Publish your own book for free

When William P Young wrote his guy-meets-God novel The Shack he had trouble getting it published. Its spirituality put off secular publishers whereas faith-based publishers found it too controversial.

So Young sent it to friends, who were so impressed they set up a company specifically to publish it. A year later it was number one on The New York Times bestseller list and Amazon.

Dreams of literary success are not the only reason for self-publishing. You may be aiming at a niche market, such as an obscure academic discipline or an unusual hobby, where the potential readers will be few but highly interested. You may want to produce a manual for your company or a photo album just for friends or family.

This is where print on demand (POD) comes in. Instead of printing a stack of books, storing them, and sending them out to customers, the publisher prints a POD book only when an order comes in for it. Although it costs more to print one book individually than in a run, there’s no money tied up, no warehousing and the book need never go out of print.

We can’t promise you a bestseller, but we can show you how to do it all yourself, and at minimal cost. The first part of this feature concentrates on getting your book into publishable form. The second looks at low-cost ways of turning your work into a real, ink-on-paper, professionally printed book using POD services.

Tools and tips for authors
First of all, and at the risk of stating the obvious, you’ll need a word processor. The features required will depend on the nature of your book. For any form of writing you’ll need a spelling checker. If you are writing a novel, then you will probably want a word count, search and replace, and page numbering, all of which have been around since the dawn of word processing.

For non-fiction, you’ll want refinements such as an index, a table of contents, and footnotes or endnotes. We have written an article that covers indexing in detail (click here to access it), and other Hands On columns cover the rest (all are available online here).

Although the Hands On tutorials are based on Microsoft Word, you should find that any competent word-processing application will handle the same tasks in a similar way. The free Openoffice Writer offers all these capabilities.

Pictures
If you are using photos in your book, then you’ll need to make sure they are the right size. Most photos benefit from cropping ­ cutting away areas of the image that you don’t want ­ and you should ensure that the finished, cropped image has a print resolution of at least 300dpi (dots per inch). For example, a photo that is 6inx4in on the printed page should measure 1,800x1,200 pixels.

You may also want to correct brightness and contrast, and fix other problems. There’s no shortage of free software to do this. Google Picasa is easy to use, and Irfanview offers better control for more ambitious image-tweakers. You’ll find both on the PCW downloads site.

Layout
Although you can use them to create columned text, marginal text boxes, ‘wrapped’ illustrations and other design elements, word processors such as Microsoft Word and Openoffice Writer are not page layout programs. This may not matter for a novel, for example, but if precise control of layout, position of graphics, typography and general design elegance are important, you’d be far better off with a proper page layout or desktop publishing (DTP) application.