6 Desktop Publishing Skills to Get Your Book Self-Published and Distributed Worldwide
Now that you have your manuscript, you may be wondering which is the best desktop publishing company to hire. Or how to self-publish your own book without incurring too much cost?
If you’ve never self-published before, let me suggest that you try publishing an e-book on Amazon first. From there, you can migrate to publishing on other e-reader platforms, such as Barnes and Noble, IBook, Kobo, and eventually other e-reader distributors around the world.
Technically speaking, once your book is on Amazon, it’s available worldwide. But there are plenty of readers out there with other e-reading devices besides the Kindle, so it’s not a bad idea to distribute to other e-readers.
Once you’ve finished distributing your e-reader, then it’s time to get your book in print. We will discuss how to print your own book in another article.
Certainly, books and publications have been a hot topic in the last ten years. With Kindle Publishing and Amazon opening the doors for anyone to cheaply publish a book if they have the know-how, there’s no excuse not to do it yourself.
There are a few things to keep in mind when you want to self-publish.
If you know how to do these 6 easy things, you should be able to publish worldwide in as little as a week, and there’s no need to pay desktop publishing gurus thousands or even hundreds of dollars. Your book can be distributed worldwide with just a few clicks of the button. And there is no need to pay anyone for this.
Self-publishing costs these days have plummeted, and you shouldn’t be using a self-publishing house to help you accomplish these simple tasks, like:
1. How to format your manuscript from a Word document to Kindle’s.mobi version.
And it’s not as difficult as you think. Some programs require you to download them to your computer and may be free like Calibre, others have a small cost like Jutoh.
But I really like the free cloud-based software that Draft2Digital offers. I’ve tried a few free and paid services, including Amazon’s KDP converter, but Draft2Digital is still my favorite. They are a UK company. If you’re having trouble email them and they’ll get back to you in the morning if you’re in the US.
2. How to set up a website and a blog. Because these days you can set one up for $5 a month or even free. No need to pay thousands in developer costs like I once did. The technology is simple and free if you know where to look and how to easily drag and drop things, similar to copying and pasting in a Word document.
Some programs allow you to create landing pages on your WordPress website, but others, like Wix, give you the option to create a landing page even without purchasing any plugins. In fact, I created a landing page for my 16 Princess books using Wix, and I really like the flexibility this technology gives me. For someone who is not technical, I found Wix easy to use. Nothing to download or upload to create the site pages.
3. How to upload your e-book (mobi format) to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) – a matter of filling out forms. I am not kidding.
4. How to set up an Amazon Author Page so you can direct your readers to it, so they can just click on your name and access your bio and other website presence you have from your website, your blog , your Facebook fan page, and all your other social networks, all from Amazon’s book site.
5. How to format your eBook for non-Kindle readers at the click of a button for free.
6. How to get your e-book distributed worldwide in e-reader bookstores, from Australia, Italy, Japan and beyond. And with Amazon, you can even get your books into US libraries.
With the way things are set up for desktop publishing, all you need these days is a good editor and a cover design. Everything else shouldn’t cost you thousands like it has in the past.
But as in everything in life, you have to know where to look.
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