Author Societies You Should Consider Joining
ALLI (The Alliance of Independent Authors) - £89/yr for Author Membership
Great resources, a vibrant community, and fees waved on publishing with Ingram Spark
the Society of Authors - £102/yr for Full Membership
Professional author society. Clause-by-clause contract vetting, quarterly journal, free ALCS membership, up to 25% discount on books.
ALCS (Author Licensing and Collecting Society) - £36 lifetime membership (free if a member of many british author/writer guilds)
A not-for-profit that does the hard work of getting you your share of royalties when someone copies or uses your work.
Advice Column
Joining at least one author society is highly recommended. Not only do they provide access to a great community of other authors, but many of them also have very good financial incentives.
Distribution Platforms
- KDP Direct - the big fish, easy to use, streamlined, linked e-book and print, and responsive service team
- Ingram Sparks - large alternative to KDP, has a cost for each book
- Draft2Digital - a new big player in indie digital publishing (e-book & audio)
- StreetLib - e-book/PDF production aimed at users with no technical knowledge
- PublishDrive - new and improving, wider global market access, royalty splitting, some costs depending on services required
- Smashwords - indie e-books, high quality production values
- Blurb - excellent quality photo books
- Lulu - the original and still going with many updates
- PayHip - general digital content distributor
Advice Column
The quality of conversions to e-pub and mobi (kindle) formats may vary with some distributors, especially some of the new indie ones. Although this can be offset by more transparency and access to your files. Regardless, you may wish to have accounts on multiple platforms to best suit your needs.
Amazon and Related Independent Services
- Kindle Direct Publishing - Amazon indie publishing home base
- Amazon Author Central - Join to have your author bio and books linked to an Amazon author page
- Kindlepreneur - Independent book marketing site - everything you need to know about publishing and selling e-books on Amazon
- Amazon Sales Rank Calculator - Independently created tool
- Amazon Book Description Generator - Independently created tool
Advice Column
Amazon is still the king, so it's useful to be there.
Kindlepreneur provides useful blogs, analysis, and tools to help optimise your Kindle publishing experience.