{"id":128,"date":"2014-05-10T04:19:15","date_gmt":"2014-05-10T04:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/?p=128"},"modified":"2014-05-11T07:49:37","modified_gmt":"2014-05-11T07:49:37","slug":"what-i-learned-self-publishing-no-name-key-part-1-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/?p=128","title":{"rendered":"What I learned publishing No Name Key – part 1 – Content"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think my wife, Jessica Argyle<\/a>, may have had the easy part… writing No Name Key;<\/a> a great work of historical fiction; a murder story set in No Name Key, in 1935, as the strongest hurricane ever to hit the US<\/a> came ashore.<\/p>\n

\"No_Name_Key_Cover_for_Kindle\"<\/a> Whether to publish a book yourself, or try to find an agent and publisher was always a question.\u00a0 Amazon has wiped most of the bookstores off the map, and a similar upheaval is happening on the publishing side.\u00a0 Unless you’re Stephen King, and even with a huge following, the economics of being a writer is dismal.<\/a><\/p>\n

In short, you’re now expected to have your own following, and handle just about all your own promotion in return for a relatively small advance and the cachet of a publisher, then they’ll give you something like 7% royalties; not to mention it could take over a year before your book sees the light of day.\u00a0 The alternative, is to do it yourself… the reward is up to 70% royalties and total control.\u00a0 What do you give up?\u00a0 From what I can see, nothing.\u00a0 If the book is great and a publisher is interested in bringing it to their wider audience, you have all the rights, you can still sign up.\u00a0 And I suspect the terms might be a bit more favorable.\u00a0 Not to mention, with Kindle, immediate worldwide availability.<\/p>\n

The downside is having to put the book together for print. I’m not an expert, I’ve done it a couple of times, but each time have to re-learn how to do it – not necessarily a bad thing since the technology is getting better and the exercise is in a lot of ways getting easier.\u00a0\u00a0 Note that there are a lot of people and companies out there who will be happy to do this work for you; prices, quality, and turnaround vary.<\/p>\n

The first decisions are do you want a physical (printed) book, an ebook, or both.\u00a0 We want both, and I’ll cover both in these blog posts.\u00a0 We’ll also assume you’re using Microsoft Word and that your book is well on it’s way to being finished… or at least finished enough to start thinking about publishing.<\/p>\n

For physical publishing, it’s Createspace.<\/a><\/p>\n

For ebook formatting, it’s Calibre<\/a>.\u00a0 Played with Kindlegen, but Calibre very nicely converted a native Word from docx format and handles all ebook formats, not just the Kindle.\u00a0 The alternative, which I spent hours on, was converting Word -> HTML -> .mobi, which was not bad, but not great.<\/p>\n

So the first thing you’ll want to do is choose a size – we chose 5.5″ by 8.5″ and grab a template from CreateSpace<\/a>, it’s pretty complete.\u00a0 Might as well sign up while you’re there.<\/p>\n

Here are a couple of suggestions, all of which were learned the hard way.\u00a0 That’s why they’re written down:<\/p>\n