I have now had four books published and this is my story.

I had never actually planned to write a book but I had been trading stock markets for many years and in 1998 was approached by the Financial Times Pitman Publishing Company to write a book about my methods. This book went on to be a best seller!

In my naivety I thought this was my ticket to writing glory and I thought I would have no problem when it came to my next book. How wrong I was. It was the same turgid round of letters to agents and publishers followed by a rash of rejection slips – how the mighty are fallen!!

This is when I realised an important truth. There are two solid reasons why it is much better to self-publish:

1.The chances of finding an agent or a publisher are slim. Unless you are a Z class celebrity in which case you should have no problem!

2.More importantly you make more money when you self-publish.

Here are the three stages I went through:

1.My book was commissioned by established publishers and they sold 5000 copies – I got £5000 (around $8500).

2.I teamed up with a web site designer and internet marketing man and we sold 5000 copies – I got £20,000 (around $34,000) – a big difference!

3.I now do the web design and marketing myself – now I get 100%!

Let me put this in perspective. The established publishers sold 5000 copies but I did a fair bit of that selling – at one speech I gave we sold 100 copies in the post-speech book signing session – that 15 minute session, which I guess was my 15 minutes of fame, accounted for 2% of their total sales!

In terms of revenue I now get the same from selling 400 books as I used to get from the publishers selling 5000!

Ultimately it all comes down to sales. You have to do the sums to work out which method is going to be the best for you. But having done this you may find you have little choice. You may be completely unable to find an established agent or publisher and you may also have difficulty interesting any web designers and internet marketers in becoming involved in your project other than on a fee paying basis – and that could cost a fortune.

From here on in I am going to assume that you have decided to enter the publishing business. Your first decision is whether to go with a hard copy of your book or whether to stick with an e-book – by which I mean a book which is sold in electronic form. E-books are cheaper and sell well – my first book is called THE WAY TO TRADE and we have sold more in e-book form than in hard copy form. If you want to see the web site simply enter THE WAY TO TRADE in the Google search engine.

In fact that book is the biggest selling trading e-book in the history of Clickbank.com! Of course you may never have heard of ClickBank.com but it is the biggest seller of e-books in the US and thereby the world. It would pay you to visit the site and check out some of the titles. It should give you ideas of the competition you face, what to write about and, most importantly, how to sell your book.

Perhaps you don’t know how to build your website or how to market it. Don’t worry I plan to follow up this short article with further articles on those subjects and also talk more about hard copy books.