Self-publishing

@jenwriter17 I’ve never heard of Ingramspark, but I’ve printed my books with two different sites, Diggypod and Lulu, and out of those two Lulu is much the better!  On Lulu they allow you to order a single sample copy to make sure the formatting and cover are all correct before you order your full shipment of books.

On Lulu also, you can set it up so they sell your books on both their site and on Amazon, very easily.  (I have actually done that for my time travel book, but haven’t linked my site to it yet because I haven’t gotten around to setting it up for my kids series and want to link them all at the same time…for some reason. 😉 )

So…I would definitely recommend Lulu! 😀

One thing to note about self-publishing and working with printing companies is to make sure you follow exactly the formatting instructions laid out by the printing company.  If you do that, everything else should be very easy.  And after you do that once or twice it gets really easy too.  You just have to figure it out.

Also, I would recommend the app bookcoverpro for making book covers.  It works great for designing the book covers yourself, and then you can convert to jpeg or whatever other type of file required by the printing company.  I think I had to actually go into the jpeg files and change the pixel coordinates for Lulu, but that was really easy, so…I don’t know…I’m just going to ramble on if I don’t stop now.  I’ll just end this and say if you have any more questions I’d be happy to answer them, because besides self-publishing my own seven books I’ve helped publish the forty plus books my parents wrote for their ministry, which website you saw.

Farewell for now, hope this was helpful in at least some small way!

@jenwriter17 Great!  Glad it was helpful. 🙂

I’ve seen your topic on the Story Embers forum and noticed that several people are recommending CreateSpace (or something like that.)  I’ve never heard of it before, so I’m not going to say anything about it, except that they’re probably right that it’s a great place, if they’ve already used it.  I just wanted to note that if the only reason it’s better is because it puts your books on Amazon with print on demand, Lulu does that too. 🙂

Here my book is on Amazon, set up by Lulu, and here my book is on the actual Lulu website.

That will give you an idea of what they look like when you put them up for sale. 😀

However, I think I remember the people on SE saying there were a couple of other good things about CS besides putting it on Amazon, so you’ll just have to go through and compare yourself, because I haven’t seen anyone who has used both Lulu and CreateSpace. 😛

So anyway, maybe what you should do is look at the formatting options on the several different sites you are considering and see which type of formatting you like best.  For example, for my books I would much rather use Lulu because it’s easier for me and is print on demand, but recently I was considering going back to Diggypod for something because I needed a different type of formatting for a certain book.  So I think formatting is the biggest thing.

@Jenwriter17 I know that @Hope uses CreateSpace. 😉

Other than that: self publishing involves a lot of marketing. You have to get your book out into the world without any help from the publishers. You also have to edit it as much as humanly possible, and it’s best to get a professional editor to look over it, otherwise you’ll be publishing and subpar book and people won’t recommend it.

@Jenwriter17 Yep, I have heard of canva. Great job designing your own covers! 😀

@jenwriter17 No, I do not. 🙂  How does that work?

(I do know what Goodreads is, of course!  I use it all the time to look up books.  I’m just not sure what an author account would do or how you would set it up.)