self publishing for free - write publish and market it

A friend of mine was thinking of writing a book of recipes – specializing in chocolate. For quite sometime my husband is asking me to compile and put together all the 100- odd chicken recipes which I have scribbled in dairies and notepads. Another friend has told me that she is editing and updating database of names with its meaning and she wants it to be published.

All of them wanted to write and self-publish. Self-publishing is made easy with advance technologies in publishing. Here I will share some ideas and tools to bring out a book of your own, without paying hefty up-front cost!

To me writing a book or putting together scattered recipes in one place and making it readable is indeed daunting task. Some years ago, one of my relatives published a book of Short Stories authored by himself. He published it through traditional publishers. I am sure he must have faced lot of hurdles in first writing the stories and putting it together, then negotiating with publishing house. Then taking care of design and printing of the book. And then marketing. I told him recently that I am planning to bring out 101-recipes of chicken delights and sort advice on publishing. The first step he asked to take in this regard was: WRITE.

Right. Newbies, like me, tend to take two steps at a time. Stay focus on the first step, my relative advised me. Just write first. The first step is to WRITE a right book. Even if we starting writing one page a day, we can come up with 90-page book in three months. Finalize your work and keep aside your first draft. A week or two later, pick up the draft; read, re-read and revised it. If you can afford, seek professional help to asses your work and take his/her comments. Once you are satisfied with your final draft, search for the online publishers.

You have ideas and creative skill to write next bestseller. But ever wonder if there are any tools that help in putting those ideas creativity to digital format? Well, it would need separate hubpages to write details on those tools. But here are some hints and tips on writing tools to get you guys going.

The best one is free – WRITER, it is from java.com: OpenOffice.Org.  If you writing for small project of small book, WRITER will be enough.  If you intend to write for large project and volumn of pages for huge book, then go for Final Draft version 7.0 - a software for professional writers as well as for personal use.

If you have difficulty in writing, then you can opt for speech to text software.  In this catagory, the best one is Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.0 Professional.

And if you don't want to spend money on writing tools, then as said earlier, go for OpenOffice.Org application or you can also try this wonderful software yWriter 4, which is free and easy to use software, keep track of characters, events and places. 

And if you are on the move, and want to use Online writing software, try Google's Docs, or Zoho Office or Adobe's online word processor, Buzzword.

I planning to write a separate hub on the experiences of Ywriter 4 and other software for writing!  Once I write the hubpages on this topic, then watch out for link here!

As already said, advance technologies have made self-publishing task easy. Here you don't have need to have an agent or talk and negotiate with large publishing house. Some it would takes months of negotiation and finalization of the contracts – even for the established and renewed authors. In the first place large publishing houses won't entertain newbie authors. The Internet, Web 2.0 technologies have thrown lot of opportunities to writes to publish their work either on blogs or forums or sites like hubpages.com or squidoo.com. Moving a step further, you can publish your work as PRINT on Demand (POD) and sell your books.

There are varied online services available for self-publisher. They provide tools to write, publish and market for authors. Here are a few of online self-publishing websites:

The top ranked in self-publish service is LULU.COM. The reason being ,it is simple but versatile in offering complete solution in print-on-demand solutions.  You can publish anything from paper-cover novels to hard-bound research to photo books, to calendars, CD and much more.  And what is more!  You can do all these without spending a cent up-front.

The website was revamped recently to make navigation easy for the newbie.   And addition of DEMO helps new authors to learn fast on how to publish through LULU.COM.  There extensive help available to FAQ section to proceed step-by-step into self-publish.  This site is highly recommended for both amateur and professional alike.

BLURB has a free downloadable software called BookSmart to help building your book.  The software helps to imports your writing from some blogs and also helps import images from the photo hosting websites like Picasa, Flickr.  But BLURB bogs down when working large voluminous books.  Blurb is good for illustrated books, with lots of photos and less number of pages.

Here you can also offer free sample chapters – first 15-pages for readers’ preview.  In market-place, you can increase ranking in search by adding tags, categories and descriptions.

Their help section is not as detailed as in lulu.com, however, you can seek assistance from Custom Bookmaker.

Wordclay.com is another fine print-on-demand service for new authors.  It is sort of DO IT YOURSELF (DIY) service when it comes to publishing.  They provide DIY self-publishing wizard which runs you through every aspect of publishing your book.

Apart from providing Free DIY self-publishing wizard, they also provide premium services to create, publish, distribute and market your work.

http://www.wordclay.com/

Wordclay.com is another fine print-on-demand service for new authors. It is sort of DO IT YOURSELF (DIY) service when it comes to publishing. They provide DIY self-publishing wizard which runs you through every aspect of publishing your book. This is highly recommended for novice authors.

Apart from providing Free DIY self-publishing wizard, they also provide premium services to create, publish, distribute and market your work.

Founded in 1997, Xlibris are the pioneer in self-publishing service industry.  Here you require contacting a consultant and consulting your work and the way the book need to be published.  The consultant would offer you the right solution and package for your work.  Once the deal is done, you can go ahead publish your book the way you wanted.  The consultation process is free of charge.

Added advantage is that you can have premium editions of your book in leather bound.

Very popular place sell your art or work is CafePress.com.  I like this particular site for various option available for selling your work.  You can sell T-shirts with your art-work.  Or sell greeting-cards out of your photo collection.   You can sell audio or data CD, Photos, Calendars, T-shirts, Mugs, gifts, posters, bumper stickers etc. through this site using your art work.   Apart from this you can also sell your books printed on demand.  You can upload your book PDF format (not more than 100 MB).  You can tweak templates to suit your work and nature of book.  But not all the options are available which are there in WordClay or Lulu.com.

You can also open your own store – available in two options – one Free basic store and fee based Premium Store.

Apart from the above, there are several online self-publishing services available. Some of them are, listed randomly (not in any particular order):

• WeBook
• CreateSpace (acquired by Amazon.com)
• iUniverse
• AuthorHouse
• BooksJustBooks

If your market is India, then I would suggest you to try out these print-on-demand self-publishing websites.

One is Pothi. Pothi.com has extensive help on formatting and writing your book. It is worth a look, even if you are using other self-publishing services. Bangalore based Pothi.com‘s founding members are Abhaya Agarwal & Jaya Jha are IIT-Kanpur graduates. Book pricing is not very expensive here!

Another place for Indian market is Goa based media company CinnamonTeal, cost effective way to self-publish and print-on-demand services.

Also have a look at JustPrint, in case you are just looking to print a few pages or a book for your own personal use.  JustPrint subsidy of Overnite Business Support Services Pvt. Ltd. (Overnite Express Courier company).