Top 17 Best Self-Publishing Companies

today I'm going to walk you through the top self-publishing businesses out there both to help you actually publish your book as well as to assist you in the self-publishing process let's get into [Music] it all right so I want to start with what I call the big five and I think that's usually what they're known by in the self-publishing world but for most people there are five main companies where you will be self-publishing your book and where you will make the most money so the first of the big five is of course Amazon and Amazon

has their program called Kindle Direct publishing which allows you to self-publish your books on their platform it doesn't cost you anything they only take a percentage of your sales so that you're able to publish freely Amazon owns a massive share of the publishing world and if you ask me perhaps a little bit too much of a share of the self-publishing process but that said that's where you're going to be making most of your money is on Amazon and so make sure that you are publishing on Amazon if you want to self-publish your book or at

least if you want to self-publish your book and make money from it the second and probably the next biggest platform outside of Amazon is Apple Books Apple also has a system that allows you to self-publish your book onto their platform so that your book can be available inside Apple Books keep in mind to go back to Amazon for a second if you have selected to be part of the KDP select program also known to the reader as Kindle unlimited then you must keep your ebook exclusive to Amazon but if you're not in the KDP select

program then you can also publish your books on to to Apple Books and these other platforms that we'll get to from everything I've heard and from my own personal experience Apple Books does appear to be the next biggest Money Maker in terms of how much money you can make from your book selling on Apple and that's because so many people have iphoneon so many people are in the Apple ecosystem that they just prefer to do all of their shopping there on Apple but one of the next bigness and from here on I I don't necessarily

have an order in terms of like the next biggest buy profit that people make or what have you but one of the surprising big ones is called Kobo now Kobo is owned by a company called Rakuten which is a massive company that owns a whole bunch of other little companies and Kobo is a really big Market in certain countries notably Kobo has a much bigger market share in Canada than from what I've heard it might even rival Amazon in terms of how many people buy from Kobo in Canada if you're from Canada chime in let

me know if you've ever boughten a book from Kobo but it is a pretty big one and one of the things that sets Kobo part is that they make it really easy in a seamless process for the author themselves so you definitely want to check Kobo out if you are interested in publishing your books to a wider audience the fourth of the big five you've probably also heard of which is Barnes & Noble which is one of the biggest retail chains for books in the United States at least and Barnes & Noble also has a

way of publishing your ebook online now unfortunately just because you publish your book through Barnes & Noble's online platform that does not give you any guarantee that you can actually get your books inside Barnes & Noble stores getting books in stores has long been the big hurdle that a lot of self-publishing authors face and I'll get into that a little bit more when we talk about Ingram spark a lot of people have Nooks Barnes & Noble offers and so if they have that then they're likely to buy from Barnes & Noble so if you want

to publish your book as widely as possible you want to make sure you're publishing your book in Barnes & Noble that brings us to the last of the big five which is Google Play books which is a compared to these others a relatively newer one but due to the power of Google it's also a one that you want to definitely check out now from what I've heard Google Play is a little bit of a nightmare for aggregators which I'll talk about next so a lot of people do end up uploading their books directly to Google

play I've done it it's a relatively seamless process to do and not something that takes a whole lot of time and so once again if you want to be published as widely as possible I strongly recommend you get published in Google Play books as well all right those are the big five but I'm going to add another one to the end of this of a big sixth option and that is Shopify so Shopify is a different type of platform because it's not one where you can just upload your book and sell it on shopify's platform

Shopify is what you use to sell your books directly to your own readers so if you want to create your own store just for your books Shopify is the one that you want to use I could do a whole video comparing the benefits of Shopify versus woocommerce versus gumroad versus all of these other selling direct platforms because there are many but I'm just going to put my foot down right now and say Shopify is the best platform that you want to use as evidenced by a lot of data that has been gathered about people that

are successful selling direct I'm going to link down below to this blog post right here which was a massive survey done at Kindle prur that happened just before I left working for them and they put together a whole bunch of statistics about the people that are having success selling direct and one of the data points that was overwhelmingly clear from this thing is that the successful people having success selling direct we're selling through Shopify and so there's a whole lot more information that we could get into on how to sell Direct that's beyond the scope

of this video but I just want to bring up Shopify is the one you want to look at if you want to sell direct all right now that we've talked about the big five and Shopify I want to talk about all of the different aggregators out there and the best ones for authors by aggregator I mean all of these sites will take what you upload to them and they will distribute everything for you to other platforms the first one and my personal favorite is draft to digital which also recently merged with another company just like

it called smashwords the two kind of joined forces and became a Powerhouse for Distributing your book to all of these different retail places drafted digital doesn't have any kind of fee to do this but they do take a 10% royalty of all of the books that come through drafted digital now you can choose which platforms to distribute to so while drafted digital does upload to Amazon and Apple Books and Barnes & Noble and everything that we've already discussed you can opt out of Distributing it to those programs and you can upload your books to those

platforms by yourself meaning you won't have to pay that 10% fee to draft a digital I recommend doing this at least for Amazon however I have sometimes found that just the hassle of going through Amazon and Kobo and Apple Books and all of these and uploading my books to all of them is a lot of work and I would rather take the fee to give drafted digital more of my royalty from all of those platforms in exchange for them just taking care of all that work for me however this is going to depend on how

much money you anticipate making on these platforms if you think you're going to make a lot of money from Apple Books for example then you should upload to Apple Books yourself and let drafted digital take care of everything else and if you're willing to spend the time I would at least upload your book to all of the big five that we discussed already and then of course if you're selling direct through Shopify that's all done through your own network as well but drafted digital is in touch with so many more forms Beyond this that it

makes sense to use it to just make sure your book is available everywhere else that you can think of including in libraries and various subscription platforms as well as other platforms that are more mainstream in smaller countries now if you don't want to pay a percentage of your royalties there is another option out there called publish drive and publish Drive is different because it doesn't take a percentage of your royalties it charges you a flat fee per book so if your book is making like a ton of money or your books in general are making

a lot of money it might make sense to move more of those books over to publish drive because publish Drive will keep it at a flat fee and so the expenses will not scale with the number of books that you sell that said the downside to that is if you aren't selling a whole lot of books that fee can add up as you can see from their pricing plan that can be as high as anywhere from $99 a month for 48 books now if you have 48 books chances are you're making more than $99 a

month but in order for this to be worth it compared to drafted digital you would have to make sure that 10% of your royalties is not more than $99 a month but if you're say making a million dollar a year off of your books then 10% of that is a lot of money and this $99 per month would be a much more attractive figure for you and a million dollar is a lot even if you were making $100,000 a year then this would still be an attractive option for you because it would be less than

10% of that so it all kind of depends on where you are in the publishing process are you really successful yet are you really just starting out that's going to make a difference on whether you choose to use published drive or drafted digital the next one that I want to talk about is Ingram spark now Ingram spark isn't as much of an aggregator like the others but it is important because if you want to get your book inside of bookstores Ingram spark is one that you're going to want to use now I personally don't use

it very much because I find it to be a bit of a hassle their workflow is not very good their pricing used to be pretty expensive it would cost $50 for every version of a book that you wanted to upload to Ingram spark and then they would distribute it and you have no guarantee that your book is going to be picked up in other markets now I believe they charge a flat fee for every book that you sell instead of $50 up front but I still find it to be a little bit of a hassle

and it's just not my favorite platform to work with personally but here's the benefit of it if you want your books to be in book stores physical bookstores most of those bookstores are getting their supplies from Ingram spark while it is possible for those books to get your books through Amazon or through other platforms to get them into their bookstore most people won't do that because Amazon is the sort of elephant in the room and these bookstores don't like to support Amazon and in order to get a book from Amazon and put it into their

Library it's usually more expensive than getting your book from Ingram spark and so most of these bookstores don't really want to support Amazon they usually just go through Ingram spark so if you don't have your books uploaded into Ingram spark Chann of getting into bookstores are very slim now I have uploaded a few books to their platform in order to distribute certain print copies of my books more publicly but I haven't seen much result from that yet but that's one of the things I plan on experimenting with further I'm just putting this out there as

basically a necessity if you want to get your books into bookstores I personally do not see the need for that as much as some other people might I do quite well with the books that I have through the channels that I have and even if your books are uploaded Ingram spark the chances of you getting into bookstores are kind of slim unless you are personally calling up all of these bookstores and convincing them to stock your book and that brings us to the last aggregator here that we have and that is find away voices Now

find away voices is pretty much exactly like drafted digital except for audiobooks so if you want to distribute your books widely as audiobooks then you will probably want to look at find away voices now as I'm recording this there was a recent incident where there was some mixup in the terms and conditions of findway voices that caused a little controversy that was eventually cleared up and repaired as authors caught onto it turns out it was a kind of a copy paste thing where people were copying from the boilerplate of another contract and putting it into

the new terms and conditions and it just sort of blew up from there honestly the lawyers that were working there should have been able to catch those things and they didn't but thankfully the authors did and that issue is for now sorted out but if that's a cautionary thing for you then be sure to take that into account find away voices is owned by Spotify and this is actually a good thing in my book even though Spotify has had some mixed results for artists out there in the music industry I believe that Spotify has the

biggest chance of being an actual real competition with Amazon's audible which is currently the king of audiobooks right now to the point that they are almost in a monopoly type situation and anytime we can get some real competition to a monopoly like that I am all for it and so I am usually Pro Spotify because of the competition that it's going to provide so I personally have no issue putting my audiobooks on findway voices enabling me to distribute my books everywhere including Spotify and that's it for all of the self-publishing platforms and the big five

but I do want to walk through a few more tools or platforms that will help you in the self-publishing process not necessarily as places where you actually publish your book but as places that will help you gather all of the assets you need and to format or package your book in a way that will be actually really great and the first of these tools I want to highlight is publisher rocket now full disclosure I used to work for kindlepreneur which is under the same umbrella as publisher rocket and attacus which I'll get to next but

I do believe that publisher rocket is one of the best research tools out there especially if you are more Amazon focused if you really have a focus on Amazon you want to game the algorithm and figure out where are the niches that are best underserved so that you can serve them then publisher rocket is a great tool for you additionally if you want to optimize your book on Amazon with the right keywords and categories to give you the most exposure then again publisher rocket is the one that you want I used to work in SEO

which stands for search engine optimization which was the idea of trying to get articles ranking onto Google so that people would find them in the top page of Google and click on them and visit your site well publisher rocket is a tool that's basically SEO for books if you want to optimize your book and your book landing page and everything so that it comes up in search then publisher rocket is the tool to make that happen the next tool also comes from from the same umbrella company as publisher rocket and from Dave chessen who used

to be my boss and that is attakus attakus is by far the best formatting tool out there for authors and it's not only a formatting tool but it's also turning into a great writing tool to actually just do your writing inside of attakus I format every single one of my books in attakus and it makes the whole process really easy so that not only can you do ebooks and format ebooks to look pretty but you can also get your print books ready to go for any kind of paperback or hard cover that you were looking

for on either Amazon or Ingram spark or any of these other aggregators that we've talked about all you had to do is basically just a few clicks and your book is ready to go to any of those platforms in any different format the leading competitor to attakus is one called Vellum but it is only available on Mac and it costs $100 more in order to get all of the same features that attakus has and it doesn't actually have all of the same features it is missing out on a couple basically attacus is if Vellum and

scrier and Google Docs had a baby it would be called atus and so that's why I use it for literally everything that I do every single project that I work on that's writing related goes through Atticus at some point in my process I cannot recommend it enough the link I have down below is not even affiliate link because they're not giving away affiliate links yet but I still recommend it highly for any author out there it is a fixed fee so there is no recurring subscription that you're going to have to pay you pay for

it once and you'll have it forever all right next there are two editing programs that I want to highlight the first is called Pro writing a and the second is called autocrit now I haven't done a ton of videos on Pro writing Aid yet I do plan on doing some I've done a few about autocrit and I do enjoy using autocrit but the two are kind of a little bit different and I use them for different purposes Pro riding Aid is by far I would say the best tool for proofreading and catching spelling and grammar

errors in your book for long form projects like a book it is way better than grammarly at catching all of the different things that you need to catch Plus like grammarly there is actually a lifetime subscription option for pro writing a it's a bit pricey but the fact that you can pay for it once and then never have to pay for it again is a big deal for me it's really a tool that was built with authors in mind people that had these bigger projects to be able to help you find all of the grammar

and spelling errors that you might have and so I strongly recommend Pro writing Aid link down below along with everything else now autocrit on the other hand it's a very similar platform and I'll probably do a autocrit versus Pro riding Aid video at some point in the future let me know in the comments down below if you'd like to see that but I consider autog grit to be a very different platform for one you have to do all of your work inside of autocrit platform and it's not as geared towards proofreading and spelling errors as

Pro writing Aid is instead it's more interested in a more structural analysis as well as line editing and I've done videos in the past looking at the AI analysis tools that autocrit gives you they are quite impressive and from a developmental standpoint they go far beyond what you can can do with Pro writing Aid they also give you a lot of really good analyses of different things that you might want to change or work on in your book like for instance the number of adverbs that you use or the number of dialogue tags that you

have and what they are and then most importantly you're able to compare your book to other books books by other authors or books in your genre to understand is your book hitting the same sort of benchmarks as they are or is it going too far with your adverbs or what have you so you can work on scaling that down and I find it's actually good at even teaching me what are some things that I should be worrying about certain cliches and things that I can do PR writing Aid has some of that but it's not

really Geared for that that's why I have both and I use both but if I could only have one I will actually reserve my judgment on that until I can do a full versus video of the two thankfully for both of them you can get a lifetime option I have links to that below the next platform I want to bring up is mibl art and its cousin get covers so these are both run by the same people same parent company for both of them one is a little bit more high quality and more expensive than

the other but both I consider to be really affordable ways of getting amazing book covers for your book mble art as you can see here has a lot of different options and you can get it for basically any type of book that you want any genre and there are many other things that they will do for you like creating a brand kit for your website and things like that creating logos creating social media content that goes with your book cover all of that is additional add-ons that you can do through mibl ART a typical book

cover that you get from a professional book cover artist often costs between $500 and $1,000 roughly miart is much cheaper than that starting at about $220 here and going up to 270 if you get the ebook and the print version and that's significantly Less Than You'll typically spend for a cover however if you're just starting out and you really don't have any options there is an even cheaper option here called get covers Again by the same people and I find these covers should not be quite the same level of quality as what I get out

of miart but the fact is you cannot beat these prices even AI even using AI is likely going to cost you more than using get covers for your book whereas miart started at around 220 for their basic package here you can get it for $10 so it is extremely affordable and I think the quality is definitely way more than I would expect for $10 and you can even go up to $35 to get their premium cover which is in my mind frankly a steal now I still get all of mine from miart because I'm willing

to pay a little bit more to get that little Edge on the quality but uh this is where I get most of my book covers now is from miart but that said if I were starting out I would 100% go to get covers to get all of my covers done okay last but not least I wanted to highlight a site called the urban Riders now as I'm recording this I'm aware that they are probably soon going to be going through a Rebrand and calling it dibl so if you're watching this in the future it may

be called dibl so I've started recently to hire some ghost writers to write some of the book ideas that I have in my head in addition to the books that I am writing myself and this is where I go to get most of those writers now they do have other book Services here besides ghost writing including uh like SEO articles uh editing for your books cover designs illustrations Etc even audiobook narration and so you can take a look at them for all of those I can't speak to the quality of those things as I can

to the ghost writing but I do feel like the quality that I get for the ghost writing and for the price that I pay for the ghost writing is actually really really high Urban writers goes through and vets all of the writers that work for them so that you know you're getting a certain base level of quality and all you have to do is make sure that they are the right type of style for the book that you want to create again links to all of these will be down below some of them are affiliate

links but as always I do not recommend any Affiliates that I do not actively use myself and many of them aren't even AFF link so definitely go check all of these platforms out so you can get a good look and additionally if you want to know more about self-publishing I did an entire master class on how to upload your book to KDP and how to prepare a lot of the information like your book description your book title your keywords and everything like that in that process of uploading all of which can be used across all

of these different platforms as well so definitely go check that out if you want to know more about the self-publishing process and I will see you in the next video our five P companies that are most and one of the direction to hire some uh