Is it easier today to publish a novel?

Yes - it is a lot easier to publish now than ever before. But that doe not mean that you will be successful; that's a different question entirely.

Will

Do you mean on Kindle,because that is where I would start 'if 'I wanted to write.

Yes, given the ease of writing an ebook and putting it on the web, I'd say it's easier than ever to publish your work these days.

It is not any easier to get customers/your target industry to take notice though. That still takes blood/sweat/tears and a hell of a lot of patience.

It is SOOOOO much easier to get your work published and get attention to it these days than the old days, which consisted of mainly relying on the big boys club of publishers. Now you can publish on Kindle, publish it on your own, then you can drive attention and traffic to it like wildfire if you know what you are doing and or you have enough money to invest.

Great comments thanks.

If you were looking to publish online would you first release a part of the novel as a free ebook with a link to where people can buy the whole ebook?

Short answer: absolutely!

Read David Gaughran's Let's Get Digital .

As a person who has uploaded three short novels and a mini short story collection - YES! :-)

No need to toil for endless hours on a query letter to send to agents, who, depending on how they're feeling on a particular day, will either totally ignore it, respond to it with a "no" and no further explanations, or a "no" because they didn't fall in love with it, etc.

You don't have to worry about publishing contracts, for which you (as content provider) get paid about 17%-20% in royalties (that's about average for print and/or ebook). Some publishing contracts are so bad that they'll take certain rights that haven't even been thought of yet. (Not kidding.)

If you ever decide to go the trad route, BTW, do NOT go with an agent. A lot of them are turning themselves into publishers, which is a breach of ethics. (They could turn down your book, but then suggest you pay them to publish through them. Oh, really? How nice...NOT!) Go with an Intellectual Property lawyer; there are some who do only publishing contracts, which are strange beasts. :-) The Passive Guy's blog (Google it) is a very good source of publishing info to learn about agents and publishers. Other good ones that will give you the inside poop are Kristine Rusch's site (kriswrites[dot]com) and Dean Wesley Smith (Google it). The first is a lawyer who's involved in helping trad authors with horrible publishing contracts understand; the other two are a husband and wife novelists who have done the trad thing and are now putting up their backlist.

Wow - sorry about the length of this, but this is right up my alley. :-)

I would suggest you not only consider uploading to Amazon but to upload to another site that will not only get your ebooks into the Barnes and Noble store as well as the iBooks store (good for those - like me - who don't have a Mac): Smashwords (Google it). While it makes sense to upload in mobi format for Amazon, SW only accepts (for now anyway) documents in Word format (not RTFs, DOCs). SW has a free guide on how to format your manuscript for their Meatgrinder, which will cut/slice/dice your stuff into different formats: ePub, mobi, PDF, etc. You might want to consider using LibreOffice (the supported version of OpenOffice) instead of Word, because Word puts all those crappy symbols and stuff in the file, which will cause SW to reject your document.

Feel free to ask more, because I have a lot of practical knowledge since I've been doing this since last July (and have been part of writers boards for many years). :-)

Jzgirl

Many thanks for your greta post. I have been thinking about a self help/story for many years now and feel now might be the time to give it a go.

good share..

It is easier to publish due to the lower entry costs.

By the same token, a lot more competition. Even if you were to give away some books free, there are also so many authors giving away their own as promo that you really have to stand out to grab eyeballs.

If you're into fiction, maybe you wanna check out Amanda Hocking's free book (last time I checked), as an idea of what a hugely successful kindle author writes.

As long as we are in the same place at the end right? Some us just like to take the scenic route lol.

Yes. It is way easier to publish a novel than it was 50 years ago. Definitely. No question.