How to Simplify Self-Publishing and Save Your Hair

Introduction

How to Simplify Self-Publishing and Save Your Hair has three parts that cater to different needs.

1. To publish a narrative without complex formatting, the Quickie Guides in Part I will get you going right away.

2. Part II presents the concept behind the guide and the Self-Publishing Checklist organized by task with links to further resources.

3. The Reference section in Part III goes into details for tasks grouped in the order they appear on the Draft2Digital or Kindle Direct Publishing platform.

The complexity of this guide makes any presentation wanting. Different formats serve various needs.

• To demonstrate the concepts in this guide, low-priced black-and-white versions exercise all the features of the Draft2Digital platform. The complex formatting exceeds the capabilities of its tools focused on narrative, however. Blank lines and borders disappear. Tables spill across pages. Color-highlights fades away. Using a theme with graphics and phrase caps adds more clutter. View the e-book horizontally in landscape mode, if you can. The large amount of screenshots blows up the file size, thus raising the minimum price required by online retailers.

• The full-color e-book gives a better reading experience, taking advantage of highlights to convey information better. The e-reader still controls most of the text formatting. Effects such as highlighting sections with different fonts or colors may disappear. Its production required a second, labor-intensive pass through Kindle Create, and pricing reflects that.

• The full-color paperback in an oversized format best reflects the source document and allows studying the screenshots in greatest detail. Of course, hyperlinks don't work in paperbacks. It required a third pass through KDP and expensive four-color printing.

• Finally, the audiobook allows listening to the narrative repeatedly during other activities, but comes from a fourth time-consuming production that had to compensate for lack of visuals.

The web changes constantly. If you come across a broken link, try again the next day to make sure it's not a temporary Internet hiccup. If the link continues to fail, please let us know at [email protected].

All screenshots by the author.

Part I

1. Quickie Guides

1.1. A 15-Minute Recipe to Create a Book Cover

FIFTEEN MINUTES CAN make the difference between a bestseller and a shelf warmer. When you self-publish, the right free tools and a recipe can determine your author fate.

For we do judge a book by its cover. More precisely, in the digital age, we judge a book by its cover thumbnail. Marketing people believe that this little picture in the search results and Books you may like section contributes to 50% of sales.

The one-five minutes to go from a heap of pictures and text to professionally looking print and e-book covers can lift you into the Parthenon of best-selling authors—or wherever they hide out in your country. Developing an eye-catching and attractive design takes a bit longer, including properly researching U.S. Department of Writers prime grade titles and a seasoned book description and author biography.

Given its importance, you may want to turn to professional designers and artists to develop and execute concepts. A good cover design follows psychological principles to attract and guide the eye. The overall look balances the various graphic elements, colors, and fonts with optimum placement of book titles and author names. Every genre also has conventions that readers recognize, even if only subconsciously.

Long on time and short on cash? Do your own research. Study covers of bestseller in that subgenre and emulate their practices. Free tools like the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Cover Creator and Draft2Digital will help you create your masterpiece for print and e-book in no time following this recipe.

Ingredients

1 BAG OF CASHEW GOURMET mix with premium chocolate chips (optional)

1 JPG, PNG, or TIFF image

1 book title, USDW prime grade

1 book subtitle (optional)

1-4 author names

1 book description, pre-seasoned

1 author bio

1 author picture, funny or serious (optional)

1 free Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing account

1 free Draft2Digital account

1-4 glasses of 1981 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Macallan Lalique 62-year-old Whisky, or Bud Lite (totally optional, but so worth it, or not)

Directions/Steps

1. Wet your throat with your chosen beverage. so you don't suffer a thirst attack. Otherwise, fifteen minutes can feel like an eternity.

2. Fortify yourself with a generous helping of cashew gourmet mix to have the energy to power through this arduous journey.

3. Throw your garment into the laundry so the chocolate stains don't set before you finish.

4. Log in to your favorite KDP account, create a new e-book project, and enter the required metadata, including title and optional subtitle.

5. On the Kindle eBook Content tab, launch Cover Creator.

6. Upload your picture.

COVER CREATOR COMES with premade elements, including an Image Gallery with categories from Animals to Concepts and Ideas to Technology. A field at the top lets you search by keywords and pick an image to grace the front cover.

You may not use covers made using stock images from the gallery outside KDP, however. Rather than risking a lawsuit that will cost Amazon a fraction of a single share of stock, I'll turn to my favorite free photo sites so I can show the results online.

A number of these offer free images under various terms.

• Pexels

• Unsplash

• Wikimedia Commons

• Pixabay

• Free Images

• Free Digital Photos

• morgueFile

• Death to the Stock Photo

Finding quality cover art takes time. Like with Cover Creator, read the license agreement to ensure that it allows your chosen pictures on book covers. Pexels, for instance, requires you to add value to images that you use on a physical product.

You may also want a free graphics editor like Paint.NET, The GIMP, or Canva to create composite images or make color adjustments. Say if I were to (completely coincidentally) want a cover for a book titled How to Simplify Self-Publishing and Save Your Hair, combining pictures of books and hair comes to mind.

Fortunately, Mahrael Boutros at Pexels saved me the 207.16 seconds I would have to spend in the editor to combine pictures in layers by providing a free one touching on both themes.

Cover Creator accepts JPG, PNG, or TIF files that meet the Amazon Publishing Guidelines and have a minimum resolution of 300 dots per inch (DPI) for print. Any text already on it should be legible.

Amazon considers a height/width ratio of 1.6:1 ideal, with a minimum of 1,000 x 625 pixels (px), and a recommended 2,560 x 1,600 px. The large size ensures you meet the DPI requirements. Upscaling small images results in blurriness and pixilation. If you download pictures from stock sites, go for a size that fits the cover. I hence downloaded the large version with 2,880 px height.

You do not need to resize your photo in one of the above-mentioned programs. Simply upload it, and the specialized tool takes care of Amazon’s self-publishing requirements.

Thanks to integration with KDP, Cover Creator combines your image with information from the Details tab to create ten starting designs. The help comes at the price of flexibility. You have no choice beyond these, although you can change to one of eight layouts in the next step. Of course, you can download the finished cover as starting point for further manipulation in a graphics editor.

KDP Front Cover Creator Designs

THE thumbnail view shows which designs work on that scale on sales pages like the Kindle store. With some, the long title and subtitle become impossible to read, particularly with image-based designs, and thus the cover loses a lot of value in an ad. Since many readers will only see the small version to entice them to click the Buy button, make sure it gets the critical information across.

7. Have another gulp of your drink while you rack your confused brain to decide on the best design.

8. Nothing wrong with one more swig. Picking a design is so hard.

9. Wipe the chocolate stains off the keyboard (okay, maybe the gourmet cashew mix was not the best of ideas, but doesn't the wonderful bouquet of the Chateau Lafite make up for it?)

10. Adjust your design in the Cover Creator editor. This step may require additional drinks.

ONCE YOU FIND A GOOD starting design, Style & Edit lets you customize most elements of the cover.

The three buttons at the lower left apply quick styles.

• Select a pre-styled color scheme or create your own by picking primary, secondary, and text colors,

• Choose one of eight layouts to reposition the existing design elements,

• Choose typeface sets, pre-matched combinations of fonts.

Once you've refined the design, you can change individual items. Clicking the photograph brings up a dialogue box with options to resize and rotate the image. Dragging the square handles also resizes, whereas the round handles rotates. Dragging the entire picture will reposition it. Click to reset image position will restore the original one, which may be larger than the design. Similarly, Undo may not return to the state you want. To go back to picking a design, click [Start Over].

KDP Front Cover Creator Style & Edit

TO FORMAT TEXT ELEMENTS individually, clicking within their dashed box brings up the formatting bar with the following style choices.

• a good 40 typefaces,

• Autofit or one of 14 font sizes,

• Bold or italics (only available for certain fonts after selecting text),

• font color,

• drop shadow,

• alignment.

To pick a color, Cover Creator brings up a color palette. It has no means to specify number codes for a shade. Note the exact scheme or positions of the colors you picked to match them in the print version.

You can insert or delete text. Keep in mind, however, that Cover Creator checks if writing on the cover matches the entries on the Details tab in KDP. Adding returns with [Enter] lets you wrap long titles or subtitles in a logical way without running afoul of this Amazon requirement.

Preview lets you check the design in color mode, grayscale, and as a thumbnail. You can zoom in one level to focus on details. To see the cover with different device configurations, use the KDP Online Previewer once you exited Cover Creator.

11. Celebrate your efficiency and productivity with another sip.

12. Make sure that the design follows good layout principles and all elements work together.

13. Ignore the blurry lines in the design and the voices in your head claiming you're drunk. You earned it.

14. Click [Save & Submit] to upload the cover and return to KDP.

COVER CREATOR DOESN't have a button to download the cover for use with other publishing platforms. Right-clicking the Preview image lets you save a high-resolution version. Note that the KDP Online Previewer saves a low-resolution image, but includes the high-res one when you download the HTML book.

15. Take a four-minute nap to sober up.

16. Wake up in a panic when you realize that you only have one minute and thirteen seconds left to finish the wrap-around print cover.

17. Continue setup of paperback.

18. On the Paperback Content tab, launch Cover Creator.

19. Upload the e-book cover you downloaded as starting point.

20. Down a drink in celebration, because the tool tells you the design to use with a front cover image.

21. Curse at Amazon because Cover Creator cannot automatically match the color scheme or pull the description and author bio.

FOR A PRINT BOOK, YOU need to extend the front cover across the spine and back. Customarily, the color scheme wraps around all three sides.

You can't finish a wraparound cover until you have converted your interior file and know the exact number of pages. The platforms calculate the spine width based on the following.

• paper type (white/cream),

• print type (color/black and white),

• interior page count.

KDP Wraparound Cover Creator Style & Edit

THE PAPERBACK COVER Creator’s first design adds spine and back to an uploaded front cover following industry practices. Its spine shows the primary author name and book title in a contrasting text color. Not much help other than making a template unnecessary. You have to pick a matching back cover color yourself. Fortunately, you do remember the color schemes you used above, right?

Customarily, the back contains blurbs, information printed on the back cover to describe the book and make it attractive to buy, such as the book description and your author bio, plus your headshot. Cover Creator doesn't fetch the text for the back cover from KDP’s Details page or Author Central. If you have tight deadlines, you may want to switch to whisky at this point.

Amazon will add the ISBN barcode in the white rectangle in the lower right corner.

22. Down the rest of the bottle in despair.

23. With 23 seconds to go, breathe a sigh of relief because you remember that you planned to distribute wide.

24. Log in to Draft2Digital.

25. Upload the front cover you focus-grouped for weeks.

26. Click the Cover button.

27. Countdown the remaining seconds while D2D auto-magically creates a wraparound cover.

DRAFT2DIGITAL AUTOMATICALLY generates a wraparound cover from the front one in the paper size specified. The background color from the top extends all around. Cover Creator frames the preview image in a neutral color. Remove that border before uploading to Draft2Digital.

Its tool pulls the book description from the Details tab onto the top of the back cover. The lower half splits into the bio of the primary author from the Contributor Profiles on the left, the matching profile picture on the right, and the automatically generated ISBN barcode below them.

D2D Wraparound Cover

UNFORTUNATELY, D2D only makes a low-resolution image unsuitable for printing available for download. Nevertheless, your e-book and paperback now share finished covers, and the actual production only took fifteen minutes thanks to free tools.

28. Stop your 15-minute timer. You've finished your covers.

29. Take another sip to celebrate your accomplishment.

30. Go to bed and nurse your hangover.

1.2. A 15-Minute Recipe to Self-Publish Your Story

TIRED OF WIPING THE virtual dust off your manuscript? Scared of formatting your content according to a hundred-page style guide? Frustrated at missing out on the self-publishing revolution. Fear not. Fifteen minutes can change your life, literarily, with the right free tools and a recipe.

That’s one-five minutes to go from text to professionally looking e- and print book files. But they don't sell themselves. Marketing takes a bit longer, including properly researching keywords, subgenre categories, and a seasoned book description. But if you're dying to see a finished book within the hour, because you promised your mother a copy for her birthday next week, start with something simple and improve the metadata later.

Oh, and you do need front cover art, a JPG or PNG image with the book title and author name on it. You can create your own with free tools like Paint.Net or Canva. Technomagic will convert it into a wrap-around print cover.

Ingredients

1 STANDARD BOX OF COOKIE mix (optional)

1 DOC, DOCX, ODT, or RTF manuscript

7 keywords

1-5 subgenre categories

1 book description, pre-seasoned

1 author bio

1 author picture, funny or serious (optional)

1 JPG or PNG front cover image, well done

1 free Draft2Digital account

1 cuppa joe or tea, or 1 glass of milk (optional)

1 spoonful of sugar, helps the medicine go down (totally optional)*

*Mary Poppins not required

Directions/Steps

1. Preheat the oven to the temperature on the cookie mix box.

2. Grab a cup or glass of your favorite working beverage so you don't suffer a thirst attack. Otherwise, fifteen minutes can feel like an eternity.

3. Open your manuscript in your word processor and check for consistency.

WHAT, YOU THOUGHT YOU were done with the manuscript? You need to make sure you have no formatting issues that the Draft2Digital converter can't