Success comes in many forms. For authors, it means seeing a book published. Publishing a book is one of the most rewarding things you can do. This will be, without a doubt, one of the most exciting moments in your life. 

It’s a chance to share your story with the world, show off your expertise, and build a business around it.

I’ve guided 54 books and 600+ authors through their Amazon bestselling launches and hosted multiple book launch parties, both online and in-person. I can surely guide you toward publishing a book in 2023!

If you feel this blog doesn’t go into enough detail about the steps involved to guide your journey and dream of a book launch, we have a guide for authors wanting to strategize their Amazon bestselling launch in our FREE Resources Vault. Grab it! It will guide you through every step of the process. After all, launching a book is for warriors, kudos to you!

Step-By-Step Guide To Publishing A Book In 2023

Before you go any further…

If you decide to publish your book, do you want to self-publish or go through a traditional publisher? If you choose the latter, do you want to go through a small or large publishing house?

Now that you have a sense of what publishing route is best for your book, here are some tips for every author to keep in mind. 

I’ll cover some advice that will be helpful to authors regardless of what they choose to publish.

1. Write a Book That Matters to People

The first thing you need to decide when publishing a book is what you want your book to be about. What’s the purpose of your book? Why are you writing it? Make sure that your book has a useful purpose and benefits people in some way (e.g., helping them solve problems or achieve specific goals). Don’t just write something just because you think it will sell well—write something worth reading! Know your target audience? What are their interests? What do they like to read about? What do they hate? How can you connect with them on a personal level? These are some questions you need to ask yourself before publishing a book. 

2. Hire an Editor or Editor(s) for Your Book(s)

If you want to write a book that sells well, make sure you hire someone with experience to help you create a book that reads well, is free of mistakes, and looks great on the shelf. Hiring an editor can mean the difference between writing a bestseller, or a mediocre book. To ensure that your book is ready for publication, take as much time as necessary at this stage of the process. 

3. Build an Author Platform Before Publishing Your Book

What is an author platform? It’s your online presence where people learn more about you, connect with you, and buy products from you. People also refer to this as an “author brand” because it’s bigger than just one product. If you’re just starting, or if you’re already writing, start building your platform now. Start building your email list, and social media following well before you start writing your book. 

4. Recruit, form, and market through a launch team

It’s time to start recruiting your team! Exciting! This will consist of friends and collaborators promoting your book on their platforms. The goal is to get as many people interested in your book as possible, so you want to make sure that you ask people who are already connected to their large audiences. Where do I find people, you might be wondering? Well, pretty much anywhere. From the checkout person at the store, you frequent, to the pals online, you can ask anyone to be on your launch team. 

5. Get feedback on your book from readers, other authors, and publishing professionals

When you write a book, it’s important to get feedback on your draft as early in the process as possible. As writers, we tend to spend a lot of time in our heads–we retreat into our caves and work on our first drafts for long periods without showing anyone what we’ve written. But if we don’t get someone else’s perspective on our work, we won’t know if what we’ve written makes sense or if anyone else will care about the topic as much as we do. Getting fresh eyes on your book can help you catch typos and grammatical errors and give you ideas for tightening up your story and making the theme clearer. Giving a manuscript to one (or more) “beta readers” before sending it to an editor can save you money and time.

6. Pick a Title

While it may seem counterintuitive, choosing a title for your book should wait until after you have written the first draft. This will help you to avoid writing yourself into a corner with the title, and instead focus on writing the book that needs to be written.

7. Design a book cover that sells

The saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is generally true, but when it comes to selling books, that’s not always the case. If your book doesn’t have a professionally designed cover that converts readers into buyers, people are simply going to skip it and look for something else. This is why hiring a professional to design your cover is so important. Unless you’re a graphic designer yourself, don’t try to create your cover–it’s just not worth the time or money. Before you hire someone, though, make sure you have at least a rough idea of what your cover should look like so that your designer can give you what you want instead of wasting time on designs that won’t work. Even if you’re not a book designer yourself, looking at other covers in your genre can give you some ideas of what works well with readers and what doesn’t.

8. Throw a virtual launch party

Don’t just promote your book on social media, but on your author’s website and by guest-posting on other people’s blogs. Make it a big deal; shout about your book from the rooftops, so as many people as possible will hear about it!

I have written a blog post that will give you tips on planning an impactful book party; The Brave Healer Author’s Guide to Successful Book Parties and Launch Events!

9. Decide on a price

It’s time to set your book’s price. You’ve done all the hard work of getting your book ready for publication, so the last thing you want is for the logistics of pricing to trip you up at this late stage. As with most aspects of publishing, there are several ways to go about this. Authors often choose to create a list price and then promote and advertise a discounted launch price by clicking “Promote and advertise” in their KDP dashboard. This lets readers know that, during your discounted launch, they’re getting more for their money. This should tempt more readers to buy your book, which means you can hit publish! (Feels good, doesn’t it?)

10. Make your book available on online retailers

Congrats on taking the big step of self-publishing your book! The process is easier than you might think. To self-publish a book, you just need to be sure that you have all of your materials prepared before you get started. Amazon and other retailers take you through the upload process step-by-step, so it should be easy for anyone who has everything ready.

Here are the steps to publishing your book on Amazon:

• Enter a title, description, and keywords/categories for your book.
• You can upload your manuscript in EPUB format.
• Upload your book cover image (JPG, TIFF, or PDF)
• It’s time to price your book and hit the “publish” button!

11. Promote the book to increase sales

Your book is polished and published and hopefully, you are already seeing readers flock to it. But don’t get too comfortable–you still have a lot of work to do. Here are a few more essentials to take into account: Blog tours are great ways to connect with other authors and spread the word about your book, Price promotions can help boost sales even further (especially if you use KDP Select), And third-party promotional services can make things even easier by taking care of some of the marketing legwork for you.

Closing Thoughts

Publishing a book is always an enormous undertaking. If you’ve read this far, you now know exactly what your options are: You can self-publish or hire the services of one of the best Book Publishers. We at Brave Healer Productions are proud to be one of those companies! We create a safe space for writing and publishing to be part of your healing journey. It’s because we understand the mistakes and know how to avoid them. And it’s because we’re learning every day, and paying that knowledge forward to our community every day. We’re confident that you have everything you need to achieve this lifelong goal! Keep your eyes on the prize, enjoy the journey!” 

Let’s get writing!