In part 1 of this post, I shared my experiences writing my book: Breaking the Boundaries of Impairment: A Life Journey with Low Vision. In this part 2, I will share the details of my experiences in self-publishing the book.
Writing can be difficult, but I was to find out that publishing is difficult in its own way. I knew that my book probably would only appeal to a very narrow audience, so a mainstream publisher would not be interested in my book because of its low potential for generating revenue for the publisher.
There is a great deal of information in public libraries and on the Internet about how to self-publish. I spent a lot of time reading and researching to understand what I needed to accomplish this. Many libraries have The Chicago Manual of Style, which is invaluable for determining publishing standards. You can always use your favorite search engine to find articles and blogs on the Internet where people have shared their writing and publishing suggestions and experiences.
My first draft consisted only of chapter titles and paragraphs using basic Microsoft Word formatting. Comparing this draft to a published book, the format of the book will look very different. A book has standards covering front matter, which usually consist of title page, copyright page, table of contents, and possibly other pages as well. There are more standards covering how the pages of book text are formatted, for example the first page of a chapter always starts on a right hand page. There are yet more standards about back matter, which includes author biography, index, etc.
There was much to learn and many decisions to be made. After extensive research, I decided to take the easy way out and buy a Microsoft Word book template from the thebookdesigner.com. This template is a sample Word document that contains all the styles and formatting to make your text look like a real book. There were many options to choose from. When I found one that I liked, it was a simple matter to purchase and download.
At that point, I had to decide on a physical size for the book. There are a number of standard sizes, and each type of book has its own common sizes. The smaller the dimensions of the book, the more pages it will have and the more it will cost to print. The larger the book, the harder it is to hold. Larger print sizes will also increase the number of pages. Considering these and other factors, I chose a six inch by nine inch template and then copied and pasted the text from my Word document into the template Word document’s titles and paragraphs. This is when my document really started to look like a book.
The Front Matter of a book starts with a title page and contains everything before the first chapter. Being of the mind that simpler is usually better, I opted to only include a title page, copyright page and a table of contents. Not including other pages also helped keep the printing costs down.
As in any other art form, there is much debate over what is good and what is not good. I read many suggestions to hire a graphic artist to design the book cover, and not to do it yourself. Optimal covers are supposed to reflect the contents of the book and contain certain design elements. Like a good resume, the cover is your chance to sell yourself at a glance. In the process of researching this I saw more than a few covers on very successful books by mainstream publishers that had broken many cover guidelines.
I had definite ideas about what I wanted in a cover. I wanted a visible boundary that was either already broken or being broken, and that would reflect the portion of the title “Breaking the Boundaries…”. A good cover is very important as it evokes an emotional response, piquing someone’s interest in your book. In my experience, working with a strong artist comes with a risk that their artistic inspirations will not exactly match the ideas and emotions that you want to convey. To me the cover is more about communication than it is about art, so I decided to try and produce a cover without a graphic artist. After much doodling on paper, several conversations with my wife who is more artistic than I am, and looking at many digital pictures, the fire boundary with the running silhouettes touched me emotionally. With it, and another hour or two of doodling with Microsoft Powerpoint, I had my front cover design.
At this point, I had to create a back cover and spine. There are many variations of back cover designs, but the primary purpose is to continue the process of selling your reader on your book with a little longer glance. I included a brief description of the book, a short excerpt of one of my life experience stories from the book, and three blurbs. A blurb is a short positive review of your book by a person whose name ideally will be recognized by your potential readers. It is important to chose your reviewers wisely. Space for the Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code must also be included.
Since in writing and publishing this book I was not pursuing a professional writing career, I was looking for a simple way to make my book available in many markets while not investing a lot of time and effort on the book distribution process. CreateSpace seemed like a good choice to accomplish this because it would plug me into the Amazon book distribution network. It also would let me print copies on demand, so I would not have to keep an inventory of books. In the few months that I have been dealing with them, I have had no regrets about that decision. As with any other printer, CreateSpace has guidelines on how to set up your document and submit it to their printing process. These guidelines are comprehensive and clearly written. Following them will ensure that your manuscript is printed with no errors or surprises.
In this twenty-first century technology is intertwined in our lives. Using a computer to build files is one example of this, and does not always go smoothly. I chose to submit my manuscript to CreateSpace in PDF form, because I thought it would be very simple for Word to save it as a PDF file. My older version of Word would not include the fonts within the PDF file as CreateSpace required, so I had to use a “print to PDF” software program to fool my printer into producing a PDF file. I had to use the same process to save my cover to a second PDF file for submission.
Once all the files were submitted, CreateSpace created a digital proof copy that you can review on your computer. It showed the book pages as they would be printed on paper. I also ordered a printed proof copy as well, because I had heard that reading a digital copy on the computer is not the same as reading a printed paper copy. That turned out to be a very good decision, as I found additional errors in both forms of the book.
The final stage of proofreading consisted of taking the printed proof copy, sitting in my easy chair and reading it as I would read any book. Even though I had proofread the book over a half dozen times on my computer, I still found four more errors in the printed copy. After correcting those errors, resubmitting the corrected PDF files, and reviewing the digital proof copy, I finally had a publishable book. A few clicks of my computer mouse, and the print edition was released to Amazon for sale.
After breathing a big sigh of relief at finally reaching my goal of publication, I began the process of producing an electronic version of the book. The popularity of e-readers is increasing significantly, especially with the low vision community, because with an e-reader any book can be a large print book. Since e-readers are little computers, building e-books comes with some technology challenges. Having even a little technical knowledge can go a long way in making the production process easier and smoother.
In keeping with my decision to use the Amazon book distribution network, I chose to use Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to submit the e-book. KDP prefers that an author submit a MOBI file type, so I used Calibre software to convert my Word files to a MOBI file. Books containing only prose should convert cleanly, but my bulleted list in the next to last chapter did not format correctly. To fix this, I used a little of my technical knowledge to tweak the MOBI file and fix the list formatting. Once again, with a few clicks of my computer mouse, the e-book edition was released to Amazon for sale.
After another sigh of relief to mark the completion of the e-book publishing process, I began to think about the next steps.
When you write, your material is automatically copyrighted, however in order to defend your copyright in court, you must register your manuscript with the United States Copyright office. Even though this is optional, with my book I felt that it was important to do, however it does add to the cost of publishing.
Even though Amazon makes your book available to many distribution channels, it does not actively advertise or market your book. Marketing of your book is up to you as the author and publisher, and can be as extensive and complex as you want to make it. As with anything else, the results are directly proportional to the effort that you expend. I am still developing my marketing plan, which includes, but is not limited to: spreading the word among my friends, posting on social media sites, and creating a web site for the book.
Writing and publishing a book was certainly not easy, but it was not the most difficult project that I have ever undertaken. So I’m glad that I stuck with it through the long process, and I am also happy that I am able to share experiences from my life, plus information that I hope will help many people in the Albinism community. I did not track the time that I spent on this project, but I’m certain that it would total many hundreds of hours. As a Do-It-Yourselfer, my cost to publish was probably around $400. If I had hired a publishing house content and copy editor, as well as a graphic artist, my costs would have been upwards of several thousand dollars.
Over my life, I could not have accomplished what I have without others who have generously shared their knowledge and experience. Whether that sharing was verbal or written it was equally valuable. In this century, we have very much become a global community whose ability to survive depends on us supporting each other. In the spirit of my book, I would encourage everyone to push your boundaries out a little and share your experiences, whether successes that inspire us or failures that we can learn from, so that we all may benefit.