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How to Self Publish

Below you will find basic information on how to self publish a book. Although some of it may seem complex, or some of the terms unfamiliar, the process is relatively easy as you go through it. I have presented these basic guidelines to help people who are new to self publishing get an idea of what to expect and how to begin. These guidelines were written with the assumption that you either know a bit about page layout and word processing programs or are intelligent enough to teach yourself as you go along. When you first get into contact with whichever company will print your book, they will assist you and send you guidelines for file set up, which programs they work with, what they expect of you, how to save graphics, etc.To Make the printing costs as cheap as possible I chose to do all the layout myself, including the cover, and I supplied the printing company with a .pdf file that was also a digital proof of all the work. This means that the printing company does not do any of the work or application conversion for you, and if you have done everything right, you will just pay for the actual cost of the printing of the book.

PLEASE NOTE: all of this information is based on the experience I had about two years ago, as far as I know most of it is still relevant (the exception being that pagemaker is supposedly obsolete). Please check with whichever printing company you are interested in going with to make sure that these instructions still meet their requirements.

Index

Overview

You can write your manuscript with a word processing program like word perfect. You then open the completed document in a page layout program like pagemaker or quark. After the page layout is complete, you convert the pagemaker (etc.) file to a postscript file, and then convert the postscript file to a .pdf file which is a file that is read by acrobat reader. At the point your file is in .pdf format and perfect, you can proof this file and send it out to the printer with anything else they request. If you design your own cover, You work in a program that the printing company accepts, get the entire file perfect, and then print it out as a digital proof.
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How to Begin With a Word Processing Program

When you use a word processing program, the best thing to do is to use the style attributes and make sure all the paragraphs and headings are consistent as to fonts, first line indentation, etc. These style attributes will carry over to the page layout application and it is a lot easier to set them up right to begin with, than it is to scour the entire document and fix all mistakes. Don't worry about graphics placement, chapter placement, etc. If you create these things for your own ease or aesthetic, you will find when you move your file to the layout program you will have to redo them all. False page breaks, using the tab or enter key for formatting etc. can all leave you with a lot of work to clean up. It may be easiest if you use whatever fonts you will be using in the finished product to begin with, as sometimes it can be a hassle to change it all manually at the end, but again if you use style attributes, it will be easy to make any font or formatting changes later. Click here for information about postscript versus true type fonts.
Make your manuscript as perfect as you can get it. The word processing program is the place to make all changes having to do with the actual content of the book. If you are unfamiliar with word processing programs, the more you work with one, the easier it will all get. Once you feel you have edited and proof read the manuscript enough times, you can then move it over to the page layout program. It is best at this point to get in contact with a printing company, because then you can set up your new page layout document to their exact specifications, which will vary from company to company.
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Printing Companies

There are many book printing companies on the web. The easiest way to find them is to do a web search. I have also included links to all the ones I found on my links page. When you get in contact with the printing companies, you will be required to fill out a form to recieve a quote for your work. This is just an estimate right now. You can type in the number of pages in your completed manuscript and all the other information asked, and use your quotes to determine which company you like the best. When you have your book in its actual layout with actual page count etc. you can resubmit the quote and get the actual prices. After days of research and comparing quotes I chose to go with Thomson-shore, Inc because their prices were either better or comparable to the other quotes I recieved, I heard only good things about them in the various places I looked, and they appear to be a quality book manufacturing house rather than a place interested mostly in your money. (They did a good job, and were very nice people.) Upon deciding which company you would like to work with, you should then let them know that you would like them to print your book, and ask them for all their guidelines and any help you need in setting up your layout files.
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Page Layout Programs

There are a few page layout programs around. I am only familiar with pagemaker, though I have heard from most everyone around that quark is the easier and better program. I only ran into a few problems with pagemaker 6.5 and I have heard that the later versions are better and that the earlier versions are almost incapable of doing some of the things that need done. Once you have a completed manuscript you can place it into a page layout program. First you set up a new document to the exact trim size of the book, page count, and with all the margins to specification. You can easily look at any published book to get a good idea of trim size, margin size etc. The inside margin (in the gutter) is usually 3/4". If you will be creating a postscipt file to turn into a .pdf, you will need, at this time, to get the guidelines from the printing company you are dealing with. These conversions are very easy to do, however if you do not set up the document to their specifications to begin with, when you set them up later they can change the entire layout of the book and you will have to go back over and redo most of your work. To place my document into pagemaker 6.5, I had to convert the .doc to .rtf (which you do with the save as command) then in the file menu of pagemaker, you go to 'place', open the file, and place it into your new document. Be sure that autoflow in the edit menu is checked as this will flow all text throughout all the pages in your layout file. After this, simply work with the layout program and get the file to look exactly as you would like the layout of the book to look. Page numbers, headers, footers, text alignment, chapter breaks, table of contents, copyright page, title pages etc.
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File Conversion

Many of the printing houses I recieved information from were happy to recieve pdf files. It is less work for them and lets you do as much on your own as possible. If you have never done file conversions it may seem complicated, but it is one of the simplest parts of this whole process. You will need an acrobat distiller program which often times comes with the page layout program or can be tried for free on the adobe site. Then it is just a simple matter of setting up the specifications with your printing house's guidelines and saving your completed layout file as a postscript file. The printing house will also give you the guidelines of how to set up the distilling program so that conversion from your new postscript file to your final .pdf file is just as simple as above. Once your file is in .pdf format you will not be able to change it, but you will be able to see exactly what it will look like when it is printed out. This is used as a digital proof so you can make sure everything is perfect, and this will also make it unnecessary to print out the entire book into a set of printed laser proofs. If you do see changes that you need to make, it is simple to delete the files you just made, go back into your page layout program, make the necessary changes, and resave it all as before.
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Graphics

If you have any simple graphics in your book, such as a logo, title, line drawing etc., these are best saved in .eps files and then placed into your layout file. The appearance of the graphics in the layout file is not necessarily what they will look like printed out at high resolution. It is best to print these graphics yourself, or to find someone to print them for you at high res to see what they will really look like, as sometimes they can look really choppy and ugly in the layout program. If you have photgraphs or other graphics that print to the edge of the paper you will have to make room for bleeds in the document set up. The printing company you work with will tell you how much room to add for bleeds and can also give you the information you need to have your photographs or complex graphics look best.
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Fonts

You need to use postscript fonts, as truetype fonts will often not print true. You will most likely need to buy a postscript font family to use. You can browse fontshops on the web,and then buy and download the fonts you like. Sometimes you can find free postscript fonts, but it seems to be worth the money to pay for good quality fonts that are exactly what you want. You will need to use a seperate font for bold or italic letters, i.e. rather than just check the bold button in the program, you will need to change fonts from say- garamond to garamond-bold. All text including information on title page, chapter headings, etc need a postscript font.
I shouldn't really have to mention this, but the number one thing to look for in a font for the book text is readablity, and number two is appearance. An unreadable font, although it may be pretty to look at, defeats the entire purpose of publishing a book. Common fonts used in book publishing are simple ones like, times new roman, garamond, arial, courier, etc. Headings, titles, and art books can all obviously benefit from having a more interesting font.
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Book Covers (and spine width info)

You can have a hardcover book, a paperback, or a split run, which is an order with a combination of the two. If you have a hardcover book, you will need to design the jacket, with a softbound book you need to design the cover. There are many companies that will design covers for you for a fee. If you design your own cover, you should be working with a design program like adobe illustrator, you can also use photoshop, but photoshop is much better for creating or manipulating the art itself, while illustator is beautiful to work with in the actual layout. To get the dimensions of the cover, you need to know the inside trim size, and the spine width. You use your final page count to calculate the spine width. Search for "spine width calculator' to find a good site to help you determine spine width. If your cover prints to the edge, you will also have to add room for bleeds. Thus if you have a softbound book with a 6x9 trim size, (w x l) and you calculate that your spine width is 1 ½ inches, plus you need to add 1/8 " on all sides for bleeds, your complete cover will be 13 ¾ by 9 ¼. You can use true type fonts in your graphics, but make sure that any font that you use in your graphics is embedded into your file; there should be an option to do this when you press save. You can also change the text into a graphic, in illustrator you do this by selecting the text, going into the type menu, and then clicking create outlines. If you do not do either of these things, and a printer does not have your fonts stored in its memory, it will print a default font like courier in place of any fonts it does not recognise.
As you are working in print you will need to be working in cmyk color mode, your screen colors will print differently than you see on the screen, so it is best to get an accurate printout before you finish to make sure your printed colors are to your specifications. Also, even if you get a printed proof, the colors can sometimes be slightly off, if it is important to have an exact match, you are best working with, or even just looking at pantone color chips ( a color management system for sale in many art stores) to make it perfect.
see below for ISBN bar code graphic info.
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ISBN Numbers and Barcodes

All the information you need to know about ISBN numbers is available at the ISBN website. This is also where you will be ordering your ISBN number from. It is not necessary for you to have an ISBN number just because you wrote a book, but if you are looking to distribute your book through bookstores etc. many of them require you to use an ISBN number. Once you have recieved your number there are links on the ISBN site where you can have a company generate a bar code for you and supply you with an .eps file of your bar code. Your ISBN number itself will need to be put onto your copyright page, and the .eps graphic file of the bar code with the ISBN will need to be placed on the back cover of your book. Many printing houses will supply you with an ISBN number, generate the bar code, and place it for you. The ISBN website will give you the information you need for placement or just by looking at other printed books you can get an idea of what size it will be and where you will need to place the symbol.
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Copyright Info

Go to the copyright website for detailed information about copyrights. You should copyright your material, because then other people cannot take it from you and do what they want with it unless they have your permission. You can copyright the material before it is an actual book if you want, or you can add the © symbol to your copyright page (the page directly after your title page), and then fill out the proper form when your book is published. The form is also available through the copyright website.
Most programs understand the CTRL+ALT+C (for windows) or option+g (for mac) to make a copyright symbol, but if you have problems you can download a copyright symbol for free (or a circle p symbol for musicians), and learn most everything you ever wanted to know about making and using a copyright here.

Example:
©2003 by Bruce McBain
or
©2003 by Dana Hersey
All rights reserved.
or
©2003 by Abigail Lee Goldberger
All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, bla bla bla.

You can look in any published book to get an idea of what rights to list under your copyright declaration.
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Permissions

If you are going to use any quotes from another source, another book, a song, a poem, etc., you need to get permission to use the quote. This involves a little bit of research, but is pretty easy. For many books you can get permission from the publishing house's website. I am not sure about music or anything else, but a letter or phone call to the company that produced the media will give you the information you need. It seems to be best to begin to obtain the permissions a few months before you are ready to print the book, as sometimes their replies can take a while. Often there is a one time fee involved once permission is granted. You will also need to add to the copyright page a little acknowledgement of the source of the quote and that you have permission to use it.
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