Publication 06: Self-Publishing

In these recent posts, I’ve discussed the complicated subject of publishing.

I did this because I’ve seen that many new, or unpublished authors, do not fully understand the complexity of publishing. In the past posts, I’ve discussed what is required to transform a rough file on a computer screen to a polished and completed book.

If you’ve studied what is needed to get your manuscript ready, it’s now time to decide which path to take.

As was discussed earlier, do your homework, check every

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option.

After you have weighed how much time and effort you want to invest in publishing your manuscript and you feel that Self-Publishing is the route you want to take, there are many options open to help you with that task.

The first task is to prepare your manuscript. In previous posts, we discussed what must be done before publishing. There are software packages that are designed for that task. I am not going to comment on how good they are. That is part of the required homework you must do as you decide on your formatting software.

Consider the cost of the package, the quality of the final product and the learning curve required to efficiently work with the software. As you are considering those aspects of software, consider using the writing programs which you most likely used in writing the manuscript – Word or WordPerfect.

Using Word or Word Perfect may require a bit more detailed effort, but both of those writing packages work. If you wrote a manuscript with one of them, you know how they work. Therefore, there is no learning curve. Both of the software packages have a final option of converting and saving the manuscript as a PDF file, which is what is required for self-publishing.

While I will not recommend any software package, full disclosure requires that I tell you that I use WordPerfect for all of my self-published manuscript formatting.

That leaves one last software related item. Images?

If the images you are planning to use in your manuscript are basic images, the two image software packages which I use work fine. They are Photoshop and Microsoft Digital Image. With both of these packages, you can do minor image repair and enhance the intensity, tint or brightness of an image.

If you plan to do some exotic image processing, you need to do a search for the newest and best image processing software.