Self-Publishing Tips Part II

by guest blogger, Cynthia MacKinnon

In the last post on self-publishing tips I emphasized the importance of treating your book just as would a big publisher. Put it through all the necessary steps—as time and energy consuming as they may be—your book is worth it!

You will probably see a pattern with my "best practice" suggestions: hire a professional to do the work for you. Now, I am not stumping my own services—I don't have the time to take on contract work! but I am providing the best advice available. At least consider professional services for your first book; then learn from these folks and perhaps cut down on the costs on a later project. It can also save you money, believe it or not. The programs and resources you will need to professionally dyi are expensive and printing companies are adamant about the types of files they receive.

And now further must-dos of self-publishing:

4. A picture is worth a thousand words. Books are judged by their covers, like it or not and you want your book to stand out from the shelf. The sure sign of a s.p. book is an amateur cover. Now, you'll never find an entire group of readers who'll love the same cover, everyone has different taste, right? However, your cover better appeal or at least be presentable to most book buyers or the book will never stand a chance.

NOTE: I am not a writer so I am excused . . . but you'd better not use all the clichés I just did!

Best Practice: Hire a good cover designer, solicit recommendations from other authors or publishers. Do you like the style of a published book's cover? then check the copyright page and you will likely find the name and website of the cover designer.

Acceptable Practice: Use the industry standard Adobe programs like InDesign and Photoshop to design your cover. Don't know how to use them? take lessons from a site like VTC; they even have some freebies to get you started. Can't afford the big ticket price? check online for used copies. Adobe is forever updating their products and usually, once one has the newest version, there is no need for the earlier one which may be only 2 years old and still very reliable.

Bad Practice: I can use the free cover maker at the POD site. They have at least 18 backgrounds and then I can get some images from the free photo site! Yeah, and you and a thousand other people will have that same background that everyone can point to and say, hey! they used the free cover maker at . . . Remember, I said your cover needs to stand out from the crowd?

5. The interior of a book must look professional. From the title page and copyright page to the individual chapters and the ads at the back. You need to spend the time to adjust the pages, make sure there are no widows or orphans (and don't use the widows and orphans feature, edit the text), make sure the page count starts where it is supposed to start, don't put headers on the initial chapter page or any of the non-story pages . . . and on and on. Make the interior of your book as beautiful as the words it contains.

Best Practice: Hire someone to do the page layout; believe me it worth the time and frustration of trying to dyi.

Bad Practice: I can just use [shudder] MS Word or OpenOffice. (by the way, if you do use MS Word and are having trouble with page numbering (i.e./ not all pages should have numbers printed), then check out this tutorial: Instant Publisher.

More tips in the next post