A Consumer's Guide for Self-Publishers

By Carla King

Take all the doubt out of your decisions about what vendors to use in your journey as an independent author with this trusted resource. It's packed full of reviews of the tools and services that help you write, edit, format, design, fund, publish, sell, market, and promote your books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carla King
• Release date: Apr 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781945703089

Carla King

Carla King is a self-publishing expert and an adventure travel writer. She has been self-publishing since 1995 and has been teaching, speaking, and writing about publishing since 2005. Her Self-Publishing Boot Camp Guide for Authors is in its 4th edition. She also authors a blog and book series from her motorcycle journeys in America, Europe, China, India, and Africa. Her writing has been published in Wild Writing Women: Stories of World Travel, Travelers’ Tales anthologies, and In Search of Adventure: A Wild Travel Anthology. Her book, American Borders, is the first in a series of misadventurous travelogues.

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Creating Your Book

1Interior Design and Formatting Tools and Services

I’ve used most of these design, formatting, and conversion tools at one time or another and I like them for different reasons. Browse through them to find the ones that attract you.

See also the Online Marketplaces chapter for places to find professionals to design and format your book for you. (Bublish, Fiverr, PubLaunch, and Reedsy,)

Reminder: This consumer’s guide is a companion reference to the Self-Publishing Boot Camp Guide for Independent Authors, 4th Edition, which provides step-by-step instructions on how to create, publish, distribute, and market, and sell your book.

IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

Adobe Acrobat Pro / Document Cloud

acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat/acrobat-pro.html

Acrobat Pro and the new Acrobat Cloud are Adobe’s software for viewing, creating, combining, and controlling Adobe PDF documents. If you’re doing your own book formatting and conversion to PDF, you need these and you need to keep them updated. Most authors, however, hire this out.

You can create PDF files from any application that prints, combine files into a single PDF document, protect documents with password protection, annotate and collaborate, sign documents, create fillable forms, and export to Office apps retaining layout, fonts, formatting, and tables. Acrobat Pro can be purchased for about $50 if you search around the web and Document Cloud is a $14/mo subscription alone but it’s included with a Creative Cloud subscription. The cloud version comes with a lot of extras but most self-publishers won’t need them.

Adobe InDesign

adobe.com/products/indesign.html

InDesign, unlike Word, was designed as a professional book and magazine production program. It is the de-facto standard used by professional book designers. It’s expensive and a challenge to learn.

InDesign’s paragraph styles are more accurate, it allows you to fine-tune line and letter spacing, images stay put and export to CMYK for print (instead of RGB), and it produces a more professional, polished book.

A subscription to InDesign costs about $10 per month. Whether you are using it yourself or hiring a professional, make absolutely sure they are using the latest version.

The easiest way to learn and format your own book in InDesign is to buy a template. If you get stuck, you can always pay a professional to finish it.

You’ll spend about $70 for the template and $10 a month for the software subscription from Adobe, and it’s a good idea to spend $25 a month for a subscription to Lynda.com for video instruction. (Try it free for a month.)

If you hate formatting, you won’t do a good job, so spend the money to hire a pro if you want your book to look good. You can find adequate help for low cost using a service like Fiverr, Guru, or Gigbucks but most really good designers charge $500-$2000.

Get book design templates for InDesign at http://bit.ly/interiorbdt.

Amazon Kindle Create

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GHU4YEWXQGNLU94Tcreatespace.com

Use Kindle Create (PC or Mac) to transform your completed manuscript into a  Kindle ebook. You can make three types of eBooks with Kindle Create.

Amazon Kindle Comic Creator

amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1001103761

Kindle Comic Creator is a free download for Windows or Mac for authors and publishers to turn comics, graphic novels, and manga into Kindle books. Import artwork, create guided navigation, set double-page spreads or facing pages, and preview how your book will look on Kindle Fire tablets and Kindle eInk readers.

Amazon Kindle Kids’ Book Creator

kdp.amazon.com/kids

Use Amazon Kindle Kids’ Book Creator to create and sell children’s ebooks to owners of Kindle Fire tablets. The authors I know who have used it say that it’s still pretty basic, but expect improvements and enhancements over time. This is the only way to create a children’s book for the Kindle Fire other than doing it yourself or hiring a professional designer and, I think, a great way to break into publishing books for kids.

Apple iBooks Author

apple.com/ibooks-author

Available free on the Mac App Store, iBooks Author enables you to create ebooks for the iPad and the Mac. You can use an Apple-designed template or use your own imagination. If you have a full-color ebook or interactive book idea, know that you can create swipe-friendly photo galleries, animations, scrolling sidebars, pop-over widgets, and 3D objects. Widgets can be set to play automatically, offering your readers a fun surprise when they turn the page. Then export your book in iBooks format to publish and sell on iTunes. You can also upload your book to Gumroad or another direct sales tool. Royalties are 70% of list price.

If you have a simpler book and don’t need all the bells and whistles of iBooks Author, or a plain-text book, a good alternative for creating EPUBs to upload to Apple (and other stores) is Vellum.

Author Marketplaces

See the Author Marketplaces chapter for places to find professionals to do this for you. (Including Bublish, Fiverr, PubLaunch, and Reedsy,)

Author Solutions

WARNING: iUniverse, Author House, Trafford, Xlibris, BookTango, Balboa for HayHouse, LifeRich for Reader’s Digest, Archway for Simon & Schuster, and Westbow for Thomas Nelson

See Full-Service Formatting, Design, and Distribution to understand why a professional self-publisher should not use these companies.

Barnes & Noble Press

See Aggregation and Distribution.

Blurb

blurb.com

Creating a professional-looking complex book is a big job and can be exhausting for a beginner. Many authors give up at some point and hire it out, but that can be expensive. Why do I recommend it? I often recommend Blurb as a way to present design concepts to a professional book designer. The more direction you give them the less time it will take to create it. Like all POD (Print On Demand) services, Blurb offers a free (up front) solution that takes a fee when you make a sale.

I recommend Blurb’s BookWright tool to authors who are testing ideas for full color books and either don’t have the money to hire it out or who want to try it themselves. And I always cross my fingers and hope they’ll eventually hire a pro. BookWright makes it very easy to use to design beautiful complex, full-color books. However, since its proprietary software, you’re stuck with the Blurb printing service. This isn’t terrible—they have good distribution and very high-quality digital printing on heavy paper with accurate color separation. But because it’s such high quality, their printing costs are very expensive. And I mean, very, very expensive.

Listen, Blurb’s a great tool but I’d only use it for a limited, specialty book. Recently I was at a boat show and one of the yacht rental companies had created a Blurb book as a glossy, expensive brochure to give away to clients who pay the equivalent of my yearly income on a ten-day vacation. Wedding photographers use Blurb to print and sell albums. I’ve also recommended using Blurb as a marketing tool—an easy way to create small color books that advertise your other