Promoting great stories by supporting Self-Published authors.

Authors who self-publish must overcome many challenges on the journey to success. This slow, painstaking, and painful journey results in far too many authors failing to achieve commercial success. Some of these issues include:

1. Limited Visibility and Recognition: Without the benefit of a known name or brand, this key sales and marketing lever is not available for new authors to pull on. This is particularly limiting in a market saturated with traditionally published authors and other self-published peer authors.

2. Marketing and Promotion: Most self-published authors are responsible for writing, marketing, and promoting their books. The skill sets and resources to manage marketing and promotion are not always possessed at a sufficient level to be effective by many authors.

3. Quality Control: Self-publishing authors will typically handle all aspects of the publishing process including editing, formatting, and cover design. Ensuring a professional and polished final product can be a significant challenge.

4. Distribution Issues: Print and digital copies remain significant parts of the publishing system. Successful authors need efficient distribution systems to get their works to purchasing customers. These distribution systems are typically not sufficiently available for self-published authors, or new authors who are still in the early career phase. This can limit the availability of books in physical stores, e stores and libraries.

5. Financial Investment: Typically self-funded, Self-Published authors will put their money into professional services. While this can offer more control, it also means authors bear the financial burden, and success is not guaranteed. It also limits how quickly this class of authors can scale. In addition, it limits the opportunities available to the self-published author to the size of their own financial capacities.

6. Time Constraints: Self-published authors often have to balance writing with the demands of marketing, promoting, and managing the business operations aspects of book publishing. This can be time-consuming and may impact the time available for creative endeavors. This is one of the key reasons why self-published authors are unable to focus on a particular area of the value chain to become exceptionally good at. Many authors are spread too thinly across many areas, limiting their ability to be outstanding in any area.

7. Lack of Support System: Traditionally published authors face these issues too. However, the backing of a publishing team often comes with decades of experience and resources to support the authors in many areas. Self-published authors may lack these resources and must build their own support networks.

8. Discoverability: The technologies and trends that enable self-publishing also come with a downside. With the vast number of books available, getting discovered by readers is a significant challenge. Algorithms on online platforms can be competitive, and authors need effective strategies to improve their discoverability.

9. Updating and Revisions: Making updates or revisions to a self-published book can be more challenging. Being able to make a title a commercial success often detracts from the fundamental art of writing and updating content in line with new information and emerging trends.

Despite these challenges, many self-published authors have found success through perseverance, strategic marketing, and a commitment to producing high-quality content. At Scribcity, our position is that a good story, or message deserves to be told, and more importantly, deserves to be discovered.

The Scribcity platform is designed to support authors at various stages, with as many of the inherent issues with self-publishing as possible. We launched our beta platform to help authors deal with the discoverability, promotion, time constrain and support system challenges. 

We will continue to evolve our service offerings until every deserving self-published author with a story worth telling has the required platform to get their story and message in front of a receptive audience. But this is not about authors alone. 

Without readers, there will be no need for authors. Scribcity will continue to provide a rewarding experience for avid readers and book lovers to discover literary talents, messages, and perspectives worth exploring.

In the short term, Scribcity will focus on deepening our understanding of the unique issues authors and readers face to complement the facts and data we already have. We will create digital platforms to bring lovers of literary works together. We invite authors who are interested in partnering with us to list their various works on our platform and we take it from there.

We actively promote and position the platform to readers who are likely to find the content provided interesting. We keep the readers excited with fresh content and new nonmainstream authors. The readers can discover and explore the profiles of the authors and the platform, engage directly with them, and patronize their works from the authors estores directly.

Get started today, at Scribcity.com, or tell someone who needs the support we provide to get on board.