It’s Free and Easy to Self-Publish Your Book: A Step-By-Step Guide

By Jack Preston King

Self-publishing is free and easy. Before you pay somebody big bucks to format your eBook or paperback, or to create your book cover, you owe it to yourself to read this book filled with straightforward, no BS, click-by-click instructions for accomplishing the task on your own. You’ll be surprised to discover just how easy it is to get professional results, and publish your own book – For FREE!

CONTENTS:

Introduction

Part I: START WITH YOUR EBOOK
How to format your manuscript as an eBook, for Amazon’s Kindle and for sites that require ePub, like iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.

Part II: FORMAT YOUR PAPERBACK
Everything you need to know to transform your eBook file into a fully formatted paperback book interior.

Part III: CREATE YOUR BOOK COVER
How to create a great cover that will work for both eBook and paperback.

Part IV: PUBLISH YOUR BOOK
How to publish your eBook and paperback editions on Amazon, which does something like 65% of all online book sales, and also on Smashwords, which will get your eBook to the rest of the world, including iBooks, KOBO, Barnes and Noble, and will even make your eBook available to libraries.

Learn how to format your eBook, format your paperback, create your book cover, and publish your book for global retail distribution using Microsoft word and PowerPoint – all for FREE!

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Paradigm Press
• Release date: May 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370160921

Jack Preston King

Jack Preston King is the author of "In Defense of Magical Thinking: Essays in Defiance of Conformity to Reason" and other books for rebels against the spiritual, creative, and cultural status quo. He writes unruly poems, short stories and novels, too. Visit him on the web at jackprestonking.com. He's also on Twitter, Medium and Facebook.

Book preview

Introduction

Self-publishing is free and easy to do. Before you pay somebody big bucks to format your eBook or paperback, or to create your book cover, you owe it to yourself to read this book filled with straightforward, no BS instructions for accomplishing the task on your own. I think you’ll be surprised to discover just how easy it is to get professional results without spending another dime.

The only tool you absolutely need to accomplish all of this is Microsoft Office, and specifically Word and PowerPoint. I use Microsoft Office 2010, so that’s the version all of the screen shots are taken in, and the click by click instructions refer to. From what I hear, Office 2013 isn’t much different. If you’re using Office 2007, you may have to click around a little to find the referenced commands, but I’m pretty sure they’re all there. Office versions prior to 2007 didn’t have the command ribbon at the top, so if you’re stuck with antique software, this book may still be helpful, but you’ll have more of a challenge ahead of you. Consider upgrading. You’ll be glad you did.

I highly recommend that you also acquire the Atlantis Word Processor, which you can use free for 30 days, after which there is a one-time registration fee of $35 if you want to keep it forever. If you wait to start your free month until your MS Word file is ready to convert to ePub, you can get everything you need done in an afternoon, and never pay them anything. I’m not an affiliate, and I’m not out to sell you anything. I recommend the Atlantis Word Processor because it’s the easiest way I have found to turn an MS Word file into a flawless ePub with a few clicks of the mouse. I paid my $35 almost a decade ago, and the program has paid for itself many times over in ePub sales. All these years later, they continue to support the program and send free updates and improvements. There are free ePub converters online, but I haven’t used them, so I can’t speak to their quality. Using Atlantis is as easy as falling off a log, which is my preferred level of difficulty in most things.

Self-publishing is a process, or at least I treat it that way, and I encourage you to do the same. Take your time and work through the whole process from beginning to end. First create your eBook. Then turn your formatted eBook into your paperback with a few clicks. Then create a cover that is uniform for both formats. Prepare your cover blurb, advertising copy, and tags (we’ll cover all of that in step 4). Only then, publish. Don’t rush your eBook out there before you’ve readied the paperback. Don’t publish your Kindle eBook before your Smashwords ePub is ready to go. Yes, you can make changes after publication, no worries (which is one big benefit of self-publishing). But trust me, you’ll be happier if you don’t have to. Complete 100% of the backroom work before you go public with anything, and you’ll save yourself time, effort and frustration.

Part I: START WITH YOUR EBOOK

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Photo by Mia5793 via Wikimedia Commons/License

The secret to formatting a clean EBook is K.I.S.S. Keep it simple, sister. One reason people like eBooks is because the device/app they’re reading on allows them to customize the reading experience. They get to choose things like the size, font and justification of the words on their individual screen — which means that you, the publisher, do not get to control those things. Stop worrying about them. Any fancy-schmansy stuff you try to pull in an eBook manuscript will almost certainly get stripped out by the Amazon and Smashwords file converters anyway, so spare yourself the effort. When laying out your eBook, you want to use the least amount of formatting possible to make your book read smoothly and look reasonably good. Yes, there are fancy formatting gimmicks you can force on your reader, but why do that? In my experience as a reader and a publisher, those things only distract from the experience of reading your book.

Initial Formatting

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Photo by Kevin Jarrett via Flickr/License

Open your manuscript in MS Word. Everything needs to be in one Word document, so if you saved your chapters separately (or if they’re individual poems, stories, essays, etc.), copy/paste them into one document, in the right order. Keep your basic formatting, like bold and italic, intact as they are. You do not need to strip any of that out and redo them. They’ll transfer all the way to publication just fine. The other formatting you’ve been using as you write, line spacing and such, is fine, too. The Amazon/Smashwords converters will do what they want with all that anyway, which is fine, you want them to do that. Less for you to worry about. Right now, you want your book to be easy for you to work with, so just keep doing what you’re used to.