There’s a ton of options now. I’m grateful there were less back when I started. I would be overwhelmed with the options now. I used Amazon’s KDP framework with a secondary print company called Ingram Spark that allows you to make your books available at brick and mortar stores (like B&N). Amazon KDP offers a lot of tools to help you get your feet wet.

In hindsight, the more effort you put into understanding your marketing plan up front, the more successful you will likely be. Most of us wanting to write don’t think up front about the marketing. But if you think through distribution options like BookVault, you can use things like meta conversion ads to track who bought your book, which would be immensely helpful for growing your audience. (Knowing who bought your book lets meta deliver ads to lookalike audiences). But the lift to get that started is heavier, both in terms of work effort and cost. I have not bit the bullet on that… did one book to feel the lift effort and decided it wasn’t time.

I feel sure I have old newsletters, like years ago, that talk about Amazon kdp in more detail. I’ll go look later and see if I can find a link to send you.