On Monday, I launched my first self-published book, What to Do When Your Book Is Banned. I did a lot of the work myself. I watched tutorials and read books on graphic design before putting together my cover. Since I worked as an archaeological illustrator in college, I felt comfortable turning my layout skills toward something like this. Besides, I had Angela to give me tips.
Then I took Self-Publish Your Masterpiece: Video Class here at WOW with Barbara Noe Kennedy. One of the things Barbara talked about was making certain your fonts are copyright free or that you pay for the right to use them. I had read something on Microsoft’s site that made me think this was not essential, but I could not relocate that advice. Instead, I found the link to click for Microsoft to calculate your fee. So, I found copyright free fonts.
Then I started playing with my layout. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get the chapter titles to generate a table of content with links although I followed the instructions to a letter. Nope. It didn’t work the second time. Or the fifth time. So, I found a new way to do it.
Then I needed to figure out how to number the pages. I’m giving the book away as a PDF, so the cover is part of the document. I needed to number front matter pages with lower case Roman numerals and then the body of the book with Arabic numerals. It wasn’t that hard to figure out.
All of this was in my Word file. After this project, I’ll be creating three more self-published books. A friend gave me a copy as a Word document so that I can just copy and paste my material in the right areas and have the proper formatting. Aren’t writing friends the best?
But I couldn’t get the page numbers right. No, problem. I’d done it once. Certainly, I could do it again. I bet you saw this coming. I must have tried five or six times. I kept Googling various search terms looking for a solution. Nothing worked.
And I couldn’t figure out how to put it on my site. I wanted to create a blind page that someone would only find with a link. But that’s impossible on my version of WordPress. I couldn’t find anything that worked.
I would have just put it off if Angela hadn't talked me into committing to a launch date. But I did have to pivot to work on a paying job. By the time I met that deadline, I had 2 days left to wrap up the formatting on the book and get it posted. But I was coming at it fresh.
I did another Google search on how to save the book on my site. I found out how to use a password protected page in less than 10 minutes. It took me only slightly longer than that to find a description of how to do the page numbers that after several tries worked.
I’m not going to say self-publishing the book was simple. There were times I questioned my decision to do this. But as is so often the case with writing, the solution was not giving up. And often the people who kept me going were the members of my accountability group. Thank you, Ladies! A strong community is a must for any writer testing self-publishing.
--SueBE
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Sue Bradford Edwards' is the author of over 80 books for young readers.
- To find out more about her writing, visit her site and blog.
She is also the instructor for 3 WOW classes which begin on the first Monday of every month. She teaches:
1 comments:
I commend you for following through, Sue! I've been talking about self publishing a book for years and as you can see, I've been too chicken to do it! However, I am starting to squirrel away some money so that I can hopefully hire someone to help me with editing and formatting when the time comes. It's a start, right?
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