As a self-publishing author, I actually wear a lot of hats: writer, editor, typesetter, layout artist, graphic designer. I began acquiring those hats (or skills) when I got into publishing in 1984. No one in our smalll publishing company was computer savvy so we relied on outside services for typesetting, color separations, and cover composition.

We employed two graphic artists who mocked up each page by pasting text and photos onto layout boards. They made negatives of each page and sent them to the printing company who used the negatives to burn plates for the printing press.

Our four-color covers were pasted up in basically the same way then sent to a color separation company for final layout and processing into four sheets of film comprised of black, cyan, magenta and yellow dots. These were also sent to the printer who then burned plates for each color. Once on the press, the plates were jogged so the color dots dropped correctly and the final printed page duplicated the composited page. Sometimes they actually did.

Today, pre-press work is done by computer using various software programs: PageMaker, InDesign, QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word. The manuscript is written in a text editor such as Microsoft Word then imported into publishing software such as PageMaker, InDesign, or QuarkXPress. Graphics created or enhanced in Photoshop are also imported into the layout. Because many printers require press-ready files to be submitted in PDF format, the file is distilled into a PDF using Adobe Acrobat.

What required several people to accomplish years ago can be accomplished today by just one person – taking a book from concept through layout to press-ready electronic files ready for uploading to the printing company who uses them to produce a single book, (if they have POD [print on demand] capabilities), or a quantity of books.

Let me distill my 25 years of publishing experience into the steps you need to know to self-publish your book. If you have a completed manuscript, I’ll show you how to self-publish and actually hold a finished book in your hands in three months, perhaps much less. The more you can do yourself, the less you’ll have to pay someone (like me) to do.

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