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Saturday, July 3, 2010

The Self-Publishing Blues

I remember someone saying we've all got at least one book in us, and with self-publishing options these days, it should be easy to just whip out this book and get it into the world, right?!  Well, boys and girls, not so easy.  It's amazing all of the components of the process that you have to think about -- should you get an ISBN?  What does that mean anyway?  What size should your book be?  What service should you use?  What all-inclusive package should you let the publishing service talk you into getting?

I certainly don't have any answers for you, yet, but I found this article by David Carnoy of CNet very helpful:   http://reviews.cnet.com/self-publishing/

Oh, and it's important to try to figure out which publishing service you want to use first because that will inform what options you have regarding size and pages of the book (I'm discovering that each service seems to offer different sizes from each other, so it's not easy to move your book around or list on multiple publishing houses without being able to adjust the size).  Thankfully, my understanding of how to use InDesign is growing, so I think I'm going to be able to resize things and be able to take advantage of both Lulu (which has the size of book I want but is more expensive) and CreateSpace (which is cheaper and is the Amazon subsidiary, so I have to believe that distribution would be better).

So, stay tuned for more trials and tribulations in the self-publishing world!

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