Thanks to technology and innovation, budding authors are now presented with a never-before existing opportunity: self-publishing. The best part of being an authorpreneur is that you have total control over the cover design, content, and distribution of your book. Even more exciting, you get to choose when to publish and whom to publish with. The biggest potential for Self-publishing is that it reminds authors that the book which urgently needs to find expression doesn’t have to wait for someone else to decide if it is publishable. If you’ve decided to self publish, there are now hundreds of publishing companies, from mega-retailers such as Amazon to smaller private publishers focused on specific genres. Here are our 5 best Self-publishing companies to help actualise your dreams

Kindle Direct Publishing

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing [KDP] is a self-publishing platform where authors can publish their print and eBooks. Amazon has a widespread reach that puts books in front of millions of browsers per day. They also offer competitive royalty rates depending on the pricing of the books.

Kobo

Founded in 2009, Kobo is a subsidiary of the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten, the world’s 14th largest Internet company. Kobo is an open platform which allows readers to buy and read digital content from various sources. As an international book retailer and one of the largest ebook stores, Kobo should be on your list for publishing. It operates in 16 countries outside the US and has over 5 million titles available in 77 languages. A great feature of Kobo is the self-publishing platform called Kobo Writing Life [KWL]. This site features an easy-to-publish platform for your books, as well as a detailed sales analytics tool to allow authors to track sales in real-time.

Apple Books

Apple launched its self-publishing platform in 2010. The self-publishing platform for authors is Books and is relatively easy to upload your book. Publishing on iBooks Authors is free and the royalty is a flat 70%. Although Amazon has the longest arm of retail sales, Apple fares very well with its direct marketing approach to Mac users, making it the 2nd largest online retailer of ebooks. This is because it targets Mac users, which are now about 100 million Mac users worldwide. Apple targets Mac users and derives traffic from Mac users already plugged into the brand.

Lulu

Lulu has been around for a very long time and is one of the oldest publishing platforms, since 2009. By 2014, the publishing giant had produced 2 million books. By acquiring an ISBN, your books can be distributed to online retail outlets such as Barnes and Noble, Amazon and Apple’s Bookstore. The author receives an 80% royalty for print books and a 90% royalty for eBooks after-sales. Although Lulu’s ebook conversion, publishing, and distribution services are free, they sell a variety of author services including editing, cover design, formatting, promotional services and book marketing.

Okada Books

Okada Books is Africa’s leading DIGITAL bookstore with over 27,000 books available and ready to be read immediately, and over 300,000 active readers. For every sale of your book, you get an instant email notification telling you the book that was sold, the amount, and what has been paid into your OkadaBooks account. You also get a monthly email report on the first day of every month, listing all the sales you made for the month, the book title, the countries they were bought from, and your OkadaBooks balance details. Okadabooks offers royalties of 70% to the author.