My second book, Be Awesome at Online Business, I sold exactly same way. In the following guest post he provides a roadmap to the various Amazon services that have liberated authors from traditional publishers. His upcoming book, The Good Creative, due out June 4, explores 18 traits of the world’s most interesting and respected creative professionals. He’s a web designer and author who has self-published four books, including Everything I Know, which between the print and ebook versions sold a total of 4,000 copies.

I'm one of them (see my post, “ How My Book Became A (Self-Published) Best Seller ).

Various tools for self-publishing have taken down these barriers for authors who prefer to go it alone. If they didn't ship the package back to you unopened, they would either send you a form rejection letter or make you a lowball offer. Most would grumble that your idea would not be likely to make a lot of money, or that it sounded “more like a magazine article than a book.” At this point you might abandon the project or, if you were really persistent, send your proposal directly to publishers. Then you might contact a bunch of agents to see if they would be interested in pitching your book to major publishers.

First you would have to spend weeks or months writing a book proposal and sample chapters. Not so long ago, the first hurdle for an aspiring book author was to get past the gatekeepers.

Kindle books sale