Publish Your Book

My Publishing History

From July 5, 1975 until the late 90's I kept journals, writing in them almost daily, filling up over 90 volumes of composition books. They were full of life experiences, pearls of wisdom and a continual emotional rollercoaster. I wanted to share them. Late in the 90's I spent an entire year rereading them from the start to end and made a huge index in many categories so that I could access my writings. Then I spent another year typing the highlights into a computer. The next year was spent consolidating the works into several books. But....

I really am not a marketing type person. I had some copies printed and they just sat around. In the meantime the digital age came to fruition. This last year I finally decided I wanted to get at least a couple of my books printed. I investigated and learned about eBooks. Now, I am a pretty tactile person and have much deeper feelings about the printed word than I do about the eWorld. But, in discovering that it was free to publish eBooks I dove in and learned how to format documents to make it work. I did this for 3 books, each with quite different formatting needs and consequently learned a lot. I took notes and now I have it pretty down.

Then, the next step was the print medium. Lo and behold, you can also have books for sale in print for free. No kidding. What makes this possible is print on demand (POD). Thanks to digitalization no more need to set type. You format your book, make choices on size, font, spacing and such, then deliver a PDF of the document. It gets advertised and when a book is ordered it is printed and shipped.

Services

I have published 2 eBooks for others. Having your book published by me is a possibility but it is very easy to set up your own accounts and I'd be glad to help you do that. An account at Smashwords is the starting point for an eBook. They distribute widely but not to Amazon. The next step is to get (or use an existing) Amazon account and publish your eBook with them. Smashwords generates your eBook in many formats, one being mobi that Amazon Kindle uses so it is then a piece of cake to publish with Amazon.

For publishing in print I use CreateSpace. This is an Amazon company and your book will appear on Amazon (although it will also appear on CreateSpace's own site - you get a bigger cut this way). This is free. If you want to pay $49 and $12/year IngramSpark has much wider distribution. You can publish the same book with both of them.

ISBNs. These are your book identification numbers. Smashwords offers free ISBNs when you publish your eBook with them. I do this. But I use my own ISBNs for my print books. I bought a set of 10 and use them. CreateSpace offers free ISBNs but IngramSpark does not. So it’s nice to have your own for your printed books.

The one thing that slowed me down in publishing my books was the covers. I know enough about Photoshop to be able to do a reasonably nice cover but I am not an artist in the sense of drawing or such. I would be willing to discuss your interests for a cover if you don't have one finished but it would be great if you could come with it reasonably prepared.

And a note about the flexibility of eBooks and Print on Demand books.

It is cost-free to make changes at any level. You can upload a new cover image and can upload the document with changes any time you want and the new version goes out almost immediately.  And finally, you decide how much you want to sell your book for and can change that at any time also. Well, for CreateSpace printed books there is a minimum price, based on the distribution channels you choose. But for Smashwords eBooks, you can even make your book free if you just want to get a short story or something out into the world.

A couple of nice things about eBooks and Smashwords. One of the nice things is that with eBooks you can include color pictures. In a printed book you pay big bucks (i.e. make much much less) when there is any color inside the book. At Smashwords, you will have your own author page where you can do an interview and tell about yourself and your book. And they have really handy widgets that are easy to put on your website to sell your book. (See mine in the Shop.)

Make it Happen

So you can see that it is very reasonable to publish these day. I would be glad to help. I have no fixed rates so we will need to talk about it. If your book has been proof read and spell checked it should not be very hard to do. If you pay me anything, well, your book will not be published for free but perhaps for very little. So, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and let's make it happen!

 


Go, dear friend, if need be give up all else, and commence to-day to inure yourself to pluck,
reality, self-esteem, definiteness, elevatedness.
Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself of your own Personality.

- Walt Whitman
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