Secrets for Self Publishing Your Own Book.

Love my Dolly

If you want to gather your memoirs or stories for your, friends, family and loved ones, you may want to consider “Self Publishing.” 

Decide how many you will sell and give away. 

For my book “Rescue the Stories Book One,” I used Instant Publisher who also does cook books, club or company books fairly reasonable.  Check out their site:  http://www.instantpublisher.com/

Getting a book ready for printing is a long and tedious process. In simple steps here it is:

Collect all the stories from your blog or elsewhere that you want in your book. Save them to a folder. Then edit to make sure all the words are correct.  Change sentences you don’t like. The printing company provides a form to down load to transfer your stories to the book size you select.  Do more editing to be sure it all fits on the page.

Finally the Printer wants it set up on PDF. (So it is time to learn how to do that.) Do a Google search asking a “how to question.”

Lastly a cover for the book can be difficult.  I tried to figure out how to use a photo program that didn’t want to cooperate.

Eventually I gave up and contacted the printer company who will do the cover for a reasonable price, just send them a couple photos and words you want on the cover.  They will e-mail you a PDF photo of the cover for you to approve or change.  Change or just approve the cover and give the go ahead. Wait for about 10 days.

For a small fee, Pay Pal will supply you with a “Buy Now” button so your customers can order from your internet site.

You will need to purchase envelopes large enough for mailing.  Media Mail is about $3.00 so include that in your shipping cost information.

The more copies of your book that you order will bring the cost down. 

Instead of copies ran off at Kinko’s, your book will be professionally done and you will be pleased with the results.

That is me at three years old on the cover of my book!  I still have some available, but order soon.

This post has been shared at Friendship Friday with Joy