Types Of Publishing
You might have heard of Traditional Publishing, Self-Publishing and Hybrid Publishing, but what about Reading Platforms? With the world turning more and more digital and the pandemic still in full swing, this is the perfect place to start your writing career and make some money on the side. And if you are lucky, you can even quit your day job and write full time. But we’ll get to that later.
Traditional Publishing is when you find yourself an agent to represent you (after you have written and edited your book a thousand times) and your agent tries to find a publishing house that would want to pick up your book and do all the extra editing, formatting, cover, promoting and distributing for you (and other things, we won’t talk about that here).
Self-Publishing is when you do all that by yourself. Even if you use professional editors and proofreaders (which you definitely should in order to make sure you produce quality work), you still find and pay them yourself. Then you upload your book to Amazon, Smashwords or any other self-publishing company and market until you die.
Hybrid Publishing is something between the other two. They do most of the work for you, but you do pay them an advance. This is a tricky situation since there are a lot of shady companies which can literally steal your money and do nothing for you. Again, do your research.
Finally, we come to Reading Platforms.
Reading Platforms
The Reading Platforms are a new way of reading or publishing books via an online platform. Most often, the books there are just in an e-book format unless the platform you’ve chosen offers paperback as well. Most don’t though, so the typical way your readers can read them is either via the platform’s website or mobile app.
Currently, Reading Platforms have a bit of a bad name since most platforms allow anyone and everyone to upload their story there and as you can imagine, some of those people are just starting out. Of course, if a book is signed, usually the quality of the writing increases… hypothetically. I won’t lie that I have seen stories littered with grammar mistakes and plotholes as big as Jupiter, but the truth is… people still love them. Sometimes bad grammar can be overlooked if the story itself is captivating.
Most traditionally or self-published authors would scoff as someone mentioned one of those sites and stay on their high horse while juggling their full-time day job and working on the seventeenth draft of their next book. But the truth is, a lot of people spend good money on those sites/apps and a lot of writers can earn well there. As long as there is a demand for stories on them, the Reading Platforms are here to stay.
That being said, making it on a platform and becoming a popular author is not easy. But they are the perfect place for:
- people who are just starting out as writers and want to test the waters;
- people looking for feedback and beta readers (in that case, you don’t even need to sign your book);
- people who need to make extra money or want to become writers full time;
- people looking to create a following and grow their audience.
The Reading Platforms are definitely not the way to become a world-famous author, but I would honestly say it’s the best way to start. In just one year, I have over 1400 followers on my profile and I was able to quit my job and just write full time. It’s not a consistent thing, so you have to work hard at it and write A LOT, but it allowed me to take the path that would lead me to fulfill my dream.
So far I am working with Dreame only so I’ll be focusing on that platform since I can be most helpful there. But I am looking into others as well, so later on I might add a post or two for them as well.
If you have any questions or opinions on the manner, feel free to add a comment or reach out 🙂