You’ve written a book, paid an excellent editor (hopefully me) to carefully edit and proof it, and you now have a pristine Microsoft Word document that is ready to be magically turned into a book. But how does this happen? You can’t just send a Microsoft Word doc to a printer and hope for the best (well, you can, but it won’t go very well). If you want your finished product to pass for a professional-looking book with cred, there are a few more steps you must take.
Step 1
First, you hire a book designer. The best way to get a book designer referral is to call on fellow independent authors. You need a graphic designer who specifically has expertise in book layout and book cover design—preferably one person who can handle both tasks, so that you don’t have to communicate with two designers to coordinate their visions.
The designer will import the contents of your manuscript from Word and lay it out in InDesign or another page layout program specifically designed for books. This will create the right margins, space the chapters appropriately, formalize headers, insert page numbers in the right places, etc.
At the same time, the designer will create cover art for you, including a back page with a book description and all the appropriate information, and a spine. He or she will then save all these files to send to the printer in the right formats.
HINT: Consider buying the Chicago Manual of Style for explicit information about how to format the “front matter” and “back matter” of a book.
Step 2
While your designer is hard at work, you should secure an ISBN number for your book. That’s the long string of numbers that goes on both the outside of the book and on the copyright page in the front matter. The ISBN number is imperative to sell, distribute, and catalog the book. It’s required by bookstores, online distributors like Amazon, and libraries. It also makes your book fer real.
To buy an ISBN, visit Bowker Identifier Services at https://www.myidentifiers.com/isbn/main. One ISBN number costs $125. If you’re planning to write a series of books, you can buy them in bundles to save a little bit.
NOTE: Make sure you give the ISBN to the designer to insert into the final design.
Step 3
Decide which route to take to self-publish your book. There are three basic options for independent authors.
OPTION 1:
Pay a local printer to print and bind your book for you. This is the most economical way to profit from your books, if (this is a huge caveat) you are sure you can sell these books. The more books you get printed, the better the deal, but once you have 10,000 books in your garage, you better have a great plan for selling them. This option is ideal for people who have a built-in mechanism for selling books—like teachers, seminar leaders, and lecturers who regularly host events that draw large crowds, or people who already happen to own their own bookstore.
OPTION 2:
Use a print-on-demand company to print copies of your book as people order them. They handle distribution—including to big booksellers like Amazon—and in exchange, they take a much bigger cut of the profits. The major pro to this is that you don’t have to pay for a bunch of books up front, and you don’t have to deal with mailing people books when they order them.
The con is that you can expect the on-demand printer to keep about $11 of the cost of each book you sell. You have to charge enough for the book to actually profit from it.
Examples of print-on-demand book publishers: Lighting Source, CreateSpace
OPTION 3:
Publish your book as an ebook only. This is definitely the cheapest option. It also is the one that requires you to be most tech-savvy. And you don’t get the reward of holding a printed book in your hand. Nevertheless, a lot of people have made a lot of money selling only ebooks.
Step 4
Have your designer communicate with your printer to find out what file type it prefers. Or, if you’re using an online service, either you or your designer can figure this out by reading the online specs.
Step 5
PROOF THE FINAL MANUSCRIPT AS IT IS LAID OUT BY THE PRINTER. Make sure you get a “galley proof” back from the printer in order to do this on paper. It’s key to proof the final version on paper instead of on your computer screen.
Once you give the printer the go-ahead to go to print, “stopping the presses” is very, very expensive. Like, thousands-of-dollars expensive. I can’t stress this enough: PROOF IT. CAREFULLY. If you hired an editor at an earlier point, bring her back in to proof it for you. This might seem like an extravagant expense at this point, but if it eliminates any lingering typos or text issues from your masterpiece, it’s priceless.
Thank you to Jill Abelson, a marketing professional and yoga expert / author-client of mine, for helping me fill in the gaps on this article! Jill has several wonderful books available at her web site, yogaofliberation.com.
