It is much easier these days to write and publish your very own book and/or ebook. Besides going to the Library and finding a book on how to write books, you can get online and obtain software that makes the writing and publishing process a whole lot easier than years ago. One that I like that seems to be one of the best available is called FastPencil. If you go to Google or Yahoo and search for it, it should pop right up. It takes you from start to finish in a step-by-step process for you to produce that book or ebook. Even if you have no previous writing skills, you would be able to produce very nice results with this product -- Fastpencil. It gives you a lot of tips and ideas of how to improve your writing and then when you have your final transcript in hand, they will even help you get it published. Check it out.
Great recommendation, Roy. It's a lot easier these days to publish books but much harder to get them read because the net is awash with "bad" books. While it's possible for anyone to write and publish a book, not everyone can write the sort of book which people would enjoy reading or find informative/useful if it's a non-fiction book. Good thing about all that though is, no writer should ever have an excuse for living in misery because their book wasn't accepted by a publisher.
I don't think this really prevents writers from struggling with their books. If you want to make a living as a writer, there's really no way around being liked or accepted as a publisher. Sure, there might be cases out there where a self-published author was able to write a successful book, but those cases are outliers and not all that common. It's very similar to journalism, a field I'm trying to crack into currently. While I can self-publish my articles on my own blog, I need to get hired by a known organization to really get noticed.
It's harder now, more than ever, to have a book accepted by publishers because fewer people read books these days. The competition is much stiffer and new writers . . . well, their first books hardly ever make any money. I read it somewhere that if you have a blog that gets a decent number of visitors daily then it's possible to make some good cash from a Kindle book if you promote the book on your blog.
Thanks for the information about FastPencil. I never heard of them. Yes, it much easier to get a book published. I think it's a good thing. Publishing housing used to control which books hit the market. Now, independent writers can bypass them and sell directly to consumers. I think the benefits outweigh any cons. The main con is that some really crappy books make it to market.
Thank you for sharing FastPencil. It's actually my first time to learn about it (bookmarked). I love the fact that they also provide options/features so that one can earn from the ebooks they created. I also find the "Bookbuy Widget" very helpful for online promotions. Really something worthwhile to check out for newbie/aspiring writers.
I never heard of Fastpencil. I use Apache Open Office which is a free processor like MS Word. It does not have all the bells and whistles and is less busy. All I need do is save as html, PDF, or doc. It is an excellent way to format the book once you learn the Styles & Formatting tools. If you write for audiobooks, all you need do is upload the doc file to the narrator and they will take it from there. I had no idea how picky some readers could be until I published. To me a story and character development were most important. But some readers look only at the format, or at least allow them to become distracted by the format. I learned if they do not like the format, they will not even read the story. After publishing my first book, a reader pointed out that my page numbers and chapter headings were not what she wanted. I went pouring over various books to see what she meant. Lo and behold, there were things she noticed that I had never noticed. When I made these changes, the book did look more professional.
