If you have a book up your sleeve, or maybe even already written, a logical next question is how to bring your book to the world. There are more options out there these days than there ever have been before, but sometimes the various options can be paralyzing, especially for someone who\’s never published anything before. (And maybe even for those who have.) When you are considering the following options, always keep in mind what your end goal is. Why did you write the book in the first place? Were you trying to reach the most people possible? Were you trying to establish credentials for yourself and your business? Were you just thinking about making money? What you decide to do will end up depending on how you answered these questions.
Traditional Publishing
Traditional publishing is definitely the old way of doing things. Time will tell what ultimately becomes of this old way, but for now there are still plenty of pros to getting a book published by a traditional publisher. Unfortunately, one of them is probably not going to be making money, at least not directly through book sales. What publishing a book traditionally will do for you is give you massive credibility and possibly exposure (though that depends a lot on your self-promotion skills). Since it is still ridiculously difficult to get a book picked up by the old-school publishing houses, this actually ends up giving you a lot of clout that you can then parlay into speaking engagements, a website audience, another book, etc.
Self-Publishing a Physical Book
This route will also gain you some credibility and allow you to claim expert status in your field, (after all, you wrote a book on the subject), but whether or not you make any money with it will depend a lot on you, and also the quality of your book. Be aware that if you go this route, it will be difficult to get traditional bookstores like Barnes and Noble to pay attention to you because self-published books are a dime a dozen. If you ARE able to command an audience with your book, maybe because you already have one through your blog, you do stand to make substantially more in royalties per book sold than you would with a traditional publisher.
Self-Publishing an Ebook
This route is probably the easiest and also has quite a bit of potential. Publishing your book in ebook format will make it easy for you to control the process of its distribution and also open up the possibility of you making some money with it, since there is very little overhead (no paper / printing costs) involved. If you want to get your message out quickly, if you already have an online audience or have solid plans of acquiring one, and if there is no good reason for you to need a physical book to tout, then publishing your ebook is kind of a no-brainer. You will want to make sure it\’s well-designed and you should probably hire an editor to go over the manuscript, but ebooks offer a lot of benefits especially if you don\’t necessarily need the credibility of a physical book because you plan on selling it via your online presence.