If you are considering a publisher, be VERY careful. A true, traditional publisher will NEVER ask you for a fee at any point, ever, for anything. If they ever want you to pay them, you are being conned. You will likely run across thousands of vanity and hybrid publishers that make their living being paid by authors. These are scam publishers. If you sign with one of those, they will likely take your rights, most of your royalties, and you will never get them back. If you sign with a con, a real publisher will never sign you. A true, traditional publisher makes money from the author’s book sales. Anything else, sales are irrelevant. Fake publishers make money from the author themselves. Hiring someone to publish for you should be no more than an author service. If you do hire someone to publish for you, make damn sure you have access to your own author account and it is a one time transaction. Make sure you are not giving up any royalties or rights. Never give up your control. It takes about 10 minutes to upload a book to amazon once you have your KDP account. That isn’t worth paying someone very much who knows how to do it. Also beware of fake claims from amateurs claiming to be “digital marketing experts.” I have talked to hundreds of indie authors just starting out that have used these con artists. You know, the ones that solicit authors under their social media posts and message you out of the blue claiming they can get your book tons of sales for a modest fee. Not one single author I have talked to made back the money they spent on these crooks. Almost everything you read on the internet about self-publishing is wrong. Most of these articles and videos were written or filmed by fake publishers, fake agents, and fake marketers. They want to take advantage of new authors who have not learned how the business works. I took a years worth of free and paid classes from some the best self-published authors in the business. I also interviewed several who have made millions on selling their books. They all told me how they did it. They all did very similar things.
We deleted the link to buy his book/ visit his blog or whatever to find out in my experience most successful self pubbed authors wrote in series, set up mailing lists and newsletters, used a free or cheap book as a magnet to get newsletter subs, and advertised using FB and AMS they also made sure they had good copy, pro covers, and expertly written sales blurbs none of them spammed forums as a method of promotion which is kind of ironic really
So... OP warns about giving money to publishing scammers and people who will "help" them out for sums of money, while promoting a material that claims to help people with publishing... that cost money. Did I get all this correct?
the thing about self publishing is that there’s no secret sauce, and anyone who interviewed lots of best selling self pubs would know that. It all boils down to have a decent product and market it effectively ( which doesn’t include any kind of spam, since that just pisses people off) ETA: I went back and followed the link it’s actually to a rather strange forum which covers everything from house building to writing. I’ve no idea why he wanted to promote that and don’t much care. Spam is spam and only ends one way
Probably had something to do with this: https://www.writingforums.org/threads/we-fix-it-right-the-first-time.177568/
