SELF-PUBLISHING POSSIBILITIES TABLE OF CONTENTS

Getting started ...... 3 Preparing your manuscript...... 6 Designing...... 9 What does “publishing” mean?...... 10 How to get started with JETLAUNCH . . . . 12 GETTING STARTED

t’s easier than ever to self-publish, and you can actually self-published and they use print-on-demand self-publish many products now. Once 3D print- technology. Print-on-demand (also called POD) uses Iing matures, you’ll be able to self-publish almost special digital printers that can print one book at anything! a time. These digital printers are what flipped the In addition to printed products (like books, publishing world on its head. workbooks, journals, and planners), you can People have been “self-publishing” for years, self-publish t-shirts, DVDs, calendars, coffee mugs, but until POD came along, you were stuck printing bookmarks, and so much more. hundreds of copies at a time just to save on printing The most common self-published products, costs. You then had to warehouse boxes and boxes however, are books, booklets, co-authored books, of books, then ship each and every book that was workbooks, and journal/planners. sold. It was expensive and a lot of work! With POD, you never even have to see or touch PRINT-ON-DEMAND your book. You can upload your book files to Amazon When they hear the term “self-publishing,” most (or similar sites) and they only print a book after people think of books. Most books, in fact, are one is ordered by a customer. You don’t even have

JETLAUNCH .NET 3 to pay anything. When the customer orders a book, • Booklets . These vary in size from around Amazon takes their share and the rest is deposited 4 x 6 inches to 4.75 to 7.5 inches. The word into your bank account one a month. count is usually below 10,000 and they And POD isn’t just for books. You can also print almost always have a softcover. The binding booklets, journals, t-shirts, and much more. is often saddle-stitch (stapled) but some- times glued. Common self-published products that • Co-authored books . These fall within the JETLAUNCH can help you with: standard book sizes but, as you can guess, have several authors. They are also called • Books . This is the most common compilations. self-published product. Books vary in size from around 5 x 8 inches to as big as 8.5 x 11 • Workbooks . These are often created as an inches. Word count can vary from around accompaniment to books and have ques- 20,000 on up to 100,000 words and beyond. tions or writing prompts followed by several They can have both softcover and hard cover lines to write on. Sometimes, workbooks are and the binding can be glued (also called per- stand-alone products that are not based on fect binding for whatever reason) or stitched. a “normal” book.

JETLAUNCH .NET 4 • Journals and planners . These can vary For example, you would use a planner to widely in size, binding, and cover type. An plan a book you’re going to write or your easy way to distinguish the two is that task for the day or week. You might record journals record information afterward and your favorite wines in your journal or the planners record information beforehand. events of the past day.

JETLAUNCH .NET 5 PREPARING YOUR MANUSCRIPT

EDITING that makes you look like a professional will pay for I often tell authors that if they don’t have their man- the edit. uscript professionally edited, then they shouldn’t How much does an edit cost? JETLAUNCH bother publishing. And even if you’re a professional charges an average of two cents per word. (It can editor, you should still hire another editor because cost more if your manuscript needs a lot of work.) something weird happens with our brains when we For a 40,000-word manuscript, that’s only $800 try to edit our own work. total, which isn’t too bad. And if you buy our booklet Editing can seem like a big and unnecessary package, we include editing for free. expense but publishing a manuscript that has been shoddily edited can cost you even more, espe- MICROSOFT WORD, STRUCTURE, cially when you consider that your book acts as AND FORMATTING TIPS an important ambassador of your brand and rep- Most authors use Microsoft Word, which is pretty utation. If you lose even one customer because of much the standard for text documents. Some peo- a bad edit, it will cost you far more. And even one ple prefer to use Apple Pages or OpenOffice or even new customer who comes as a result of a book Google Docs, and fortunately, they all export to

JETLAUNCH .NET 6 Word format. At JETLAUNCH, we prefer Word for- IMAGES mat because it’s easy-to-use and powerful enough Images are easier to include in your book than might for our needs. We edit in Word and we import Word think. The main thing you need to consider is the files into our design programs. size that it will be in your book. For example, if your When you submit your manuscript, you don’t book will be 6 x 9 inches, then your images would have to have it formatted and ready to print. Word need to be 5 x 8 to fill the part of the page where is terrible for page layout, so it’s best to give us a the text falls. To see what I mean, open almost any Word file that makes it clear what the structure is. book and look at the block of text on the page. For example, we need to know where a new chap- You’ll see that there’s around a half-inch of white ter starts, what’s a first level heading and what’s space in the margins all around the block of text. a second level heading, which text is a quote, and Most of the time, a full-page image will fall within anything else that is related to structure. that same space as the text. Also, if you need certain words or phrases If you want your image to fill up the entire page, in bold or italics or all caps, we’ll need to know then it will need to be 6 x 9 inches plus 0.125 inches that. However, if you want to emphasize a word extra around the outside. That part can get a little or phrase, you should use italics, not bold or all tricky to calculate, but our print design team can caps. All caps should almost never be used, and help you with that. bold should be used to signify the different levels Also, the print resolution needs to be 300 ppi of headings. or larger. Just because your image looks crisp and

JETLAUNCH .NET 7 clear on your computer screen doesn’t mean it To determine the print resolution of your image will look crisp when printed. This is because most on a Mac, you can open it in Preview, click on Tools computer screens only display 72 ppi, which is about in the menu and then select Adjust Size. On a PC, one-fourth of what images are printed at in paper you can right-click and choose Information. books or booklets.

JETLAUNCH .NET 8 DESIGNING

COVER DESIGN PROCESS are committed and proud to create beautiful print Readers instantly decide whether or not they want designs that are accessible to every entrepreneur. to buy your book based on its cover design. We Formatted perfectly with the correct specifications, help you communicate the true value of your book we keep working on your print book design until through a professional cover design so you can you are proud of the final product we’ve created make a great first impression. When you work with together. us, your cover design is completely customized with your design preferences in mind. We provide EBOOK DESIGN PROCESS three to five initial drafts based on your input and Ebooks will help you rapidly grow your business with continue the draft process until you’re completely an easy-to-access digital product. We use a unique, satisfied with the final cover design. hands-on design approach that ensures your ebook design looks great on any device or screen size. You PRINT DESIGN PROCESS will receive the mobi (Kindle) and epub design file We’ve been told our print designs are better than formats so you can easily sell and distribute your traditional New York publishing houses, and we ebook anywhere in the world.

JETLAUNCH .NET 9 WHAT DOES “PUBLISHING” MEAN?

PUBLISHING AND DISTRIBUTION SETTING UP YOUR ACCOUNTS The term “publishing” can be confusing. In a general This is relatively easy to do. If you want to have sense, it means distributing your content so other your book published on Amazon, then set up people can consume it. This includes not just books, your account at kdp.amazon.com. You can use but blog posts, video, Facebook posts, and so on. It your current Amazon login email and password can also mean selling your content, which is what if you want. If you want to publish your book on you do when you publish your book on Amazon, for Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Kobo, and many example. If you list your book for sale on Amazon other distribution sites, then you can set up your using a service like KDP or IngramSpark, you are account with ingramspark.com. And if you want the publisher, not Amazon. to print in bulk or sell directly from your web- Distribution usually refers to the distribution site, you can set up your account with vervante. channels you use, such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, com. JETLAUNCH will take care of setting up your and even your own website. You also become your books on any or all of those platforms, so you only own distribution channel when you sell your books need to take care of the initial creation of your directly, such as at a speaking event. accounts.

JETLAUNCH .NET 10 Be sure to fill out all of your financial informa- that we do. We assign them to the publishing com- tion when you set up your accounts because none pany name of your choice. of those sites will let us upload your book files until That doesn’t mean you have to form an actual that is done. Your financial information is secure, publishing company, however. You can choose any however, because once you enter your information, name you want, such as your own name or the name not even you can see the bank account numbers, of your business or even something random. The social security number, etc. name you choose will show up at the publisher of record for your book. ISBNS Also, you need a separate ISBN for each book There is also a lot of confusion with ISBNs. ISBN format. If you publish a paperback, a hardback, an is an acronym for International Standard Book ebook, and an audiobook, each one of those needs Number. ISBNs are only sold in the Unites States a separate ISBN. You do not, however, need a sep- via Bowker. At JETLAUNCH, we include ISBNs at no arate ISBN for each ebook format. extra cost with any print interior or ebook design

JETLAUNCH .NET 11 HOW TO GET STARTED WITH

To get started, it’s as simple as going to jetlaunch .net/contact and filling out our short contact form. We’ll get back to you, usually the same day, and help you determine the best options to accomplish your goals for your book, booklet, workbook, journal, or planner.

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