Thinking of Self-Publishing Your Book in 2013? Here's What You Need to Know.

Here’s the problem with self-publishing: no one cares about your book. That’s it in a nutshell. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe. Many of those – perhaps as many as half or even more – are self-published. On average, they sell less than 250 copies each. Your book won’t stand out. Hilary Clinton’s will. Yours won’t.

So self-publishing is an exercise in futility and obscurity. Of course, there are the stories of the writers who self-publish and magic happens and they sell millions of books, but those are the rare exceptions. How rare? Well, on the order of 1 or 2 per million.

If you like those odds, go for it. If you don’t, and you still have a book in you, then please, please read Guy Kawasaki’s book APE: How to Publish a Book, co-written with Shawn Welch. It will save you from yourself and that obscurity.

I can give an unqualified rave for the book – if you’ve already decided to self-publish. If not, then you need to think about the only serious quibble I have with APE first. And that is that for most people, the task of developing what the publishing world calls a ‘platform’ is simply too time-consuming and too difficult if you don’t have one already. Guy’s naturally optimistic about creating a platform, because he has an incredibly strong one that he’s developed over a number of years and a number of successful ventures. But if you’re starting from scratch, it’s a different story. Sure, celebrities and CEOs have a huge leg up, but I’m talking about most of us.

Read more: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorgan/2013/01/08/thinking-of-self-publishing-your-book-in-2013-heres-what-you-need-to-know/