Published: Mar 13, 2021 by Richard Sezov
There’s a phrase people use when talking about a task they can do competently: if it were easy, everybody would do it. Publishing, and particularly self-publishing, is like that. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can try taking the easy (and expensive) path: pay some service to do everything for you. I’m publishing my first novel, so you could argue that I don’t know what I’m doing, since I haven’t done it before. But paying a service to do it for me is not my way, as anybody who knows me will attest.
I’ve been in technology for decades and am a self-attested geek. That means if I’m going to do something, I want to learn all about it and figure out how to do it myself. To publish my first novel, Providence, therefore, I have set out to do, well, everything myself. The only thing I knew I was not competent to do was the cover, so for that I did hire a graphic designer. But the layout of the cover? Check.
On top of that, I’m an open source enthusiast. In case you don’t know what that is, open source software is free, with free meaning much more than having no price tag. Yes, it’s free of price, but it’s also free for you to look at the source code, modify the source code, and contribute to the project. Why do I like open source? Because it drops every barrier to entry, making you free as well to learn new skills. I don’t want to dwell on open source in this post; I just want to make the point that to publish my book, I’m using software that probably most other people aren’t using. I’m hoping, therefore, in these posts not only to help others be a success at publishing, but also do a little publicity for those open source projects that have helped me along the way.
So where do I stand? I have completed the layout of the print book in Scribus, both the cover and the interior. I’ve uploaded that and am awaiting its “processing,” whatever that means. I have also completed the ebook layout for both Amazon and ePub in Calibre, with Pandoc as an intermediary to get the book from its text-only Markdown format into a properly typeset (i.e., curly quotes, em dashes) OpenDocument. I’ve manually uploaded my ebook to my iPad and to my Kindle Paperwhite, to make sure it looks good (and it does).
Now I’m ready to upload the ebooks. I plan to have it available on every platform I can think of: Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Google. We’ll see how that goes in the coming week, but I don’t want to start uploading the ebook until I get some notification from my print distributor that my book is doing anything other than “processing.”
That’s where I stand at the moment. I hope to post more about my actual process once the book is published. Until then, I’ll use this space as a place for updates.
The first word processor I ever used extensively was WordPerfect, in high school. I’d write articles and my serialized story for the school newspaper, papers when I could (since I didn’t own a computer), and anything else I had a chance to write, since the experience was so much better than the typewriter I had at home.