DIY: self-publishing digitally

GraphicNovel, Comicsbeat

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For those who work in digital media--writers, photographers, video producters, musicians, voice actors, artists, animators, musicians, and any combination of these--this is a survey of options available for digital self-publishing. TopTenReviews offers extensive information about the Best Online Book Publishing Companies. Possibly most useful about this TopTenReviews page is the breakdown of factors involved in self-publishing.

But self-publishing isn't limited to books; there are graphic novels, photographic anthologies, videos, music, and games to consider. Since games require extensive user interaction, they're a topic for another day.

Several online portals offer exciting opportunities. Amazon's CreateSpace (free to signup) can be used to publish books, music, and films. KDP, Amazon's Kindle portal, has categories for book genres, comics, and graphic novels. Selling on Amazon is featured.

Lulu offers full services, including assigning an ISBN number free, Print on Demand (POD), reviewing and marketing. Careful with the ISBN number, though. Unless you specifically buy it yourself, Lulu owns it. Here's Lulu's FAQ on the topic.

With Draft2Digital you self through the website. Formatting and distribution are free; Draft2Digital takes 10% of the retail price when you sell. It looks like their primary focus is books with manuscripts submitted in .doc, .docx, and .rtf formats. Since Draft2Digital takes care of the distribution, they will format your document to fit the buyer/seller's requirements.

File formats are where things get sticky. Each bookseller has different file format requirements. Best to check each and print out their requirements pages. Google Play Books Partner Center is where you can get started for selling through Google. According to Wikipedia,

... As of now, Google accepts EPUB versions 2.0.1 and 3.0. Both text and image-based PDFs are accepted when the EPUB format is not available, with the preference being for PDFs with a text layer.

For reading on e-readers or third-party apps, ebooks can be downloaded in the EPUB ("flowing text") or PDF ("scanned pages") formats. The advantage of EPUB has over PDF is that it allows the book's text to adjust or 'reflow' automatically to different screen sizes. Books of which only a PDF version is available can be difficult to read on smaller screens.

Kindle file formats are proprietary, so it's best to sell through KDP. File formats accepted are listed on the types of formats page.

Publishing to Apple and selling on the iBooks store requires an iTunes account. Here's a FAQ for Authors & Book Publishers.

My experience with reading and viewing purchased media (and I'll admit my experience is limited) is that there's a big difference between owning the actual device and using a reader app. Pick you market carefully and test your product once it's available. A panel in a graphic novel that's rendered too small to be readable and with no option for enlarging it simply doesn't work.


-- Marge

DIY publishing

If you google "diy publishing book," it looks like everyone in the world wants to help you do it -- for a fee.  That aside, more and more authors are electing to self-publish.  The story quoted below -- about author Theresa Ragan -- is from an article in Huffington Post and explains why authors choose to self-publish.

 For nineteen years she was mostly a stay-at-home mom raising four children -- all the while penning romance novels. But she got nowhere with a few agents and was turned down over a hundred times by publishers. Although she knew about self-publishing she dismissed it as a vanity club. In 2010, while surfing the web for a job to help pay the bills, she stumbled on an article by a successful self-published author which prompted her to give it a shot ("what do I have to lose?"). She hooked up with CreateSpace, the self-publishing arm of Amazon.com and self -published her first book in March 2011 in both paperback and e-book formats. Within the first two months she was stunned by the sale of over two thousand copies -- and the sales continued to rise. To date, she has self-published four romance and two thriller novels with sales exceeding three hundred and fifty thousand copies. Theresa expects to cross the million dollar mark in royalties by March 2013. And the good news doesn't stop there. Several top-line publishers are pursuing her.Thomas and Mercer, Amazon's "traditional" mystery and thriller line, will now republish her two thrillers. In my interview with Theresa Ragan on August 21, 2012, she said that prior to venturing into self-publishing, "I would have gratefully signed with any traditional publisher with no advance and a six percent royalty." Lucky for Theresa that all the publishers passed on her.

This article in Forbes reports on the first self-published no.1 best seller, Wait for You by J. Lynn.  It also gives some pointers on how to sell your book successfully, that is, make money at it.

Many of the guides available about self-publishing cost -- sometimes in the hundreds of dollars.  But you can find good information for free on all aspects of writing at Authonomy.  It's interesting to note that Amazon's CreateSpace offers all the information on self-publishing.  Nook has also entered the market for self-publishing e-books with NOOK Press.

An intriguing and informative approach to writing could be something like Wattpad, where you can "Discover a World of Unlimited Stories."  At this site you can --

Find your audience on Wattpad! Write one chapter at a time, or share your full novel. Introduce us to great characters; explore new genres, entertain us and make us laugh... or cry.

Similar sites are Figment, WritersCafe,  weBook, and FictionPress.

-- Marge