Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years, you know that the book publishing game is changing. You probably also recognize that Amazon has been at the forefront of this revolution. Not only are they getting into transitional publishing, with the ebook Kindle platform (not to mention competing products such as Kobo, Nook etc.), people who want to become authors are no longer at the mercy of enormous New York publishing houses. Nor is the only other option vanity publishing, in which you are required to spend a lot of money ahead of time to pay a company to print, bind and stock your books (which may or may not sell). So even rookie writers can write a manuscript, upload it and commence collecting cash via Amazon’s distribution network.

But unwary writers will still deal with a lot of pitfalls on the way to success. First, there are tens of thousands of folks writing and uploading their ebooks nowadays. Unsurprisingly, with such a huge amount of competition, getting your work noticed requires a decent amount of toil. And this is where a lot of new writers are falling down on the job. They seem to think that once the manuscript is done, they’re finished. But there are still a lot of things to do.

Number one: get a good cover made. Nothing makes a book stand out from the competition more than an eye-catching cover. And a poorly done cover will limit sales, because few people will bother to take a chance on a story when the author hasn’t bothered to get a first-rate cover made for it.

Second, there is the technical process of formatting the manuscript for Kindle, Kobo and so on. Each device has a different standard, and just putting an MSWord document up on Amazon is going to create a Kindle book that has odd spaces, line breaks, chapter breaks, etc. In extreme cases, this lack of formatting can render the manuscript all but unreadable, and even in cases where it’s not that extreme, bad formatting will leave a bad taste in the reader’s mouth. Along the same lines, you should employ a professional proof-reader to give your work a once-over. Misspelled words, run-on sentences and the like will drive away many readers, and if your book should happen to get reviewed by a blogger with a large following, you can bet that technical English issues will draw criticism. Unfortunately, all too many authors neglect this vital aspect of publishing, resulting in books that are, in a word, unprofessional. If you plan to sell your books, that means that you are going to be a professional writer. So you should uphold the standards of professionalism as much as you can.

Finally, there is uploading the manuscript to whatever website or service you’re going to use to distribute it. Again, many authors simply don’t want to deal with the hassle of this step. But even someone who is technically challenged will have to either figure this out or else hire somebody to do it for them.

But you needn’t worry. There are services out there that can facilitate all of these problems. And they needn’t cost all that much. Depending on how much help you need, you can get, for instance, a guide to upload books on Kindle, complete with snippets of HTML code already written out for you, for as little as a few dollars. Editors can be contracted for less than $100.00 (for a normal-length manuscript that doesn’t involve too much in the way of fixing). And there are cover artists who can be employed for a similar amount. Alternatively, there exist reputable companies that can offer some or all of these services as a package deal, thereby saving you both money and time… time that you can then use to get your second book written.