Trends, Reviews, Information and Some Self-Publishing History in the Making

I regularly read several blogs by individuals who are authorities on self-publishing, book marketing or book design in hopes of learning as much as possible. All of the individuals whose posts are referenced here and linked to are not only experts in the field, but are successful and experienced self-publishers themselves.

From Joel Friedlander's The Book Designer: The Biggest Secret of Book Marketing Success

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2012/09/biggest-secret/#more-23674

An interesting post about book marketing. Joel reveals the method of book marketing that will produce the absolute best results.

From Aaron Shepard's Publishing Blog: Stumbling on Hyphenation

http://www.newselfpublishing.com/blog/#Wordhyphenation

A review of Microsoft's Word 2011 by Aaron, who among other things, is the author of Perfect Pages, and extremely proficient in the use of Word to lay-out book interiors for use in POD publishing. In this review, Aaron focuses primarily on the problems with the hyphenation feature of the 2011 version of Word.

From Aaron Shepard's Publishing Blog: Counting on Amazon

http://www.newselfpublishing.com/AmazonCounting.html

For you coding fans and anyone who sells their book on Amazon, this blog is worth reading. Aaaron examines the inner workings of many of the marketing tools for authors on Amazon. A blog post well worth reading from one of the experts in book marketing using Amazon.

Morris Rosenthal's Self-Publishing 2.0:  The Decade of POD Publishing Gives Way to eBooks

http://www.fonerbooks.com/selfpublishing/?p=2101

I wrote about this post a bit earlier this week and linked to it. Thought provoking look at the changing nature of the industry of self-publishing as it relates to the technology of print-on-demand and ebooks.

From Dana Lynn Smith's The Savvy Book Marketer: Free Images for Your Blog or Website


http://bookmarketingmaven.typepad.com/book_marketing_maven/2012/09/where-to-find-free-images-for-your-blog-and-website.html

Free is good! Ms. Smith provides information about locating images for use to improve blogs and websites that cost nothing for the user.

Software for Do-it-yourself Self-publishers

Even with an entry cost as low as $39 at CreateSpace, some authors may struggle to get their first book self-published due to financial considerations. This is particularly true if the author hires an editor to give the book an all important edit. Other authors may have the desire to create both the cover and the interior of their books.

As with everything else in self-publishing, there always seems to be one more hill to climb in the learning process. In an effort to shorten the learning curve for other authors, I would like to suggest some software to learn how to use so time is not wasted in determining what software to attempt to master.

If you only want to learn one, I suggest learning Adobe InDesign. I spent two days at a training seminar and plan to repeat the course. There is a lot to learn and I need to go through the basic course again before I know enough to feel comfortable poking around and really learn how to use InDesign. I am determined to master this software as it can be used to create covers and the interior files for POD books. It is a professional grade design program and can import items from other Adobe programs such as Photoshop.

Word can be used to create interior files and covers but it will take a lot of creative effort and care to produce files that look professional. If you feel up to this or have already mastered Word, I suggest obtaining a copy of Aaron Shepard's Perfect Pages and read it cover to cover. Aaron creates the files for his books using Word for Mac and shares his technical know how and experiences with creating LSI files in Perfect Pages.

The Publishing Maven, Christie Pinheiro, uses BookCoverPro to create the covers for her books. She assures me the software is relatively easy to learn and creates professional looking covers.

If any of the readers of this blog have other software to suggest, please post a comment to share with the other visitors.