Consumer's Guide for Self-Publishers

DESIGN & FORMATTING

I've used most of these design, formatting, and conversion tools at one time or another and I like them for different reasons. Browse through them to find the ones that attract you.

See also the Author Marketplaces chapter for places to find professionals to do this for you. (Including Bublish, Fiverr, PubLaunch, and Reedsy,)

Reminder: This consumer's guide is a companion reference to the Self-Publishing Boot Camp Guide for Authors, 4th Edition, which provides step-by-step instructions on how to create, publish, distribute, and market, and sell your book.

This info changes all the time. Get the most recent edition and updates at http://selfpubbootcamp.com/free-consumers-guide-for-self-publishers/

IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

Adazing

www.adazing.com/free-tools-templates-graphics/

Find free book cover mockups, editable media kit, business card templates, sell sheet templates, etc. They upsell you a lot but this is good stuff for design and marketing.

Adobe Acrobat Pro / Document Cloud

acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat/acrobat-pro.html

Acrobat Pro and the new Acrobat Cloud are Adobe's software for viewing, creating, combining, and controlling Adobe PDF documents. If you're doing your own book formatting and conversion to PDF, you need these and you need to keep them updated. Most authors, however, hire this out.

You can create PDF files from any application that prints, combine files into a single PDF document, protect documents with password protection, annotate and collaborate, sign documents, create fillable forms, and export to Office apps retaining layout, fonts, formatting, and tables. Acrobat Pro can be purchased for about $50 if you search around the web and Document Cloud is a $14/mo subscription alone but it's included with a Creative Cloud subscription. The cloud version comes with a lot of extras but most self-publishers won't need them.

Adobe InDesign

adobe.com/products/indesign.html

InDesign, unlike Word, was designed as a professional book and magazine production program. It is the de-facto standard used by professional book designers. It's expensive and a challenge to learn.

InDesign's paragraph styles are more accurate, it allows you to fine-tune line and letter spacing, images stay put and export to CMYK for print (instead of RGB), and it produces a more professional, polished book.

A subscription to InDesign costs about $10 per month. Whether you are using it yourself or hiring a professional, make absolutely sure they are using the latest version.

The easiest way to learn and format your own book in InDesign is to buy a template. If you get stuck, you can always pay a professional to finish it.

You'll spend about $70 for the template and $10 a month for the software subscription from Adobe, and it's a good idea to spend $25 a month for a subscription to Lynda.com for video instruction. (Try it free for a month.)

If you hate formatting, you won't do a good job, so spend the money to hire a pro if you want your book to look good. You can find adequate help for low cost using a service like Fiverr, Guru, or Gigbucks but most really good designers charge $500-$2000.

Get book design templates for InDesign at http://bit.ly/interiorbdt.

Amazon Kindle Create

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GHU4YEWXQGNLU94Tcreatespace.com

Use Kindle Create (PC or Mac) to transform your completed manuscript into a Kindle ebook. You can make three types of eBooks with Kindle Create.

Amazon Kindle Comic Creator