You may be wondering what happened to my latest novel, after I last posted, back in November, that I was going to self-publish it. Well, a full four months later, I’m finally almost there! The main reason for the delay (apart from life depositing random stumbling blocks in my path; as is its way) is that I went back into the re-editing phase, with some help from my friends (particular thanks go to the wonderful Gretchen Bernet-Ward). I’m comfortable my manuscript is now about as good as I can get it. Hopefully most of the typos etc. have been found and corrected (although it’s pretty much impossible to catch them all – just read any novel on sale today for proof of that).

If you don’t want to go it alone, there are a number of companies, such as Grosvenor House, Ingram Spark, and others, who offer self-publishing packages where they provide most of the services required. But there’s usually an up-front charge, and then a charge per book, so it can be an expensive option. Hard copies are usually ‘Print on Demand’, which means you won’t end up with more copies than you need. But have you seen the quality of POD books?
Some of these organisations offer marketing services, but the consensus on the web (at least, according to the commentators I’ve seen) is that these are worthless – unlikely to generate any sales. All in all, in my humble opinion, self-publishing is something you’re better off doing yourself (maybe the clue’s in the name!)
So what are the stages you need to go through?

Getting a cover
For me, this is a DIY task, albeit with a slight feeling that I might be biting off more than I can chew. I’m not a graphic designer, but I am a designer, with experience and qualifications in interior, garden, and furniture design. Creating something like a book cover pushes the software I use (Photoshop Elements) to it’s limits. I think I’ve cracked it – my next post will be the ‘cover reveal’ (he said, using the modern language convention of turning verbs into nouns!) so you can judge for yourselves. If you can’t design a cover yourself, you’ll have to get someone to do it for you, which will, of course, add to the cost of publishing.

Ebook
While you may be focused on having physical copies of your book, it makes sense to publish it electronically too, as it can open up a huge potential market, and needn’t cost a penny. There are a number of platforms for publishing books in electronic format, but the biggest, which gives you maximum reach, is Amazon Kindle. Yes, I know; there are serious issues with Amazon; the way they (allegedly) treat their staff being perhaps the most troubling. I try to avoid them when I can, but in this instance… Amazon does make it reasonably easy to publish ebooks. It’s really just a case of following their instructions.
– You need to prepare your cover. Unlike a paperback, all you need is the front cover. Kindle covers are, to me, badly proportioned – too tall and thin; which means you have to squash up your cover design to fit. I suppose the relative dimensions are tailored to ‘devices’.
– Add a table of contents (TOC) to your manuscript. Kindle will accept MS Word docs (I use an ancient version, because I’m not prepared to pay a large annual fee for Microsoft 365, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem). You can also format your manuscript in Kindle Create, which is free to download. For a TOC, go through all of your chapter headings and put them into a heading format, and then choose ‘table of contents’ from the ‘references’ menu, and a TOC is created automatically, where you’ve placed your cursor.
– ISBN. Each iteration of your novel needs a separate ISBN. Kindle will assign one for you for free, but I believe there may be implications if you later want to place your ebook elsewhere. I’m using one of my own ISBNs, as I bought a batch of ten when I published my last book (ooh, get him! Actually, they weren’t expensive, and it’s much more economical to buy ten).

Paperback
If you intend to publish your manuscript in hard (real, rather than virtual) format, there’s rather more work to be done:
– Set the page size. There are various sizes available. For my last book – the first I actually had copies printed – I went for ‘B-Format UK’, which is 198mm x 129mm, because this is the most common size of paperbacks on booksellers’ shelves (at least, in the UK).
– Typesetting is a trade in its own right, with its own language – kerning, stacking; widows and orphans. While you can use it to typeset, MS Word isn’t generally considered to be up to the job. But in practice, for a simple paperback novel, Word will do the job, and a little bit of research will give you all you need.
– Breaks: you should insert a section break at the end of each chapter, so the next chapter starts on a new page.
– Justify text to both left and right margins, as this is an industry standard, and your book won’t look right without it.
– Add ‘front matter’ – look at published novels to see what. Basically, the first page should have the title of the novel and the author’s name. The next page should contain the standard wording around copyright and publishing (you can copy this from existing novels), and the ISBN. This page is, I believe, known as a colophon. You may have a page for a dedication and/or thanks, and for a quote that is relevant to the story – from a poem, perhaps? And then you may need to put in a blank page, to ensure the first page of the novel is not on the back of a page.
– Add page numbers. These should start at the first page of the text proper, which should be page one. The front matter pages should not have numbers. Achieving this in Word can be tricky – the front matter pages must be on their own sections (hence, adding a section break after each page) and with ‘link to previous’ toggled off for the front matter, and the first proper page.
– Widows and orphans are where the last word (or few words) of a chapter are pushed onto the next page, and where only the first word of a sentence appears at the end of a page, with the rest appearing on the next page. Stacking is where a word happens to appear in the same place in a line as the same word in the line above or below. It may be that software specifically designed for typesetting can deal with this automatically, but the only way I’ve found to correct it in Word is manually, by changing the phraseology, or perhaps adding or removing a word or two, until the alignment is more favourable. This is annoying, because in practice, it’s changing your style – dictating to you how you write. If, for instance, your style is to sometimes repeat words within a sentence, for effect, you’re going to have severe problems with stacking.
You need to work from the top down, as everything below the point you are changing will alter. Maybe I’m picky, because you will see some stacking in novels (although two stacked words is one thing – three or four is another thing altogether!) I must admit, I left one or two unchanged for this book.

Printing
I had my last book printed by Biddles in King’s Lynn, Norfolk. They were competitively priced, their service was superb, and the quality of the books compared well to the novels on booksellers’ shelves. If you want the fancy effects you see on many covers – foil or gloss highlights, embossed images or text – it will cost a lot, so I would recommend keeping it simple until, or unless, your sales really take off.
I had two hundred copies of my last book printed. So far, I’ve still got most of them! I notice Biddles will now do a run of just fifty, and this might be a good option to start with – if sales start to take off you can make the next run larger.

So there you are. For the ebook version of Shooting at Strangers, everything is on Amazon Kindle, and I just need to press ‘Go’ to make it live. For the paperback, I’m about to get quotes. If you’re thinking about self-publishing your work, I hope this post will prove useful, and wish you the best of luck…