The article title question is a pretty easy one to answer: Adobe InDesign is an industry standard for book publishing, and would be an excellent book creation tool for a self-publisher, specifically those needing graphics manipulation or other advanced book layout and design tools.

…and there’s no way I can afford it. So, sorry InDesign, no offense but you’re too rich for my blood. My wallet can’t afford you. 

I had been using Microsoft Word. It’s a fine word processor and document creation engine – I use it for my “regular” book publishing needs. But I’m working on a new project. A children’s book. With a title of “Sharks and Bunnies“, you can bet it’s got a lot of interesting art on each page.

For now, I’m using Microsoft Publisher. It’s not InDesign, but it’s a heckuva lot cheaper and far better than MS Word. So far, it’s perfect for my needs.

For building my children’s book, I’m doing this for every page:

1) Work with an artist to create art. She’s painting 18″x18″ pieces.

2) Scan in and post-process the art with Photoshop. This is also where I overlay the book text over their place in the art. Other tools like GIMP (free) or the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite (cheaper than Photoshop, but I don’t use Corel for this reason) would also work fine.

3) Export from Photoshop as a 9″x9″ TIFF.

…then I do this in Microsoft Publisher:

4) Create a new document (page/paper size is 9″x9″, with an extra .5″ gutter for the spine. The published book will be an industry standard 8.5″x8.5″.)

5) Import all page TIFFs into each page in Publisher, and place each piece of art where it goes – the guidelines and rulers and “snap-to” functionality allows me to place the graphic easily on the page and plan for bleed and other layout considerations.

7) Export the entire project as a PDF. (Publisher has detailed resolution controls so the art won’t be degraded by PDF image compression.) 

…steps 4-7 are what I was originally trying to do in Microsoft Word, and it failed miserably. It’s not designed for such sizes or frequent graphical manipulation. The process was extremely buggy.

And I also found out another Microsoft Word “feature” the hard way: Word’s file size caps off at 512MB. Any bigger, and Word will refuse to open the file. So after I made modifications to my Word file, I could no longer open it! Nasty. Microsoft Publisher, on the other hand, doesn’t crash, graphic manipulation and project sizing is smooth and intuitive, and the performance is great, even with a large file (the current file size for my publisher file is 643MB. It takes several seconds to initially open and save, but the actual work inside the file is delay-free).

To answer the original question: What’s the best software for doing layout and design for self-publishing a children’s book? There are many options that will work well for many people. My choice right now is Microsoft Publisher.

I’ve been featured as a guest writer on the “Writing and Publishing Resource” website. Check it out: 

Recommendations for writers: How seemingly bad advice can improve your writing process

A goal in writing the article was to describe mental stumbling blocks that I’ve encountered in writing and publishing, along with advice on overcoming those problems. 

Thanks to Sabine Reed for making this guest appearance happen.

For YA and middle-grade fans of science fiction and mystery, I’ve now fully finished production of “Waking the Dreamer”, the first book in my “Transhuman” series.

After paper book printing and ebook design, this culminated with the development and rollout of the audiobook edition.

For the audiobook, I again used the ACX service (which I documented before in this post), and I again am very happy with the results. ACX handles availability and sales in Amazon, Audible.com, and the iTunes Store, and gave me access to an excellent reader, actor and publisher, Maxwell Glick.

Most every author today will have heard recommendations for and against traditional and self-publishing. Some argue that one method is inherently better or worse than the other. Some say that one is destined for failure, that it serves the wrong people, or that it provides no long-term benefit to those involved.

In a more measured opinion, picking one over the other depends on what you’re trying to achieve: Your sales expectations, long-term plans, available time, audience and other factors can influence this decision. Both methods are here to stay for a while, though it’s also true that both are in a state of major flux. This is the reason I dated this post to 2012 – I’m eager to see what the publishing industry will look like in a few years, because it’s going to change. Significantly.

A non-comprehensive comparison between self-publishing and traditional publishing is below, and while there are always exceptions, and while the rise of self-publishing and ebooks are upending the publishing industry, this is a fairly accurate pros and cons comparison for most new and mid-list authors in 2012:

	Self-Publishing	Traditional Publishing
Prestige
Lowest Author Effort
Potential Distribution
Quality
Cost
Author Control
Royalties
Rights
Longevity
Publication Speed
Publication Ease

Prestige:

In 2012, it’s still a notable thing to be published by a traditional publisher. You get the (usually) extensive traditional vetting process and the (hopefully) greater number of talented people working to produce a single book. That’s not to say there are poorly-produced traditional books, or excellent self-pubbed books, because there are. I’m talking about overall trends and the public’s perception.

Lowest Author Effort:

This encompasses a lot, and is meant to represent the amount of work that a publication house can assist with. With things like proofreading, editing, cover art, physical design, publication processing, marketing, advertising and putting books on shelves, traditional publishing has the edge.

Self-publishing requires the author to do all of the above alone (or be willing to hire out the needed jobs), and in some cases, simply doesn’t have the contacts, money and methods available to a publishing house.

Potential Distribution:

It’s difficult or impossible to get books into high-volume venues like Walmart, Barnes & Noble physical stores, most libraries and your airport of choice. In order to “qualify” for these, it’s practically a requirement you publish traditionally. Or be really, really good friends with a store manager, librarian, or airline CEO.

Quality:

In order to be published, the editor must approve your manuscript. For the editor to approve your manuscript, she must approve the sample chapters you wrote. In order to write sample chapters, the editor must approve the synopsis and outline you sent. In order to have the synopsis and outline approved, you often have to have an agent submit them. In order to get an agent… Well, books have been written about that process alone. It’s time-consuming and difficult.

This typical scenario is not the same for all publishers. Some want a fully-completed manuscript as the first step, which puts more of the workload on the agent to help the author develop it. The point: While irritating and far from perfect, the traditional publishing vetting process does raise the bar for the quality of the finished product.

Cost:

Traditional publishing shouldn’t cost anything. If anyone’s charging you money for reading feeds, editing feeds, publication costs or similar items, you’re probably being scammed. All money should flow to the author.

With self-publishing, the costs can be cheap, but there are still costs. You may hire out for proofreaders and cover artists, for example, and the author does have to pay for the pre-publication proof costs and any actual printed books. Self-publishing can be cheap or expensive, but there are definitive costs.

Author Control:

With a traditionally-published book, you give up a lot of control over the work. If you don’t like the cover art, tough. If your editor doesn’t like parts of the story and insists you change them, do it. The publisher may listen to your concerns, but (as is specified in the contract you signed), they have no legal right to do so.

In a self-published environment, the author has 100% control of the material, the design, and is responsible for the end result. 

Royalties:

The graphic above is not weighted by importance. If it was, the Royalties section would be huge. Traditional publishing royalties are around 10% per sale, 15% if you’re very lucky. With self-publishing, the author sets the price on a fixed publication cost, and can therefore decide on the royalty. A common range for self-pubbed royalties is from 30% to 70%.

Rights:

Ebook rights, audiobook rights, movie rights, foreign printing rights and more: Today, all of these rights are contracted heavily in the traditional publisher’s favor, to a 50% royalty split or more. Many publishers refuse contracts that don’t give them some or the majority of the royalties for these additional sales. Some publishers require the extra rights, but never use them. In self-publishing, the author owns 100% of these rights.

Longevity:

Traditionally-published books have a print run. Hopefully more than one. But there will eventually come a time when the book isn’t profitable, and the publisher stops printing it. In a self-published world, the author controls when a book goes out of print. And with the inclusion of print-on-demand and ebooks, many books may literally never need to go out of print – readers will keep buying if books are available.

Publication Speed:

Self-publishing is exponentially faster than traditional publishing. In traditional publishing, a normal publication wait after a final manuscript is approved is often one to two years. Self-publication’s turnaround is as fast as you can upload a manuscript, cover design, specify book details, kick off a few proofs, make tweaks, and click the Approval button. In my experience, this is often two to three weeks.

Publication Ease: 

Along with the speed factor above, the ease of moving a book through the self-publishing process is pretty simple. Yes, self-publishing requires a learning curve to learn about the design and printing process, but the learning curve and time requirements for traditional publishing are far steeper (just start with getting an agent, and let me know how that went).

Self-publishing and traditional publishing: They CAN get along!

In my case, the comparatively-long traditional publication process was made significantly longer due to an unexpected crisis at my publisher. However, it’s been a mixed blessing, because it’s allowed me to focus on my own self-publishing efforts: I have two books available now, and by the time the traditionally-published book is on shelves, I should have yet another completed. 

My experiment is to see if my traditionally-published book can cross-promote my other self-published titles, and vice versa. Worst case is “no”. Best case is that sales of one type will increase sales of another type. Everyone wins – my readers, my publisher and me.

The self-publishing and traditional publishing industries can indeed play nice together. A first step for authors is to self-educate about these drastically-changing, increasingly-complex industries. Then they don’t need to bash, ostracize or worry about self-publishing or traditional publishing. They can take advantage of both.

My daughter, wife and I sat in the TV room. It was just before bedtime and my six-year-old was watching a movie she hadn’t seen in a while.

My wife and I were trying to talk to her about the actors involved, the special effects, the storyline, how the movie wouldn’t be so spooky if it happened in real life… You know: All the usual stuff parents distract themselves with when they’re desperately trying to avoid having to actually watch a particularly bad kid’s movie.

My daughter watched the movie for another moment, then she looked at me and said:

“All bad guys always brag about themselves.”

Whoa.

I was impressed. The blanket statement wasn’t really something you can apply to all villains, but from someone with her level of exposure to “bad guys”, it was very observant.

This revelation came from the mind of a child raised on Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks. (Yeah, I see problems with that list, too. My wife and I know there’s a problem and we’re trying to fix it.)

In storytelling, it’s a tricky situation. We want to avoid cliches because they can make for a predictable and by-the-numbers story. However, we still want to introduce conflict, adventure, appealing characters and all the ingredients that make a great story, and there are a limited number of ways to do that. 

Granted, sometimes celebrating a cliche leads to great entertainment. The movie Office Space, the TV series South Park and the movie series Austin Powers are good examples. I see those as something to work up to, but they’re not something to emulate unless you understand what makes them work.

Some people (think Aardman Animations’ Wallace and Gromit) tell brilliant stories without falling into many cliches – I remember when I watched “The Wrong Trousers” for the first time, I was amazed at the creativity of such a unique and entertaining story. Yet for a plotline, it used a cliche of a jewelry heist. I didn’t care (until writing this article, I never even noticed), because everything surrounding it is so well done.

My point in writing this is to illustrate how cliches are sometimes necessary as part of standard story structure, but when done incorrectly they can make your story formulaic. A six-year-old may like it. Your intended audience may not. So be careful. Beware the dark and stormy cliches. Determine if they’re really needed, or if you can change them into something more creative and surprising.

One predictable cliche is that, when writing an article about cliches, I finish by using one. Instead, I’d rather wrap up with advice I’ll remember for my own writing, as a paraphrased recommendation from my daughter:

“Bad guys don’t need to brag about themselves.”

At this point I’ve cranked two books through a full self-publishing process and have a third on the way with a traditional publisher. I’ve learned a few things and can justify a few opinions about the self-publishing process. Here’s the detail.

My current self-publishing status

Since publishing with a traditional publisher takes a VERY long time, I decided to try my hand at self-publishing. Previous options (like Lulu and others) are bad for me, since they require a higher up-front cost. However, Amazon’s self-publishing program – Createspace – is really good, because 1) it’s cheap – if you do your own cover art, it can be as low as $30-$50 to get a published book in hand, 2) there’s no minimum buy, and 3) what you create will be sold for you on Amazon.com with a 70% royalty. As a special bonus, 4) the Createspace service also ties in with Amazon’s KDP program, which is Amazon’s ebook publisher.

The downside? Amazon gives you no active marketing. In order to sell, you must have a good product, or a good fan base, or you’re willing to work years to build up multiple books and fans over time, or ideally all of the above.

To give you an idea of my level in the industry as beginning author, here’s what I’ve done to date:

Superliminal: Dev Manny #1
(YA / adult book, self-published. Available now at Amazon in paper and ebook formats)

Waking the Dreamer: Transhuman #1
(YA / kids book, self-published. Available now at Amazon in paper and ebook formats)

Ghost in the Water: League of Scientists #1 
(YA book, completed, to be published traditionally by a small publisher in early 2012)

The self-publishing services I’ve used so far

Amazon Createspace – Paper book self-publishing

Amazon KDP – Ebook self-publishing

ACX – Crowdsourced audiobook creation. I’m in the middle of making an audiobook for Superliminal now.

Kickstarter – Crowdsourced project funding. I posted about it here.

CrowdSpring – Crowdsourced art design. I used this to create the book cover for Waking the Dreamer. I posted about it here.

I also have a few websites to support my efforts, as well as being an Amazon Associate: I get the usual author’s royalty if someone purchases my books, but if the sale comes from any of my sites, I get an Amazon bonus as well (usually about 4% of the total sales price).

Cover art and the cover design

I’ve written before about what I did to get great cover art, but I also wanted to give a heads-up to authors looking for cover artists, or those who want to do the work themselves:

You might have a great cover concept. You might have a great artist. But does your artist know enough about graphic design to make book-specific cover artwork?

Even though you might be handed a great piece of cover art, what about the other elements? The book titling and fonts and placement and overall graphic design can’t look rudimentary. If you can look at the cover and tell it’s self-published, that’s a bad thing.

On publisher rejections and the publishing industry

The continuous cycle of rejections is disheartening. I’ve had dozens of rejections (or flat out no-communications) from publishers and agents. Authors who have been at this longer than me (and are more skilled than me) often claim hundreds of rejections.

The traditional publishing system is ideally a meritocracy, but many parts of it are broken.

You need to focus on what you’re trying to accomplish and push towards that goal. If you really must be traditionally published, then you have to work within the system. This means you must jump through the hoops – do the submission/rejection/resubmission cycle, develop contacts in the industry, get your name in low-paying publications in order to simply get your name out and work towards the higher-paying jobs.

If you don’t care about traditional publishing, though, the self-publishing route can be very rewarding. A note of concern, though:

Publishing a book is a great feeling, but the act of self-publishing should still focus on quality. It’s easy to publish something now because you can do so in a single day. There’s a temptation to crank out your book without giving it proper editing and revising. Don’t. Make sure other editorial-minded people can read your work and give a thumbs-up before you publish it. 

With self-publishing, the lack of an editor doesn’t mean you don’t need one! The obligation to get your book’s quality as high as possible isn’t in the hands of an editor. It’s now yours. It’s a mixed blessing – you get more control, but it’s more work. You may have to pay for services a traditional publisher would provide for free.

How to best market your self-published work? How to get the word out?

While I have a fan base, I’ve grown it from my other projects over the years (mostly from my technology column and Digital Bits Skeptic). I’m hoping some of those readers will have crossover interest in my books. Crossover promotion is powerful. Do you have other interests that could feed a fan base?

I have very little money, and am not able right now to dump cash into paid marketing ideas. Book trailers, for example, are the current hot thing. I have yet to be convinced they pay for themselves, though you can self-produce simple, cheap, slick-looking videos with services like Animoto.

You must have a web presence. Specifically, a Facebook fan page for you or the book, or a blog-like website for you or the book. Some people say you have to do ALL forms of popular social media, but being realistic and as someone with a busy schedule, I’m personally just targeting the most popular ones of the moment (Facebook, a blog/website, and Twitter). I also try to feed all fan traffic to my author site as a main collection point.

As you make posts everywhere online in your usual forums, try to have your website be part of your signature. Get the word out to humans and search engines.

Self-publishing services and resources

After your book is published with Amazon (assuming you publish a paper book with Createspace, or an ebook with KDP):

Tag your book with topic tags. Use every available one (there’s a limit of 15 on Amazon). This increases the chance of your book matching other books in Amazon’s system (“If you liked this book, then you may also like this book…”). If you’re comfortable bothering others, get them to tag your book, too, increasing the relevancy to Amazon’s matching system.

Get people to review your book. One site for this is Goodreads. Here’s the link to my book “Superliminal” on Goodreads. In short, you offer free books and people get them via a lottery system. Then you hope they review them. I sent Goodreads five books, and of those five readers, three people reviewed the book. I’m lukewarm on this – I don’t think it got me any sales, and don’t know yet if there is a long-term benefit. I probably won’t do this again, but your experience may be different and I want to offer it as an option.

DRM and piracy protection

When publishing ebooks, you’ll have options for activating DRM (an anti-piracy, copy protection measure). I recommend you NOT do this. I don’t restrict my books in any way. Don’t restrict anyone from reading your work. To quote Cory Doctorow, “Your enemy isn’t piracy. Your enemy is obscurity.” Focus on your book’s exposure, not on keeping it from potential readers.

What company should I self-publish with?

You’ll notice I keep mentioning Amazon. There’s a good reason.

At this point, there are three major players and distributors in the self-publishing and ebook world: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple. (Lesser players include Smashwords, Komo and Google eBookstore.) Amazon is far and away the market leader. I work with them because I want the widest availability and exposure (it doesn’t hurt that right now they also have the best royalty setup and the easiest systems to use.)

How much money will I make self-publishing? 

Don’t self-publish thinking you’re going to be rich. There are of course exceptions, but if you think you’re one of them, you’ll end up disappointed.

There is money to be made, but it’s not about any single book. A body of work – books and books – has a much better chance of doing so. It provides exponentially more exposure for your work, as well as an income multiplier when a reader likes your books. And each book will be better quality than the last. I’m not great, but my readers and I have noticed a quality improvement after each book I write.

If you want to be a published author, then go ahead and self-publish your book, and boom, you’re done. You are indeed a published author. But if you want to make noticeable money writing, then you can NOT depend on one book. You have to keep writing more.

The above is not meant to be comprehensive or absolute. But for what I’m creating, it makes sense to me.