How Can I Publish a Book With No Money? Publishing for Free

So, you just finished writing and editing your latest masterpiece and maybe have already become frustrated with the standard publishing process. If you are looking to avoid the usual publishing options, you may ask how I can publish a book with no money?

Good news! There are many good options to publish a book with no money, such as your own website, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and numerous printing and publishing services that will help you get into print for free. Many offer excellent tools for no upfront fee in exchange for a commission or revenue share.

Although the standard route does not cost you anything monetarily, it does, of course, take a lot of time and effort without the guarantee of ever getting into print.

In this article, we will look at a few of these nontraditional publishing options that you can use to get your book into the hands of readers.

Option for Publishing a Book With No Money?

In the modern Internet era, the traditional publishing industry has received many new competitors who have dramatically changed the publishing process. These new avenues allow many would-be authors to ask themselves if they can publish a book with no money rather than compete for the precious few standard publishing contracts.

The good news for any new writer asking how they can publish a book with no money is that many modern publishing tools and services have been made available thanks to the Internet. Many of them are free to use with no advance cost and instead rely on agreeing to share revenue from future sales.

For many decades the only way to go from writer to published author was to follow a very restrictive process that involved submitting your manuscript to many agents and publishers and hoping to be noticed amongst the pile of want-to-be’s.

This has changed dramatically with the advent of a vast range of services that have only been made possible by the Internet.

Let’s look at a few of the most popular and convenient.

Kindle Direct Publishing

The biggest and most popular option for free publishing is the service provided by Amazon.com, KDP: Kindle Direct Publishing. A number of years ago, as eBooks and handheld electronic devices became more popular, Amazon started manufacturing their own range called Kindle.

As a companion to these hardware devices, Amazon came up with the Kindle Unlimited service to allow readers to get lots of e-books via a monthly subscription and the KDP service. This makes it easy for authors to publish their books and keep Amazon and the readers happy with plenty of e-books to choose from.

To get more details on how KDP works and sign up, head over to the Amazon KDP site. If you already have your book written and edited with your layout and cover ready to go, you could have your book uploaded, published and available on Amazon in just a couple of days.

Smashwords

A similar service called Smashwords also helps authors publish their books for free. Smashwords also operates on a free to publish commission-based agreement with the author. Although obviously not as big as Amazon, Smashwords has its own online bookstore with over 100,000 books available.

The big benefit of going with Smashwords is that they support not only their own platform for free but also Amazon. This gives you the benefit of being on both platforms, plus they also add Barnes and Noble and Apple access for the mobile device market and many other outlets.

Library Release

Smashwords also have access to several library systems allowing you to make your book available to libraries via platforms like Overdrive for readers to borrow from if you think that is a good idea for your book. Although some authors are unsure if being available on the library system is a benefit, many others are thrilled, and Smashwords makes it easy.

Both services have their pros and cons, but most importantly, they are free and easy to use. Head over to the sites and spend some time looking through the FAQ section on each to cover most of the common questions you will have about the whole publishing process, including how to get published and, most notably, how revenue sharing works and getting paid.

Author Website

If you just want to get your book released to the public and are less concerned with actually making any money from your book, there are other options. Both platforms above will allow you to publish a book and make it available for free. Those options are typically really intended as a first one free to entice the reader to pay for subsequent books.

Create Your Own Site

You also have the option of creating your own author website. The great thing about this is that if you just want to get your book out, you could simply just make it available to your visitors as a PDF. Because you are entirely in control of your website, you could also make other things such as novelettes and short stories available.

Releasing these different formats can help you build a following that you can leverage in the future to generate income from a paid release.

Use a Blogging Platform

There are plenty of blogging platforms that will let you establish a website free, and many provide you with excellent tools to create nice-looking easy to use websites quickly and easily. Even if you want to get your books out for free for now, you can use this to collect visitors’ contact information so you can let them know about future publications that they will hopefully buy.

Although these are the best options for free publishing, if you do have the patience and determination, traditional publishing via the big publishing houses and working with an agent still excellent and most importantly free. The workload and determination required are a lot higher due to the competition you will encounter.

Good luck with whatever option you choose, and let us know if you have an interesting author success story we may be interested in featuring.