Publishing in Progress
[image error]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.
