self-publishing

Publishing a book has been an interesting experience. The manuscript was given to me as a Microsoft Word document, which I then had to reformat, including assigning styles (see post of 8/21), because whenever I tried to import it into my layout software (InDesign) it would get only so far and then stop.

After formatting the manuscript for print, I went on to tackle ebooks, a new task for me. As it turns out, in order to get the ebooks to turn out just right, I had to copy everything from the layout, paste it back into Word (have I mentioned today how much I hate Word?), and then change all the text to Times Roman. The swash we used to separate sections of the book was pasted in as a gif; this is a tedious task in Word— in InDesign, it would have been a global find and replace. Once I had the file converted for the Amazon Kindle, I had to tweak it for Barnes & Noble's nook.

Now that both are done and for sale online, I am turning my attention back to the website while the author deals with Press Releases and reviewers. It's an awful lot of work, but in the end will be faster than going with a mainstream publisher.

You must be careful, though, as there are a LOT of websites more than happy to take your cash while returning dubious results. Of the 2400 outlets the author paid the publishing sie to send the Press Release to, most of them were either not appropriate (some were for kids, some for art, some dealt with animals) or no longer even in existence. Now we have the task of weeding out the bad and inappropriate outlets, a job we thought she had paid for.

It's a great book, and I believe it will do well. Perhaps when this is finished, I'll publish my own book on self-publishing. I'll call it "Caveat Emptor!"

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