Self Publishing

A year ago today I was having my first day of really feeling lonely and down in the dumps in my travels. So much so, that I drove straight through Georgia. It didn’t help seeing signs for Hospice which reminded me of my mother and how she didn’t live long enough to need Hospice. It’d only been a little over a year since her passing and I was really missing her. It was a day of tears and in my state of mind I chose not to stop in Savannah and drove on to St. Augustine, Fla.

I’m making the push to get the book finished. There are still many questions. Sometimes I hate making decisions. I don’t like taking the time to research details. All I want to do is write the book and get it printed. These self publishing options that are out there make it all sound so easy and in some aspects they are… if all you’re interested in is printing a few copies to give out to family and friends.

The thing to always remember is that you have to spend money to make money. The first book, My Life Isn’t Flowers, that I did online was through www.lulu.com which came out very nice, but I wasn’t totally happy. The cost seemed a little expensive for what it was and there wasn’t any way I could sell copies and make a profit. I was lucky if I could get my money back. I eventually took it to a local printer, Town and Country Reprographics in Concord, and the finished book was better, but it’s one of those deals where you have to have an excess number of copies printed to be able to save money and be able to sell at a reasonable price. It’s hard to have that initial big cost to save money in the long run.

I next printed a little picture book Through the Window using www.blurb.com. Blurb was very easy to work with. I like the templates and the ease to drag and drop pictures. The most difficult part of this kind of publishing is the marketing if you want to sell. The author is the one who really has to do all the work. This is not my strong suit. I want to be writing and working with photos, not pounding the pavement. (Yes, I know, that’s what you have to do to sell your work.)

With Too Cold for Alligators, I decided to try a new route and looked into www.amazon.com. That company’s publishing is through their createspace. Again, there is talk about the east of going this route and how Amazon promotes the book. Templates are provided and with all of these places, there are extra costs if you need help with design, set up, editing, etc.

This sounded the like the best route for me. I chose a book size that I thought would work well with pictures and downloaded the template. These things never go as easy as they proclaim. The issue for me is the type of book I want to produce. I want pictures and pictures make it more expensive. I had issues with the template and working with Microsoft Word as the template filled and the book got bigger.

I had the story itself written and was down to the adding photos, maps, and final editing when MS Word kept freezing up on me. I purchased a book from one of the guys with whom I’d been chatting on the createspace chat room about these issues. The book was a great help in understanding this self publishing business. I was advised to work in Open Office which required downloading templates for that. Open Office is similar to Word, but there are enough differences that again, it wasn’t a simple copy and paste. I could only copy and paste the text then had to make sure it copied correctly. Sometimes it didn’t. The first paragraph indents are different. Then I had to re-insert the photos. Sometimes I could get text wrap to work and other times it wouldn’t.

The months dragged and I got hung up on one issue or another. Other projects got in the way. By fall, I was working on another book. And I didn’t even have the first one finished! Now I have been put in contact with authorhouse who are telling me that pdf (which I always have issues with) does not work well if you want to do e-books. They are going to send me a package. I might just bite the bullet and give up trying to do it all myself… I’ll see what they say and what that package looks like.

While my hopes are not high with the choice of printing options yet, I do plan on finishing Too Cold for Alligator within the next four months. In Word, I am doing a final edit and making all the photos and maps black and white. When I talked to the guy at authorhouse the other day, he stressed telling my story in words and not to rely on the photos. That means I am also re-looking at my descriptions and in the final edit, choosing moments to go more into the written detail of what I experienced. At the moment, I’m not playing around with the templates. I also need to decide if I should stay with the book at 7 x 10 or go to a more common 6 x 9. This is where I am. I am NOT giving up!