Adventures in self-publishing I

Over the past couple of months I’ve had the opportunity to tackle many of the challenges associated with self-publishing and I now feel sufficiently on top of all this to share my experiences and recommendations.

I’m going to separate this out between two very different types of publication: (1) my book The New Learning Architect, which is primarily textual, and (2) Onlignment’s Live Online Learning: A Facilitator’s Guide, which is a highly-visual practical handbook. I’ll start with the easier of the two, the book.

I wrote the book in Microsoft Word with the intention of laying it out more formally in Adobe InDesign prior to publication. However, I eventually decided to stick with what I had because that way it would be so much easier to make updates and, anyway, Word was perfectly adequate for laying out text. I’m pleased with that decision because, although I could have given the paperback version more professional gloss using InDesign, I’d not have been in a good position to move publish on the e-book readers.

Publishing to paperback
I published to paperback using Lulu. Before uploading, I exported to PDF from Word (using Lulu’s own PDF template) and this worked fine. I created the cover myself, rather than using Lulu’s own editor, because I knew exactly what I wanted. This had to be a precise job, with exactly the right dimensions, including an allowance for the spine and a box for the ISBN barcode (which Lulu provide). I then exported the artwork from Adobe Illustrator to JPG to upload to Lulu.

Lulu publish from their own site but also through online retailers such as Amazon (but only after you’ve ordered and approved a proof copy). You get to set your own price and to see quite clearly how much you will receive as royalties.

Publishing to ePUB format
Lulu also handle publishing to ePUB, which is the format used for the Apple iBookStore. Conversion into the ePUB format was not trivial, because I had trouble generating a version that was accepted by Lulu as meeting the strict ePUB criteria (I had tried unsuccessfully using Calibre and ePubGen). In the end I imported my Word master into Apple’s Pages program and exported from there. My reasoning was that Apple’s own word processor should be able to export properly to Apple’s own e-book format and I was right - this time it worked perfectly.

However, don’t be impatient to see your book up on the iBookStore. The review process is taking ages, presumably because so many authors are doing the same thing.

Publishing to Kindle
Now this really was easy. Go to Kindle Direct Publishing and upload your Word document. Amazon does the rest. Your title will be up in no time at all.

Then go to Amazon Author Central to establish your author profile and claim authorship of any books you’ve already got up on Amazon.

Publishing to Sony Reader
I wasn’t going to bother with this, but I had a request for the book in this format and thought I’d have a go. If you want to self-publish, you have to go through an intermediary and I chose SmashWords. They will actually publish for Kindle and ePUB as well, but I’d already handled that so I stuck to the Sony LRF format.

This should have been easy but it wasn’t. SmashWords are picky about the formatting and won’t support either footnotes (of which I had hundreds) and tables. Nevertheless I did get a version up and running, which is now labouring through SmashWords and Sony’s review processes.

Would I do it again?
Yes, in fact I already have, and I’ll be sharing that experience later in the week. To publish in so many formats was always going to be a bit of a technical minefield, but by no means insurmountable. What you learn from the experience will make it much easier next time round and just think what you’ve achieved – publication in every known format, complete control over what you publish and when, as well as a much healthier share of the profits.