Self Publish Your Book on the Cheap

Self Publish Your Book on the Cheap

Everything you need to know

to publish your electronic or print book on a tight budget

by Susan Lynn Peterson

Alcuin House Publishing

Chisago Lakes, Minnesota

Published by Alcuin House Publishing at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 by Susan Lynn Peterson

All Rights Reserved

No portion of this book may be reproduced or disseminated

without written permission of the author.

susan@susanlynnpeterson.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-9830652-4-1

LAN027000 / LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Publishing

The information in this book comes from the author’s personal experience. I have found it to be a good method to produce a book. All the details were up-to-date at the time of final proofreading. However, I can make no guarantees that I didn’t forget something, or that you will like the method as well as I do. Neither can I guarantee that nothing has changed since the last time I checked the accuracy of this information.

Also, a plea from one author to another: Please don’t pirate this book. I have kept the price as low as I can to make this book easy for you to afford. You will find purchase information for both ebook and print book editions on my website: http://www.susanlynnpeterson.com. If you have come across a free copy somewhere, please consider your karma and go pay for one. Thanks.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Let’s Get Started

What Is Self Publishing?

What Is Print On Demand (POD)?

Vanity Publishing

Chapter 2 - Choose Your Publisher

Publisher? Printer?

Who Is Out There?

Where You Make Your Money: Costs and Royalties

Book Distribution

Which POD Service?

Chapter 3 - How to Look Like a Professional Writer

The Hard Questions

Preparing the Manuscript

Editing

Picky Little Details

Chapter 4 - Getting Your Legal Ducks in a Row

Incorporating Your Business

Will You Sell?

Keeping Records

Understanding Copyright

Using Other People’s Work

Getting Permissions

Handling Subcontractors

Model Releases

Disclaimers

License Note

Chapter 5 - A Book by Any Other Number Would Smell as Sweet

BISAC Subject Heading

ISBN

CIP

LCCN

Chapter 6- Time to Think about Marketing

Your Title

Describe Your Book for Me

Keywords

Line Up A Few Endorsements

Your Back Cover

Chapter 7 - Layout the Inside of your Book

Choose an Appropriate Software Package

Learn the Software

Choose the Size of Your Book

The Publisher’s Specs

Design the Page

Front Matter

Body Matter

Back Matter

Export to PDF

Chapter 8 - Design Your Cover and Title Page

DIY or Pro?

Online Cover Design Tools

Do It Yourself

Common Design Errors

Market Research

Chapter 9 - Send Your Book to the Printer

CreateSpace

Lulu

Chapter 10 - Your Book as an E-Book

Why E-Books are Your Best Friend

E-Book Formats

Turn Your Book into an E-Book

Chapter 11 - Getting Your E-Book to the Publisher

Distribution

The Kindle Select‒Smashwords Dilemma

Smashwords

Kindle

Google Play

Chapter 12 - Cheap Marketing

Marketing Copy

Web Page

Online Marketing

Print Marketing

Reviews

The Discipline

Chapter 13 - Where to Go For Help

Appendix

The Master Checklist

Acknowledgments

Introduction

According to Bowker, the company that issues International Standard Book Numbers, the number of ISBNs issued to self-published books grew by 375% between 2010 and 2015.1 On Amazon.com, the world’s largest bookseller,i 2% of e-books have been published by single author publishers.ii

A lot of them were pure dreck.

It’s not that self-published authors intend to stink up the place with their books. Quite the contrary. I’m a self-published author. I know firsthand what effort, dreams, worry, and longing go into every book. The problem with self published titles is not lack of goodwill. It’s lack of experience, skill, and knowledge. Let’s face it: If you have the experience to write a book about a topic, you’ve probably spent your time learning about that topic, not about the publishing industry.

Who is This Book For?

This book is for authors who have something significant to say but who don’t know how to go from manuscript to professional-caliber book. This book is for authors who want their book to look like it came out of one of the major publishing companies but who don’t have the money to hire a professional to help them get it there. This book is for those authors who want their self-published book to be good and who are willing to put in the work to make it good. This book—and it is a real book, not a 20-page pamphlet putting on airs—contains all you need to self publish your book without spending more money than the project is worth.

What can You Expect?

This book will teach you how to:

• Choose the print and e-book publisher that will let you keep the highest royalty on your book.

• Get all your legal and logistical ducks in a row. In other words, it will teach you how to do all the administrative things that a traditional publishing company typically does and that you will now need to do for yourself.

• Use the editing resources that the pros use to create clean, professional copy.

• Produce an interior layout that is not only readable but is also in keeping with the genre, readership and image of your book.

• Produce a cover that sells.

• Write a preface, a bio and a book description that are both informative and persuasive.

• Get testimonials that you can put on your back cover to help you sell your book.

• Avoid expensive potholes in the online publishers’ interfaces.

• Produce an e-book that works on all the major e-readers.

• Get your book into distribution to online bookstores, brick and mortar bookstores, and e-bookstores.

• Set up the infrastructure you’ll need to market your book.

If I do my job right, you can start with nothing more than a manuscript, a computer,iii a high-speed Internet connection, and a willingness to work your way step-by-step through the process. By the end of the process, you’ll have a professional-caliber print book, an e-book that works on all the major e-readers, and distribution to all major print and e-book distribution channels. And—here’s the best part—if you have fair to good computer skills, good design skills, and are pretty good at picking up new knowledge and skills, you can have it all (including the necessary software) for an initial investment of less than $100.iv

Here’s the ugly truth: Most self-published books make less than $500 for their authors.v To beat those odds you need to have a well-written, well-designed book. You also need to be able to produce it on a shoestring budget. If you make $3000 on your book, that’s not bad if you spent $200 to get it into print. Making $3000, however, is terrible if you spent $4000.

I’ll teach you not just the steps necessary to put together your book; I’ll also teach you some of the ins-and-outs of the business. I’ll translate the publishing lingo you’re likely to encounter into everyday language. I’ll point out the pitfalls every step of the way, so you can avoid costly mistakes. By the end of the book, you’ll know a lot more than most traditionally published authors with three or four books under their belt. And that knowledge will help you compete in the marketplace.

Who am I?

Who am I? I am the owner-operator of Alcuin Communications, LLC, a company that helps people self publish books. I have been writing professionally for 27 years. I am the author of seven books and hundreds of magazine and Internet articles.vi Four of my books are published with traditional publishers; three are self-published. I became interested in self publishing when it came time to publish my first novel. I got a lot of rejections, but I got a few acceptances. What I didn’t get was the sense that any of these publishers believed in my novel the way I did. That’s when I decided to learn everything I could about the self publishing industry, so I could take my fate into my own hands and publish my novel myself.

Over the years, I have garnered six book awards, so I know a few things about putting together a quality book. I self published my first book back before CreateSpace and Lulu, back when the only one doing online POD for the masses was CafePress. Since then I’ve been studying the development of the industry, and I’ve been guiding people like you through it.

And the novel, you ask? Reviews have been excellent. I republished it a couple of years ago, this time using all the knowledge I’ve gained over the years. It now makes more per month than two of my traditionally published books.

Why did I write this book?

I’ve been asked why I’ve put what I do down in a book. If I release this book, won’t people read the book rather than hire me to produce their books? First of all, I couldn’t possibly deal with the manuscripts of everyone who reads this book. And not everybody who reads this book could afford my services. More than that, however, I believe in the new self-publishing industry. I believe a strong industry will encourage competition, which will improve the services offered to writers. I also believe that many books fail to get published not because they are bad books but because they are a bad match with the existing publishers.

I’m writing this book, in part, because self publishing is the perfect solution for the person who has fifty people interested in his memoirs, for the person who has 300 people interested in a better method for making maple syrup, or for the person who has 100 people interested in analytical methods for understanding stray light in optical systems. I’m also writing this book, and self publishing it, because if it turns out that only a few hundred people are interested in the topic, I’d rather not share what little money comes from its purchase with all the people up and down the traditional publishing hierarchy.

What about You?

That manuscript you have on your computer isn’t doing anybody any good sitting on your hard drive. Moreover, it won’t do anybody any good if you package it as just one more amateurish e-book

If you and I have both done our work well, by the end of this book you’ll have a good grasp of the simplest, most effective, cheapest way to get your book into the hands of the public. You’ll know how much of the process you have the skills to do yourself and how much you’re going to have to subcontract out. Finally, you’ll know where the biggest pitfalls of self publishing are and how to avoid them. In short, this book will give you the knowledge you need to keep your publishing venture lean and mean enough to actually make some money out of it.

Let me help you turn your book into something that will attract attention and make you some money. Let me help you turn it into something you will be proud to show the world.

The Icons

Throughout the book, you’ll see sidebars marked by five different icons. They will help alert you to particularly useful information.

Insider’s tips are shortcuts, summaries, or a look at the big picture. They are the benefit of my experience in capsule form.

On the cheap tips help you keep your costs down. If there’s a cheaper way of doing something, you’ll find it in these tips.

Often you will need to gather together several bits of information before you can accomplish a particular task. These checklists will help you make sure you have everything you need.

Know the lingo translates publishing jargon into everyday language.

Pitfalls warn you about things that, if done improperly, could cost you time, money or aggravation.

Chapter 1: Let’s Get Started

By the end of the chapter you’ll know:

• What self publishing entails

• How print on demand (POD) works

• The difference between self publishing and vanity publishing

What Is Self Publishing?

Self publishing is becoming your own publisher. If you contract with a traditional publisher, they will (among other things):

• Hire an editor to clean up your manuscript. The editor will guide help you make corrections and clarifications and will fix grammatical and other mechanical errors.

• Have a lawyer look at the text to see if anything in it is likely to get you or them into trouble.

• Get a couple of numbers: a Library of Congress Control Number or Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Book information and an ISBN.

• Hire a cover designer to design and market-test a front and back cover design.

• Hire a page compositor to layout pages and put them into an electronic form that the printer can use.

• Hire a printer to put the book between covers.

• Do publicity and marketing.

• Send the book to a distributor, who will get it to bookstores when it is ordered.

• Collect money and pay everyone their share.

What is self publishing? Self publishing is when you do all that yourself. The good news is that thanks to print on demand, doing it yourself is easier today than it has ever been in the history of publishing.

What Is Print On Demand (POD)?

Print on demand is both a technology and a business model. The technology is a printing machine that takes in a digital copy of a book and prints out one print copy of the book at a time. The business model says, Why go to the expense of printing hundreds of book only to have them take up warehouse space until they are purchased? Why not print one book at a time and ship it out to the distributor or even the customer when it is ordered?

Back before print on demand, if you wanted to self publish, you needed to order hundreds of books. If you assume the books were, say, $4 per copy, and you needed to order a minimum of 300 hundred copies to make the printer’s set-up time worthwhile, that’s $1200 just for printing. And then you would have all those books in your garage waiting to be ordered.

All that has changed with print-on-demand. For the first time in the history of publishing, you can self publish on the cheap.

So what’s the catch? The catch is that print-on-demand is a bit more expensive per book than traditional printing, especially if you are ordering only a single book at a time. If your book is competing with a traditional publisher, who can get bulk discounts on books, your books are going to cost more per copy. If you’re careful, however, and use a few layout tricks I’ll show you later, you can get close to the prices charged by traditional publishers, especially if you are writing nonfiction.

Two of the largest online print-on-demand companies are Lulu and CreateSpace. I’ll be talking about the two of them throughout this book. Lulu was founded in 2002 and has its headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. They publish books and calendars, and that’s all they do. CreateSpace, on the other hand, is one of the many enterprises associated with Amazon.com, and they publish more than just books. When it comes to publishing books, however, the two companies do pretty much the same thing: they take your digital file, and they turn it into a paperback book. Each has pros and cons. We’ll talk about them later.

Vanity Publishing

If you’ve been online to look at writer’s forums and publishers’ how-to pages, you are familiar with the term vanity publishing. You have also been warned up one side and down the other about the perils of vanity publishing.

Vanity publishers are companies that will take any manuscript and put it between covers for a fee. They do editing (sometimes badly), page layout, and cover design. And they print and bind your book. Some will also do marketing and distribution for a fee, but most just drop a box of books on your front doorstep.

It’s true that the new Internet print-on-demand companies also take any manuscript. It’s true that they do everything for a fee. Does that make what we’re doing here vanity publishing?

I’d argue that the term vanity publishing has gone the way of manual typesetting. Back before print-on-demand, you would choose to publish with a traditional publishing house if you were lucky enough to be able to find one willing to take your book. You would choose to self publish only if you weren’t able to find a traditional publisher. If you chose to publish your book yourself with a for-hire publisher who took money up front, you were open to charges of vanity publishing, and that was bad.

In other words, vanity publishing meant that you disagreed with the traditional publishers out there about the merit of your book, and you went ahead and published it anyway. The assumption was that the publisher was right, you were wrong, and the only reason you wanted your book published was ego.

How has that changed? Today the opinion of traditional publishers is not the only one that matters. A small book can find its readership without the help of a traditional publisher.

Let me tell you something I have learned through hard experience: If your book got turned down by a traditional publisher, that doesn’t mean your book is bad. It might mean it’s bad, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that. Traditional publishers have much more on their mind than just a book’s quality. Furthermore, if your book is accepted by a traditional publisher, that doesn’t mean that the traditional publisher is the best place for your book. People self publish for a lot of different reasons: better royalties, more control over the books rights, more control over the publishing process, or simply a desire to have their book’s fate resting in their own hands.

According to Author Earnings, in February of 2016, three percent of bestselling Kindle books were self published. Another 14% were published by small independent publishers.vii John Grisham has self published. So have Tom Clancy and Deepak Chopra. I doubt anyone would accuse them of doing it just for vanity. Some self-published authors make a good living from their books. Self publishing is now a viable alternative for a professional writer.

But even if you can’t afford to live like J. K. Rowling off your royalties, maybe that’s not the point. Think about it: your definition of success might be different from a traditional publisher’s. Would you write a short book that would sell only 500 copies? Would you write it because you loved the topic, had something significant to say, and you could make maybe $1000 from sales? Given the right circumstances, I would. Could you find a publisher who would take a book that appeals to only 500 readers? Have fun trying. Publishers need to pay editors, proofreaders, printers, and marketing representatives. They can’t do that unless a book sells at least a few thousand copies. But what about the 500 readers? Unless they can find another few thousand people to share their interest, they are out of luck. And so are you. That’s the reality of traditional publishing.

With the new print-on-demand publishing services, however, if you have the chutzpah, you can ignore the traditional publishers with their high overhead. You can take your book’s fate into your hands and publish. You can put your book in the hands of 500 or 1000 people who will love it. And maybe, maybe, you can be one of that select group of self publishers who reach a wider readership.

Chapter 2: Choose Your Publisher

By the end of the chapter you’ll know:

• What the world of POD looks like

• Which POD company is best for you

• How the POD company of your choice handles royalties and distribution

Several printing options are available for people who want to self publish a book. All are far more sophisticated that the old-style printers who would take in your manuscript and hand back a carton of books. In this chapter, we’ll be looking mainly at two POD printers/publishers: CreateSpace and Lulu. In my opinion, if you have some talent for do-it-yourself and very little working capital, they are your best bet.

Publisher? Printer?

What is the difference between a publisher and a printer? The printer, obviously, is the one who puts ink on paper. That distinction blurs a little bit with electronic books, but in general the printer is involved with the physical process of creating a book. The publisher, on the other hand, is the entity in whose name the ISBN is registered.viii The publisher brings together all the resources needed to produce a book: the author, the editor, the printer, the distributor, the sales staff, etc.

Modern POD printers do some of the work of a printer and some of a publisher. They print the book, obviously. But you can also hire them to be your publishing company. They can publish your book under their imprint, using their own ISBNs. They can also perform all the service of a traditional publisher for a fee. If you publish your book using a Lulu or CreateSpace ISBN, then they are your publisher.

_______

Know the Lingo: Imprint

An imprint is the name of a publishing company as it appears on the title page of a book. Sometimes the imprint is the same as the name of the publisher’s company. Sometimes a publishing company will publish under several imprints.

For example, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is the name of a major publishing company. HMH publishes books under several imprints: Holt McDougal, Riverside Publishing, Saxon, Clarion Books, etc. Alcuin Communications LLC is the name of my publishing company. I publish books under two imprints: Alcuin House for my own books and Alcuin Family History for the memoirs I help other people write.

_______

Your POD company can be your publisher, but it doesn’t have to be. You can publish under your own imprint. You can get your own ISBN assigned to your own publishing company. You can do your own editing, your own marketing, and your own layout. You can then use the POD printer to print and distribute your book. In that case, you are the publisher, and the POD company is the printer.

What we are going to do in this chapter is to sift through the various printing and publishing services offered by POD companies. The more work you can do yourself (and the less you use the POD companies’ extras), the cheaper it will be to publish your book. You may, however, find that some aspects of publishing are beyond your skills. To find the right level of assistance for your skills, you’ll need to know what kind of POD services there are out there, and who can meet your needs without selling you a lot of services you could do yourself.

Who Is Out There?

You’ll find that most self–publishers use one of these seven services: Author House, iUniverse, Xlibris, BookLocker, Lightning Source, CreateSpace, or Lulu.ix Let’s take a look at them to see which suits you best.

Author Solutions

Author House, iUniverse, and Xlibris are all owned by the same company: Author Solutions. These three subsidiaries run on the old vanity publishing model. In other words, they take in your manuscript, edit it, lay it out, put a cover on it, and ship a box of books to you. You pay them up front for the service, and then you also pay if you want additional copies at a later date. Unlike the old-style vanity publishers, Author Solutions companies now offer a full range of services including distribution, digital formatting, Web design set up, and a full range of publicity services. You can expect to pay anything from $600 to $4200 out-of-pocket just to get your book into print using one of these companies.

If your tech skills involve barely knowing which end of a computer plugs into the wall, you may need to hire a company like this. DIY book publishing will require that you either know, or are willing to learn, how to use a computer well. If you’ve tried several times and still can’t find your way around a word processing program, you’ll need outside services. If you can’t do basic photo editing at a drugstore photo kiosk, you are likely to have trouble laying out a cover. In other words, if you’re a computer illiterate and are unlikely to get any better at basic computer skills, you will need the help of a full-service publisher.

On the other hand, let’s do some math. Many self published authors sell fewer than 100 copies to other people. Royalties from those books will typically be less than $5 per copy. Unless you know for a fact that you will have a larger readership than the norm, or unless your book is in a genre that supports a higher cover price and so can produce a higher royalty rate for you, the math on these money-up-front companies doesn’t work out very well. Of course, if you’re not publishing your book to make money or if you have a few thousand dollars hanging around in your bank account doing nothing, you will find that these full-service companies can sometimes turn out a nice product for you. I’m guessing, however, that if money is no object, you wouldn’t be reading this book. So let’s look at other options.

Book Locker

Book Locker is a small POD company operating out of Bangor, Maine. They offer some services but fewer than the full-service POD publishers. They will design a cover for you and will get you listed with Ingram, but their range of services is smaller than Author Solutions. They are a little pickier about the size and quality of the books they publish than are Author Solutions, Lulu, and CreateSpace, so they carry slightly less of a vanity press stigma. They only publish books in the US They set the cover price of the book and the royalty rate, but the royalty rates they offer seem to be comparable to what you can make using, for example, CreateSpace. They have an upfront set-up charge, which varies with the level of services you sign up for. I’ve never used their services, but I’ve never heard anything bad about them either.

Lightning Source

Lightning Source is the print-on-demand arm of Ingram, one of the largest book distribution companies