How To Self-Publish Your Book For $100 (or Less)
Self-publishing doesn't have to be expensive. The trick is knowing which tasks you can do yourself and which you must outsource.
1. Artwork: Unless you're an amazing artist, I recommend outsourcing your cover art and design (font choice, text placement) to a professional. There are many sites offering premade covers for under $100. That gets you a front cover only, which is suitable for an eBook release. The spine and back cover required for a print version can cost a lot more.
What you want are two files, one at 72dpi (for eBook) and one at 300dpi (for print).
Don't skimp on cover art! Always get the best art you can afford because people really do judge your book by its cover.
If you take the time to learn PhotoShop (paid) or GIMP (free), you can create your own spine and back cover (as well as all your book ads). That means your total budget for a single book's artwork can often be under $100.
(Note: Only download GIMP from the official site. Other sites like to stuff malware in their versions of it, but the official site's version is clean).
For example, I bought cover art for my Young Adult Horror series but did the cover design myself using GIMP. I also created my Twitter ads using GIMP. Note that Twitter ads must be 503 pix wide by 206 pix tall to completely fit inside a tweet without someone having to click to expand it to see everything. This is what my first five Twitter ads look like:
2. Print Formatting: Anyone can do this. Just copy what traditional publishers' books look like. You want your interior pages to look just as good. You can do a decent approximation with MS Word (paid) or OpenOffice (free). Adobe InDesign is even better, but costs money and has a steeper learning curve. When you're done formatting, you want to save your book file as a PDF with the fonts embedded in it. This is what you will upload to your print-on-demand printer of choice (CreateSpace, Lulu, or Ingram Spark).
Again, the idea is NOT to spend money! Other than a single test copy to make sure the book is being printed right, that's the only upfront cost you're out.
3. eBook Formatting: eBook formatting means you will have to learn a bit of HTML/CSS coding, but it's a very specific subset—the basics of which can be mastered in a few days to a week at most. You cannot outsource this without paying $150+ (for fiction) to 250+ (for non-fiction, poetry, childrens' books, comics, etc.). If you need fancy formatting, then you may have no choice, but anyone can learn the basic HTML/CSS needed to format fiction.
The best way to do this is to invest $5.99 in Guido Henkel's Zen of eBook Formatting (available as an eBook only). My advice: Buy it!
Next, download JEdit, a free HTML/CSS editor, and Calibre, a free eBook converter. These are the only programs you need to create high quality eBooks. You do your coding in JEdit, then send your HTML files to Calibre, where you turn them into EPUB or MOBI formats. MOBI is for Amazon, EPB is for all other sites. Guido Henkel's Zen of eBook Formatting walks you through every step.
Note that the above programs assume you're using a Mac. There are equivalent free programs for PC users (the Zen of eBook Formatting tells you which ones to get).
4. Upload and Sell: Create accounts at Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and CreateSpace (if printing paperback versions), Barnes & Noble's Nook Press, Kobo Writing Life, Draft2Digital, Smashwords, etc. Upload your converted files and fill out a few simple forms describing your book, setting the price, etc., and you're done.
Congratulations! You are now a self-published author for $100 or less!
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