Having gone through the process of publishing three books so far, I thought I would provide a nice step-by-step tutorial on publishing a book of your own. So how is this a spiritual article? Well, technically, everything is spiritual because it isn’t what you are doing that matters, but what you are being, while you do what you do. 🙂
In addition to just the writing aspect, I will provide insight on many of the background issues you must resolve such as creating a nice book cover, obtaining royalty-free images, working on images, publishing costs and book promotion and advertising.
Since there is so much information to cover, I am going to break this into several posts so that any particular post is not too large. As I add them, I will link them together, so if a part is missing, just bookmark this and come back in a week to see the next part, or Like Us on Facebook to be automatically informed of any new posts.
#1 – You Don’t Need A Publisher
When I wrote my first book in 2008, I used a publisher to help with performing grammar checks, creating a glossary, creating the cover, and to perform the actual publishing and distribution of the book. The end result is that it cost me nearly $5000, and I’m pretty sure I never got that back. I look at that as being my “publishing education fee“, but unless you are writing a big novel or already have reason to work with a large publisher, that route is no longer a necessary one.
For most applications, Amazon Self-Publishing is the only route you need to take when choosing to write a book. You will save thousands of dollars and will be able to update the book more easily as time passes in the event you find something that was wrong, or just wanted to perform an update.
You can publish Kindle e-books and paperback books.
For paperback books, Amazon utilizes print-on-demand which means they don’t stock any or many of your books, but simply print them as they are ordered.
As an author, you can easily sell your books through Amazon at no additional cost to you (other than a commission when a sale occurs) or you can purchase your books in volume by just paying printing costs and shipping if you would like to sell them directly from your own website, store, or stores in your area.
With respect to e-books. Amazon’s Kindle ebook format works very well when the book only consists of text, but it struggles to provide a nice even flow when images are used within any book. I am not suggesting you don’t create a Kindle ebook version if your book uses images, but just be aware that extra time will be needed to make sure things end up as tidy as possible.
If your e-book is image heavy and the layout and placement of the images matter within the book (which they usually do), you can also sell this as an e-book, but in a PDF format that saves all your settings and layouts just as you created them. To sell these from your website, you just need to have a PayPal account and set up with a shopping cart system that helps to securely deliver electronic content. For direct e-book sales, I use a service called “Payhip” and it took less than a half hour to sign up and set up the first book for sale. Their base service is totally free, as they only take a 5% commission when a sale occurs.
If you do choose to distribute your ebook as well and also have it listed on Amazon, you cannot opt to use their KDP Select option since this requires that you sell your e-book exclusively through them. You can opt in or out of the service by just clicking a checkbox, but once opted in, you have to wait 90 days before being allowed to opt out.
#2 – The Basics
For the best writing experience, you will want to write your book using MS Word, and make sure grammar checking is activated. With spell checking and grammar checking being performed for you, even somebody who struggles with English grammar can do very well.
Still, if you are working with an older version of Word, or a different program altogether that does not include a grammar check, you can simply use an interface program called Grammarly to get you by. If you prefer something with examples, I could recommend a book I used called “The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need“, which kind of sums things up in its name. Using either option, you should find all the insight you need to properly format your sentences and paragraphs.
It has always helped me to first create an initial set of chapter titles or ideas for the book or manual I was about to write. If you are performing very creative writing such as a romance or sci-fi story, maybe this won’t apply as much since your story will generally evolve on its own through time. But still, always write down the ideas for what your book should cover, and then just keep adding more sections as the thoughts surface.
You will also want to decide what size your book will be, such as the most common size of 6 x 9. Many book sizes exist, such as:
- 5 x 8
- 6 x 9
- 7 x 10
- 8 x 10
- 8.5 x 11
The reason you need to select a size is so that you will directly see how your pages will look when published. If you are including images or text boxes of emphasized text, it is even more critical that you work with the page at the exact size you will be publishing. In addition, any table of contents would be pointless if you laid out the book in Word at 8 1/2 x 11 and then published the book as a 6 x 9 because all the page numbers would be different as the text adjusted to the new layout. Overall, when taken one step at a time, this is not that complicated, plus Amazon provides a very detailed manuscript setup section for both paperback and e-book layouts.
Once you decide on the size of the book, adjust your margins accordingly, generally with .5 in all directions, then add a header and footer if you like. I always use a header and footer to include the author name on the top of the left page, the book title on the top of the right page, and page numbers on the bottom. You can do as you like, but I believe this provides a nice professional look.
#3 – Images
Depending upon the publication you are designing, images may be a vital part of illustrating your message or story. Since Amazon publishing provides the choice of including color or grayscale images in any publication, it’s helpful to consider if this is an option you want to or need to use. Let’s take a look at what is involved to make this process as clear, practical and easy as possible.
Section I – Be Aware of Copyrights
YOU CANNOT USE UNAUTHORIZED IMAGES
I made that sentence loud and clear because the costs associated with being sued for using an unauthorized image will surpass any profits you could expect to make. Fees and fines start in the thousands and can skyrocket from there. Just don’t do it. You want to make sure you create, obtain or buy images that are approved for commercial use.
Before we talk about about where to get these images, it’s best to make it clear about where to NOT get the images that will be used for commercial purposes in your book, on your website or in any software program or on any product.
- DO NOT use Google images
- DO NOT use off-brand image collections (their sources may be questionable)
- DO NOT use an image given to you by somebody else unless you are 100% sure they created it or have all-inclusive rights to it.
So where do you get your images then? There are a few simple guidelines I use with respect to finding images for websites or books and I suggest you use one or more of these three options:
Take Your Own Pictures – You can’t go wrong when the image you want to use is already owned by you. If you struggle with how to best approach taking a specific picture, look at other existing pictures of that item or similar items and let that inspire you when taking pictures of your own.
In most cases, you can very likely use the camera in your phone, but if you truly desire to have a quality image, and if you expect to be taking more than just a couple pictures, you should consider purchasing a high quality camera and lighting system. For my own purposes, I use a Canon Rebel EOS Rebel XT for my still shots, along with a Neewer LED Ring light to provide nice even lighting.
Use Public Domain or Creative Commons Images – There are tens of thousands of available public domain images or Creative Commons images. Granted, many are not of the highest quality, but many also are, so you have to weed through until you find something that will work for you. If you plan to use the images commercially, meaning you wish to make a profit with your book, website or publication, one important thing to remember is to perform your searches with the “commercial purposes” box checked when searching through Creative Commons.
Also, make sure you provide the proper author attribution for the images you use, and/or modify. Click this link for a detailed explanation of how to best provide Creative Commons Author Attribution.
Purchase High Quality Images – You will be surprised at how affordable high quality images have become, including royalty-free commercial use images. Still, you will always want to read their “Terms of Use” contracts to make sure that your commercial use is approved. For example, I use iClipart almost exclusively as the source for my high-end images for articles and books, but depending upon the license you purchase, the images might not be approved for as wide of a distribution as you would like or under the conditions you have, so always take a moment to make sure you are authorized to use the image as desired.
Actually, while writing my most recent book, Breaking Through When Feeling Stuck, I found that I could only use the images from iClipart in a paperback version of the book, but not in an e-book version unless I either upgraded my license or opted to purchase those specific images directly.
I opted to use Creative Commons CC0 1.0 and CC by 2.0 images for all interior images and paid directly for the image that I used on the cover. Overall, I kept costs down, but also obtained the variety and quality of images I desired.
Section II – Image Quality and Editing
Although I was able to find every image I wanted to use in my book, I had to make many changes so that they were better suited for the exact application and placement within the book. Let’s take a look at a few things that you will have to keep in mind when using images in your book.
300 DPI Images
Book publishers, such as Amazon, require that any image you choose to use in your book or on your cover, be at least 300 DPI in size. Because these images will be printed, their quality has to be higher than what is simply viewed on a screen, which generally uses images between 72 and 100 DPI .
To improve the image DPI setting, you need to use photo editing software. Almost all my editing is performed via Adobe Photoshop , but any photo editing program you desire will generally do fine as long as it has a resize function for changing the DPI.
Image Quality
Once your image is set to 300 DPI, you can look to see if there is any additional work needed to improve the pictures overall quality, such as adjusting the color or it brightness, adding shadows or special effects, etc.
While performing my own adjustments, I had one burning question for Amazon publishing that I could not find a direct answer for, so I will provide that answer here. Any color image used in a non-color book will be automatically transformed into a grayscale image. It is not turned into black and white, but into grayscale. This helps keep the picture quality in place, without having to modify the image into grayscale yourself.
Why not just save it in grayscale in the first place? Because if you were to want an e-book version of your book as well, the color images are so much nicer to see, so you just stick with color images and everything just works out well for both the paperback and e-book version of your book.
Image Type
In MS Word, when using clipart images in your book, you will want to use .PNG format for a transparent background and set them in place with Text Wrapping settings of Tight, then select See more… , and under its Text Wrapping section, choose either the Left Only or Right Only settings, depending upon which side of the page the image will favor, and make sure all Distance from image settings are at least .1 inches.
When using photographs, you can use either a .PNG or .JPG image type, but just be sure to maintain a good degree of image quality when compressing the images at the time of saving. As with the clipart images, you can use the image settings in MS Word to add space around an image to make sure the text and image are not too close together.
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Peace and Blessings to all
