller and they also have a means of self-publishing. These two firms offer a zero cost solution to get your books to market. There are other companies, Lulu comes to mind and there is always Wattpad and Smashwords. I will focus primarily on the first two options Amazon and Barnes and Noble as I know them best.
Let’s Get Started
The first step is to write a novel but let’s assume you have completed that step and have edited it several thousand times and had your writing circle edit and critique it a few thousand more times.
Log onto https://www.createspace.com/ and create an account. Don’t worry it is free. Scan the free publishing resources section there is lots of valuable information here. For example you can download a template that will facilitate a professional looking interior. I will warn you that some of the fonts used in the template are for Apple devices and you will get a message when you upload a PC file. The interior file review software catches the fact that the PC substitutes a font that is close and flags this “error”. Feel free to ignore the error message, I always do. Or if you are clever at that sort of thing you can change the fonts in the template and avoid the error message completely.
Now that you have a template of the size you want, cut and paste your novel into the template and save it as a word document. I like to use the title of my novel as the file name and I put a version number (v386) at the end so I can keep track of which major revision I am working on.
Once you are done admiring how professional your document looks go back and edit it again, word for word.
Now you can create a book (they call it add a title on your Member Dashboard). The system will ask all sorts of questions like the title, who the author is and things like that. You need to be careful here and input everything correctly because some of these things are not changeable and become linked to the books ISBN. Okay I know I just through a new acronym at you. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number and it is the official way of tracking books. It is the ten (or thirteen) digit identifier assigned to your book. Now you can purchase your own ISBNs but they are not cheap. Amazon will issue you one for free if you prefer.
Amazon will walk you through a series of screens to upload the DOC file (for those who use MS Word processing software) or a PDF. There is an interior review screen that allows you to flip through the book just as it will look from the publisher. Look it over closely for format, fonts, headers, footers, margin mistakes everything that doesn’t look right. Then go back and fix the original document, upload it again and start over.
What About The Cover?
Amazon’s book site CreateSpace has an excellent cover creator application that has probably fifteen templates you can use and customize to make a professional looking cover. Follow the directions to input your information, upload a few pictures and viola you have a professional cover your mother would be proud of. You can even get creative and upload a completed cover that you create yourself.
Now save your cover and submit it for review. The team at CreateSpace will review the files for consistency to make sure they are printable and that the titles, ISBN, authors match first file you created when you set up the book.
You will then be asked to review the book. You are given two options; the first is a digital review. I like this as I can do it quickly. You can view a PDF file on screen or download it and look it over at your leisure. The second option is to order a PROOF copy. This will cost a few bucks but you will have something to hold in your hand and review and markup.
Links
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/articles/
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2011/0...

I liked the beautiful disaster series by Jamie McGuire which shocked me to find out was self published and also easy by tammara webber was amazing

D B Nielsen's debut novel SEED: Keepers of Genesis I is certainly my favourite indie novel at the moment.

Definitely Amy Harmon, I love her books and she is the best indie romance author I have found so far. Her books are incredibly touching and inspiring and always make me cry ;d