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How to publish a 5.5 inch by 8 inch book with BookSurge
I'm actually showing the files from my second book project, because I learned some things with my first book project.
Here are the steps to publishing with BookSurge/Amazon.
1. Get a BookSurge Account set up. Either go to their web pages, select 'Authors' and find the place to enter your new account information (I'm not documenting what these links are, because they will probably be changing) or email sales@booksurge.com
You might enjoy working with the BookSurge publishing consultant I use. He says he is happy to work with anyone I send his way:
Gaines Hill
Publishing Consultant
BookSurge LLC
An Amazon.com Company
Gaines.Hill@BookSurge.com
1-866-308-6235 Ext. 178 (toll-free)
(843)-579-0000 Ext. 178 (local or international)
2. You will be assigned a BookSurge publishing consultant. Be very nice to this person, they are going to help you become a published author.
3. Tell your publishing consultant you want to publish a book using the Author's Express option ($99 as this is written). You will then give your publishing consultant your credit card information, the name of the book, and the subtitle. Ask the publishing consultant to give you a BookSurge ISBN for your book. There is no extra charge for this. The ISBN is the unique book number that bookstores (and somtimes book purchasers) use to find and order your book. You are going to make a barcode of this ISBN and put it on your book cover, below.
4. At this point, it is a good idea to make a folder on your PC for this individual book project. I made a folder called 'BookSurge' in my My Documents folder, then a folder underneath BookSurge of 'my books' and then a folder for each book under that, like this:
C:\My Documents\BookSurge\my books\02 The Miracle That I Offer
Now, download my book document. You will notice it has a strange name, "1-4196-4201-4_book_block.doc". This name consists of the ISBN number for my book, followed by "_book_block.doc". It is named this way to make the PDF name come out as "1-4196-4201-4_book_block.PDF", which is what the BookSurge uploaded file name is supposed to be for my book.
Your book will have a similar name, but you must change the ISBN part: "1-4196-4201-4" to whatever your ISBN number is. You can highlight the name of the downloaded file in your Windows folder, press F2, and type the new name.
The file will now have your file name, but it still has the text of my book in it. It also has the margins set correctly for making a 5.5 by 8 inch book.
Click or double click on the document in your folder, to open it in Microsoft Word. Start changing the title pages to use your book title and copyright and dedication. You can add pages here also, making sure you add an even number of pages. I combined some of the pages instead of having a separate dedication page, for example. Don't delete the blank pages! Your book interior has to be exactly the way the resulting book is going to print, blank pages and all.
Skip past the table of contents and the blank page after it. Don't delete them, we will automatically create a new table of contents that matches your book later.
Delete all of my book text from my first chapter to the end of the book. (Ctr-Shift-End keys together, then Del key).
Copy your book text in after the blank page after the table of contents.
Select all of your book text with the mouse.
Change the font to Century Schoolbook 14 point (don't select bold or italic).
For each chapter, insert the cursor before the chapter heading, as necessary, and select Insert/Page Break from the menu. Then highlight the chapter heading text, and select 'Chapter Heading' from the dropdown of styles.
Be sure to change the headers to your book name and author name.
Go back to the Table of Contents page. Right click on the Table, then select Update Field, then select Update Entire Table. Everything that is formatted as 'Chapter Heading' style will generate a Table of Contents entry.
You might want to be sure that all your chapters start on odd-numbered pages. Add blank pages before the first chapter that starts on an even page. (This will cause all following chapters to increase one page number - this can be a fun exercise.) Regenerate the Table of Contents and repeat this step until you are satisfied.
Print it to PDF, creating a page size of 5.5 by 8 inches, setting PDF margins of zero, turning off graphics downsampling and turn of convert to JPG. be sure to set the PDF to include all fonts.
Print the PDF out and triple-quadruple-check the layout, fonts, etc. This is going to be your book. If you need to change it, go back to the Word document and make the cahnges and make a new PDF.
Be sure that you have at least 130 interior pages (numbered pages plus the front title pages and contents, etc.) You need this many to be able to print the title on the spine.
Download my cover design, and modify the text to be your text. Be sure to replace my bar code image with your bar code image! The BookSurge site has a link to a website where you can create a free barcode image as EPS (which works fine in MS Word).
The spine title is set as WordArt. Click on it and change the text to be your text. Make sure that the WordArt object is formatted as 'centered' in the column.
Print the cover design Word document to a PDF, this time selecting Legal Format/Landscape orientation, using margins of zero, no graphics downsampling,etc.
For fancier cover designs, you may want to use Photoshop as BookSurge suggests.
Print everything one last time before you upload the book contents and cover to BookSurge. You can upload using either FTP (they tell you how on their site) or their web-based submission (which I found only after I uploaded the first time using FTP).
When you FTP, be sure to send the files as binary not ASCII. (Your ftp program will probably do this for you automatically.) Also, when you send them, you can't see them on the BookSurge ftp server after you send them. I assume this is to maintain the privacy of the other authors.
Be sure to have SOMEONE ELSE read the PRINTED version of the book as you have formatted it and printed out, before you upload it. BookSurge does not proofread or correct errors, no matter how glaring, unless you pay them to do so, which is not a part of the Author's Express process.
If you are the author, you will read right over your own typos without noticing them. Once BookSurge accepts the book for publication, changes will cost you money (I don't know how much at this point.)
You will need to log on to your BookSurge GPS account using the username and password BookSurge gave you. Go to "Books In Process" where you will find your book. Click on it and upload your author's headshot, and the image of the book. I made the image of my book by displaying the book cover in Acrobat Reader, set the magnification to 23%, hit Alt-PrtScr to copy the screen to the clipboard, then I used Microsoft Paint to paste the image. Then I clipped just the book cover from the image (at 100 by 150 pixels) made a new jpg and saved the image for upload to BookSurge GPS. If you don't know how to do this, ask one of your kids, or someone you know who does graphics with the PC.
Besides uploading these pictures, you will use the 'Edit Book' (actually this update information about the book) to put in the one sentence, short, and long descriptions about the book. Go to Amazon and read some book descriptions to get the idea of what to say. What you write here is ghoing to be pretty much what other people see on Amazon. Don't be shy. Write the descriptions in the third person (he, not you or I).
Within a short time (they say up to two weeks, the first time for me was 4 days) they will email you and tell you if your results look correct. PNce the book is published, it appear right away on the BookSurge site, and within a wekk on the Amazon site, based on my experience.
As an author, BookSurge lets you buy your own books at 30% off but says they may take 4 to 6 weeks to get around maing and sending them to you. I decided to buy my books from Amazon knowing I would get a 25% royalty 'rebate'. If you buy a lot of your own books, buy them from BookSurge.
BookSurge offers all sorts of promotional packages, cover design services, and other features at added expense. I didn't use any of them, so I have no idea how much help they might be to you. My goal was to get my books on Amazon.com with the least fuss, effort, and expense.
Wasn't that easy? - Brad Jensen
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