How to make yourself into an instant publisher

Along with many of my fellow writer and artist friends, I share a desire to obtain publicity and exposure for some of the works I have somehow managed to assemble on paper and on electronic media. (A great number of those creations are wisely kept out of sight and hearing!) The ordinary route to such publication is for the author – creator – to seek out a willing publisher who will attempt to produce and sell the work in a more or less conventional way. Call that way "the bookstore route." Within that route, an author sends a manuscript to a publisher. The publisher may, rarely if ever, decide to publish the manuscript in some manner, and in furtherance of that, hands the piece over to his staff for cleanup, printing, binding, selling, advertising, publicizing, selling, and shipping to bookstores, the publisher’s real customers. Judging from the number of aspiring authors, the chances of being published in this way may at best be estimated to be in the range of one in one million. Quoting a famous politician, "Them ain’t the best of odds."

Eight of us who write, both for fun and for profit, established a working relationship that is now called "The FREE eBook Project." Each of us individually writes what we like to write, and then our manuscripts are edited and more or less "tested" by placing them onto the Internet to gain critical readership and feedback from various audiences. If the manuscripts are "stand-alone," book-size items, and if they pass muster out in the world of readers, they can then be selected for places on the project’s book list. If the manuscripts are smaller items, they are assembled into similar subject groups for placement in "collections" to go together between the electronic covers of single eBooks. None of the original eight people who voluntarily labor in the project have much in the way of money. (We are what is called "old and retired.) We keep the bills to a minimum and we do pay them, thanks to some money hidden from our spouses and by support from readers who appreciate what we are trying to accomplish.

The first of the project’s eBooks has now been published and has been made available to anyone who wants a copy for their own eBook library. The free eBook contains 101 funny poems and has the title, "101 Dumb (Funny) Poems." The initial (test) audience was right here on HubPages. After their many readings and comments, the eBook was chosen for publication and has been made available.

Next to be published is a compilation of tales about their days in the military by members of the FREE eBook Project. It is being assembled as we sit here and wait for it to appear. After that will be another "Dumb (Funny) Poem" eBook. It could be regarded to be a sequel to the first one which is now off and running. Others are also being readied with the idea that the list should continue to grow as rapidly as the small staff can hustle things along.

Being of a small size as to personnel and funding resources, the FREE eBook Project would like to think that there are many manuscripts lurking around that deserve publication and readership. There are problems with such thoughts, however. If we were to open the computer door to authors through which to send good manuscripts that ordinary publishers have rejected time and time-again, we would no longer have time left to eat or sleep, plus our personal computers and other equipment would become clogged with word processor files. That would not be a suitable situation. This brought to mind a funny thought from the distant past. It was imagined that you or I stood out on the street and yelled, "I review poetry." The resulting crowd of thousands and thousands of poetry writers would so clog the street that the mayor and city council would send in the riot police to control the situation.

The situation is not one to cause anyone despair. What we are doing is what other writers can also be doing – making and publishing their own creations. Some may choose to give their eBooks away, and others may want to sell their eBooks. Whatever way is selected, the eBook self-publisher has to accomplish certain tasks, not the least of which is implementing eBook distribution. Giving away free eBooks or peddling them is a subject worthy of its own article, and so that discussion will be left for another day. Here we will begin to offer other writers some ideas about the mechanics of do-it-yourself, nicely professional eBooks that writers can make available on the Internet or on DVD or CD disks.

There are computer programs with which you can prepare your manuscripts and put them into eBook form. The two of those programs most familiar to me are "Open Office Writer," an open source, free, program available from Sourceforge.net, and various versions of Serif’s "Page Plus" programs, beginning with version 8-PDF and extending to Serif’s latest offering, which I believe is now either version X5 or X6. I personally make use of Serif’s Page Plus 8-PDF and the X2 version. Open Office and Page Plus are both capable word processors, and both have the facility to convert the word processors’ texts into portable document format (PDF) files. It should probably be your rule to always produce both word processing (or text) files and PDF files of your manuscripts. You will need the former to come up with the PDF files and, also, to insert off-website-generated text into Internet-compatible carriers, such as articles here on HubPages.

Why PDF files? First, PDF pages will be displayed the way you prepared them. They are compatible with almost all computer operating systems, for example, "Windows," "Unix," "Linux," "Mac," and others. PDF files can also be passworded and copy-protected as desired. When we use PDF formatting in our FREE eBook Project, we cause our output to be usable with Adobe’s Reader (PDF) free software all the way back to their version 5. (Why not let everyone read your books, not only those with the latest Adobe Reader version?) Now, that is a fine reason to make use of text-to-PDF software. Another fine reason is that PDF eBooks can be quickly and easily converted into eBooks of other types, those that may be required for display and reading on a large number of eBook readers and even on many cellular telephones.

A truly handy tool is the program called "Calibre." Calibre is said to be an eBook management tool; that is, it really can manage a whole library of electronic books for you. With Calibre you can list, sort, display, and otherwise control a large number of eBooks, arranging them as you may desire into your choice of groupings. But, maybe better even than those nice task managers, you can convert your PDF eBooks into nine other file formats. This number may change in the future, but nine is a significant diversity of eBook file formats available with Calibre at the moment. With Calibre, then, you can supply yourself and your clients with essentially any eBook file format wanted for use in computerized eBook readers – all the way from any of the ordinary computer systems on through hand-held eBook readers and cellular telephones.

Do you want to know something else that is really nice about the Calibre software? Of course you do. It is free and available for instant downloading from Sourceforge.net.

Suggestions: Gather together the software you can use in your composing your intended eBooks. Be sure to obtain a copy of the latest free versions of Adobe Reader, Calibre, Open Office, and any of the imaging programs you believe you might be able to use, such as Gimp-2, FotoSketcher, and any others. Bookmark useful Web sites, some of which are "yourdictionary.com," various language translators (i.e. Google’s), and more. If you want to have some commercial software packages of good use, take a look at the offerings on Serif.com. Their programs are not very expensive and they contain a great many useful features, not only in the creation of your eBooks but in production of publicity and advertising for them with and without the use of Serif’s professional templates and page designs.

As we have discussed on HubPages in other articles you might also want to keep track of the use of your writings by others on the Internet. Check out the article about plagiarism here on Hubpages.

None of us involved in our FREE eBook Project are graphic artists. Thus we would find it difficult to produce DVD/CD labels for our eBooks we will produce in physical form. We obtained and use a package from the Avery Dennison Corporation called "CD Stomper." We bought it for a modest sum at one of those large "wholesale" box stores. It came complete with the "Click and Design" software needed to print and to apply our various disk labels with very little skill involved in the process. (An example is shown in the image atop this article.)

When time permits, I will supplement this lead-in article with more detailed information about our production of eBooks and conversions for distribution in the FREE eBook Project. In the meantime, you can obtain a copy of our first eBook offering, really free for your downloading. Be our guest. Let us hear from you.