After you’ve spent the past several weeks/months/years toiling over your manuscript, it’s perfectly understandable that you don’t want to wait another year or two before your book actually gets published. That’s the great thing about self-publishing—you can get your book published fast. But self-publishing companies do vary in terms of speed, and questions like “how long does it take to publish an ebook on Amazon?” can get complicated. While the actual publication process of inputting your book’s info and uploading your manuscript on Amazon is quite short, getting your book edited and formatted and your cover designed can take months.
Luckily, there are plenty of options out there for an author who wants to start publishing right now. In fact, you can start publishing your story online before you’ve even finished it. It will still take you some time to post the whole book, of course, but you can enjoy the immediacy of pressing “publish” after you finish each chapter.
Here are 5 of the fastest self-publishing companies where you can start sharing your story with the world in a matter of minutes.
1) Wattpad
Wattpad is a hugely popular fiction platform where you can publish your first chapter quickly and easily. The platform will give you exposure to a large audience, and several authors on the site have landed deals with big publishers and movie studios. You can publish in several genres, but young adult fiction tends to do particularly well.
Wattpad provides this helpful guide to steer you through the process of creating a new story. Provided that you have already written your description, chosen your tags, and created your cover, it should only take you 2-3 minutes to create your story. If you haven’t created a cover yet, you can access Canva’s free, easy-to-use cover maker through the site and design a gorgeous one in no time.
2) Scribble Hub
Scribble Hub is another online platform dedicated to helping authors publish their stories online and find readers. Readers can follow your stories and will get a notification each time you update. You can add links to your Patreon and/or PayPal so that readers can donate money to support your work. The site also has an active forum where you can connect with other writers. Fantasy, action, and adventure are some of the most popular genres on the site.
There is a guide on Scribble Hub’s “Discussions & Writing Tips” forum that takes you through the steps of publishing your story, and also provides several useful tips and tricks. If you have already created your cover, written your description, and chosen your genre and tags, it should only take you a minute or two to set up your story. If you don’t have a cover yet, you can find a suitable free image on Pexels or Pixabay very quickly (plenty of the cover images on Scribble Hub don’t include any text, and text is also easy to add to an image in a program like MS Paint).
3) Royal Road
Along with Wattpad, Royal Road is one of the most popular online writing platforms out there. This is another site where you publish your book chapter by chapter, updating regularly. Readers can follow and review your story, and it will get tons of exposure if it ends up on the site’s “Best Rated”, “Trending”, or “Rising Stars” lists. You can link to your Patreon to get donations and subscribers—many Royal Road authors make quite a bit of money this way. Like Scribble Hub, Royal Road also has a very active forum. Two of the most popular genres on the site are sci-fi and fantasy (with litRPG being a particularly well-loved subgenre).
Royal Road outlines how to create your story on its FAQ page—just click on “How do I submit my first fiction/story?” under “General”. If you have your cover, description, and genres/tags, setting up your story will be a breeze. You can input your first chapter on the same page as your book’s info, which speeds up the process even more. One drawback with Royal Road is that you do have to wait 12-24 hours for your story to be approved. But once you’re over that hump, you can post each chapter as quickly as you like.
Fictionate.Me is a newer self-publishing platform that will give you the chance to get in on the ground floor and stand out in a smaller pool of authors. It is more popular to publish your chapters one by one on the site, but you also have the option to publish your whole book at once if you like. One unique aspect of Fictionate.Me is that you can include AI Narration with your story, which allows readers to listen on the go. The site also offers you the chance to set the price for access to your book, and all of the profits go straight to you. You can publish several different genres, but anything under the umbrella of speculative fiction—fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.—tends to do the best.
This blog post will take you step by step through the Fictionate.Me publishing process. Once again, publishing should only take a minute or two if you already have your cover, description, and genre/tags ready to go. Like Scribble Hub, it’s fairly common on Fictionate.Me for authors to use a free image without any text for their covers, so you can grab one online easily enough.
5) Commaful
One way to publish completed products fast is to focus on shorter content. Known for being “The Largest Library of Multimedia Stories”, Commaful is a great platform for short stories, poetry, and comics. The site’s unique “picturebook” format allows you to pair each page of your story with a visual component like a drawing or photo. Readers can comment on and favorite your stories, and follow you to get updates on your latest work.
Once you create your account, all you have to do is click “Create” at the top of the screen. Then you input your title and description. After that, you can start selecting your images for each page of your story—you can upload your own, or choose from one of the many free Unsplash images in the site’s library. Commaful is probably the fastest option on this list—you could be up and running in under a minute. If you already have your story completed and your images picked out, it will only take you a little more time to publish your entire work and share it with potential readers.
Author’s Bio:- Jillian Karger was born in Ohio but has lived in and around New York City for over a decade. Since graduating from NYU in 2009, Jillian has had a long string of jobs doing things like scouting books to be adapted for film and researching trivia questions for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”.
She has done freelance writing as well for sites like Cracked.com and had her Twitter jokes featured on BuzzFeed and funnyordie.com. Jillian has also self-published two novels on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Jillian-Karger/e/B07B894DNW).
Follow her blog posts about books and writing advice, read books and publish them for free at: https://www.fictionate.me.