I'm writing my first thriller book. What do you think is the best place to publish it on?

I think — I very strongly believe — that you would be best off following these steps in this order:

A) Finish the novel before you worry about anything else. If it’s a novel, that means it should be 60,000 words at the very shortest. The sky’s the limit from there. The typical thriller is about 80,000 to 100,000 words.

B) Set the novel aside for a month absolutely minimum. Longer is better.

C) Reread the novel and fix the large-scale problems that are now obvious. If nothing is obvious, put it away for another month. Or year. Then read it again and fix the large-scale problems that are NOW OBVIOUS.

If you skip this step, you know who will see the obvious big problems with your novel? Readers. And then, should you actually get strangers to read your novel, they will point to those problems in their reviews, because they are not your personal friends and don’t care about hurting your feelings. So fix the problems yourself.

While waiting, you can write a different novel.

You can also read a lot of posts — say, a dozen minimum — on how to write description, on cover design, on metadata, on promotion, and on how to recognize scam publishers and bad contracts. I mean a dozen articles about each of those topics. Minimum.

And you will be sorry if you sign an exclusive contract with a predator such as Goodnovel and only later find out why you should have read up on bad contracts before you did that.

D) And spend some time proofreading, for crying out loud. There’s no excuse for using it’s when it should be its.

E) You’ve polished it up now? Great. Find a beta reader and hand it to them. They should be an enthusiastic reader who has read a lot of books in your genre. If they hate your book, find a different beta reader. If, however, the beta reader points to big problems that are suddenly obvious as soon as they say, “You know, nothing interesting happens during chapter five. Why is that chapter there?” then it’s your job to fix this now-obvious problem.

If multiple beta readers are like, “Um, no one sane would actually pay money to read this, you know that, right?” then reassess the book on that basis.

F) Once you’ve incorporated beta reader feedback and revised your novel so that it’s much better than it was in draft, you should proofread it in four formats OR find four different competent people to proofread it OR pay a proofreader to check it — or all of the above. There is no excuse for using lay when it should be lie.

G) Buy or make a cover that is actually adequate. Write description that is actually enticing. Look at samples of traditionally published novels and format the interior of your book just like that. Don’t get creative with the formatting. Go to KDP and create the ebook. Get a paperback template of whatever size you want from KDP and create the paperback.

Then publish your book on KDP, the way virtually every serious self-publishing author does. You can go wide by also publishing via Draft to Digital, the way virtually every serious self-publishing author does. If you put your book in Kindle Unlimited, then of course you can’t go wide, except with the paper editions.

AND

That’s what I suggest, unless you want to throw some unproofread, unedited, unformatted, unreadable, 60-page novella on KDP, with a crappy cover and bad description, and discover that no one, no one at all, will buy it. WHICH A HUGE NUMBER OF WOULD-BE AUTHORS DO.

This is largely harmless, but it is a complete waste of your time.