Never judge a book by its cover…

But we do. At first, at least.

What compels someone to purchase a book? It may be that they heard great things about it from someone else. But what if someone is just wandering around a bookstore (which I am known to do), or, what with the e-publishing revolution in full force, skimming the “Books” section on Amazon?

Getting someone to pick up your book or click on your book title is the first step to success, and the images on the front cover are a HUGE factor in what makes one do that. When browsing through a list of books on Amazon, the thumbnail image that catches the eye is more likely to get clicked.

Big, bold font; bright colors; large images that have universal appeal — these are all things that make an impact, whether a potential reader is looking at a table covered in books or browsing thumbnail images online.

I have been known on countless occasions to purchase a book I knew virtually nothing about solely based on a pretty cover. I’ve found myself thinking, Ooooh, ice cream. Pretty colors. Pink. I never finished several of those impulse buys, but I bought them. In the end, they look pretty on a shelf or coffee table. And while this thought process makes me sound like an idiot, most people do this.

For instance, love it or hate it, this particular book makes an impact with its cover:

A single word. Bright, contrasting colors. Enigmatic images (why is she holding an apple?)… By the way, I read the book, and I still don’t understand this book cover. But it doesn’t matter, does it? It fulfilled its purpose.

In this New York Times article, a romance publisher reveals how one book became a good seller when the cover was changed from a “winsome woman” to three muscular, half-naked men. Well, it’s not rocket science, is it?

I know what you’re thinking: “I want to self-publish my book. Do I really have to hire a graphic designer for this? I don’t have the cash for it!”

Relax – you don’t really need a high-priced graphic designer to create an appealing ebook cover, just some time and an eye for pretty pictures that, in some way, relates to your story. There are tons of free resources on the Web to help you make that gorgeous cover.

Free Stock Image Websites. There are some really good ones out there, like Stock.XCHNG, MorgueFile, and ImageBase. Be sure to check each image’s terms of usage, even if it’s free. Generally, though, the images are licensed under Creative Commons and are therefore free to use as you wish. One of my personal favorite sites for images is Flickr – just be sure to use the “advanced search” and click on the Creative Commons checkbox.

Free Illustrations. If you’d rather have an illustration on your cover, this can be easily done as well with free clipart. Open Clip Art Library, Vector Open Stock, and Vecteezy all offer excellent illustrations for free.

Free Software. You don’t need Photoshop to create a quality ebook cover with the free images you’ve found. You can use a web-based application to alter the images – Picnik is partnered up with Flickr and has all the necessary bells and whistles. Also, Adobe Photoshop Express is a web-based application that will alter or touch up your pictures for free. If you’d rather have a good free Mac or PC-based application that you can download to your computer, I recommend Mac Preview, which actually does quite a bit of image editing, and for Windows PhotoFiltre is excellent – it is easy to use, even for a newbie.

While creating your cover design, be sure to check and see how it looks at thumbnail size, which is around 100 pixels by 150 pixels. Remember, the thumbnail is what shoppers will see first, so it’s just as important as the cover in full size. Make sure the title and main image are clear.

In the end, people are more likely to look at a cover that has sharp, crisp images and bold colors. Steer away from old paintings and commonly-seen images; show them something modern, something bold. Save the Monets or Renoirs for your living room wall.

Why self-publish with Amazon?

Self-publish your Book with Amazon: CreateSpace is a member of Amazon group of companies and provides the fastest easiest and most economical way of publishing your books without the hassle of signing up with a publisher. With the highest royalties rates in the industry and the lowest book production cost on the market.

What are the benefits?

Amazon is the biggest online retailer. Self publishing with Amazon’s CreateSpace will get your book published and listed on Amazon.com and the Amazon partner channels faster than through any other self publishing company.
CreateSpace offers one of the best economic models for self publishers in the industry. Compare CreateSpace with other online self publishing companies and you will find that in most cases you’ll earn more on your online retail sales and pay less when you order copies for yourself.

No Upfront Investment

When you publish with CreateSpace you don’t have to make an upfront investment for a number of copies because books are printed as customer orders come in. In this way your books will never be out of stock or in overstock.

Amazon Discounts

Sometimes Amazon offers discounts, these discount rates are solely borne by Amazon while your royalties remain the same. You can expect a lot of orders to come in as your book is listed with so many distribution channels.

Worry-Free Sales

When you self publish with Amazon’s CreateSpace the complete process of publishing, printing and managing sales is done by Amazon. This gives you a lot of time to focus on marketing your book.

Supersaver Shipping & Look Inside

Your book being on Amazon automatically becomes eligible for supersaver shipping and look inside feature. This is an added bonus for the authors apart from other factors which make Amazon the best choice your new best selling title.
Free ISBN CreateSpace will assign you a free ISBN if you don’t already have one. Or you may purchase your own ISBN and publish your book under any name you want.

Higher Royalties

The royalties you get directly depend upon sales channel generating sales. If your book was purchased through the CreateSpace eStore, CreateSpace gets 20% of the listed price on Amazon 40% and on EDC 60%.

EDC (Expanded Distribution Chanel)

Apart from you book being sold on Amazon and the eStore you can get your book listed on EDC. This option would make your book available to hundreds of sales channels across the world. The profit
percentage you get on the EDC sales might be lower than other channels but the idea of getting your book listed with international sellers like B&N, Abebooks, book a million etc has the potential for a huge number of sales.

Non-exclusive Agreement

You might be thinking what if my book hits all time best sellers and I want to actually sign up with another publisher? CreateSpace does not bind you to any such agreement and allows you to take advantage of any promotional or third party publishing efforts.

There are examples like CreateSpace author Jill Keto, she wrote a book for women about financial survival amidst the global economic crisis. Her self-published title was a great success. She had great reviews on Amazon.com so she signed up a mainstream publishing contract with Simon and Schuster.

What are the requirements?

You must be wondering about the requirements you have to fulfill in order to publish with Amazon’s CreateSpace. These requirements are pretty simple and include two key requirements:

Content Guidelines and Copyright

Just like any other publisher, CreateSpace will not publish any copied content. You must adhere to the standard copyright practices. You are not allowed to copy someone’s work or to use any copyright images and so on. If you don’t know much about copyrighting and are yet to obtain one, you may visit the United States Copyright
Office at http://www.copyright.gov, or research online.

Submission requirements

In order to self publish your book with Amazon you have to follow the submission requirements. The most important requirements are listed below. You can also find the list with all of the submission requirements on the CreateSpace website.

• Fonts must be embedded in the PDF version of the file you submit; all books are printed on as-it-is basis, meaning the book is printed exactly in the order the way you submit it.
• Embedded images must be 300 DPI.
• Trim Sizes and Maximum Page Counts must be according to CreateSpace requirements.
• Minimum requirement is 24 pages.
• Margins may include inside or outside type of margins.
• Inside margins are according to the books binding guidelines. See the chart
• Outside margins are the page edges opposite of the binding, and the top and bottom margins. All of the included text and images must confirm to the outside margin of .25” at the least but CreateSpace recommends an outside margin of .5”
• Bleed : If you want the images to extend to the corners of your book, make sure that they extend at least .125” to the trim size from all sides (bottom, top, all edges) then you must submit your PDF .25” higher and .125” wider than the base trim size you selected.
• Any images may be tagged with your choice of Grayscale,CMYK or RGB profiles or left untagged in a generic color space. All images should be sized at 100%, flattened to one layer and placed in your native document at a resolution of300 DPI.
• Embed all fonts and images in your PDF file.

The requirements will not say much at this time, if you never published a book before but don’t worry because I will explain each of them in detail in the coming articles.

How much does cost?

Self publishing with CreateSpace is completely free; the only thing you have to pay for is the first copy and its shipping cost. However you can upgrade to Pro-Plan which costs 39$ onetime fee and a 5$ renewal fee every year for each book. If you have ten books you’ll have to pay 50$ for renewals. If you sign up for the Pro-Plan, you get the EDC option and your royalties are significantly increased.

Publishing a book has been an impossible task for far too many authors because traditional publishers have turned writing, printing and selling a book into a business, a money-making business. But the publishing world is changing, the publishing world now offers you the chance to self-publish and bypass the middleman. Here´s what this article is about: get your words directly to the consumer.

If you’re an author (published or not), an enthusiastic reader with book ideas, a business person or just a curious one, this is the right information for you.You can print your stories, your work tutorials or anything and everything that occurs to you. And this is how you do it!

This article intends to guide you through the process of self-publishing a book with CreateSpace, a company that is part of the Amazon group of companies. And no, it doesn’t rely on any agents or publishers to review any of your work – that’s ONE of the pros: self-publishing doesn’t require evaluation of your work by any third parties. There is no need to write a book proposal and send it to countless publishing houses; you no longer have to refresh your email waiting for an answer (any answer!); you don’t have to deal with all the rejection. Here is your chance to get your words out there. Read on – I’ll show you.

Pro number TWO is the simple fact that self-publishing requires no investment on your part. This process is absolutely free! And – get this! – you don’t have to wait for your publisher to get around to actually publish your book. With CreateSpace your work gets on Amazon within the month and  is only actually printed when there’s a registered order – it’s on-demand. I’m counting that as pro number THREE.Self-publish and you get to print your own version of your work and keep the rights to your work (pro FOUR).

Do you still have doubts about why you should self-publish? That’s understandable. Every book has two covers, right? So here’s the deal: the fact is that if you self-publish, you have to do everything yourself. Yes, you have to prepare your own layout, decide things like line spacing and margins, create and insert your illustrations, create your cover and, of course, create the PDF files that will allow CreateSpace to store your book.

These are your challenges. Are you ready to tackle them? I guarantee that, even though it can sound like too much work, it’s actually pretty easy and fun. The hard part is to write the book! Besides, here’s your step-by-step guide to solve all your self-publishing problems.

We’ll get started at the beginning and tutor your way into CreateSpace, the tool that we’ll be using for publishing your book. Then, we’ll get into the publishing basics and talk about preparing your manuscript and editing it – one of the most important steps! After the words are ready, we’ll get you through one of the biggest challenges for self-published authors: the cover. Last but not least, we’ll finally get around to creating the PDF files that will be submitted to CreateSpace as your work. We’ll finish it off with your book summation process and, of course, marketing strategies for your book.

Believe me: as a self-published author I can assure you that there is nothing quite like holding my own paperback work in my hands. I hope to deliver that same feeling to you with this step-by-step guide to self-publishing on Amazon. Thank you for reading this article and I encourage you to read all the articles and tutorials that Selfpub.info has to offer, I know it will be an invaluable tool for you to accomplish your dreams.

Read the next articles:

1. Why self-publish with Amazon?

2. Book Publishing Basics

3. Writing the Manuscript

4. Proofreading and Copyediting

5. Editing the Manuscript

6. Designing the book cover

7. Preparing the PDF files

8. Book marketing strategies.

Here’s the heart of it: writing the manuscript. There are times when you get an idea – a great idea – and settle down to write it, but then life gets in the way and your thoughts can get lost, confused or forgotten. So here are some tips to get you into it.

First and foremost: you need to write every single day. There are no breaks or vacations for your writing because if you let a day go by without writing, you can lose your storyline, your characters, the words you had been thinking on and, most importantly, if you let a day go by, you’ll probably let a week go past and then a month and, before you know it, your great idea is gone.

Having said that, after you decide to put your idea into words, you need to define your subject. This is fundamental in order to structure your work and avoid going on and on about a million different things. What’s the story about? Answer this question and then begin your writing. And don’t forget to do some research on the subject. Even if the story is set in an imaginary world, research what other imaginary worlds have been created, the clothing, the weapons… whatever seems relevant.

When you’re well into your research, start making lists. This will help you get to the end of your text knowing that you’ve said everything you wanted, as opposed to writing with no guidelines and starting a text about onions and getting to the end with a text about robots. You need to stick to your intentions so that the storyline is solid.

But your work as an author isn’t solitary. There are thousands of writers out there and some of them have work that is similar to yours. As in any other business, you need to investigate what others are doing, writing, producing. In other words: you need to watch the competition. Read books that are of the same genre as yours and determine what has made them sell and be successful, learn from your peers and be better than them.

Ultimately, you need to write a manuscript that is better than those of its genre… and cheaper. “Why should readers buy my book and not my competitor’s?” – have a rock solid answer to this question and you’re set to succeed.

Since you are responsible for publishing, the proofreading and copyediting work is yours. The book sent for publishing will be published exactly the way you sent without any corrections. That’s why self published books are not treated as professional by lots of people since these works are published with grammatical and spelling mistakes. Don’t let your work counted as one of these.

It is recommended to proofread the book before it is sent for publishing. Not only you but you should take help of your friends and family members; let them read your unpublished book several times so that no mistake in the book is left without correction. Getting all the correction done will make your book top notch in quality with respect to writing.

For more perfection you can hire proofreading and copyediting services to do work for your book. Don’t just rely on grammar and spell checkers, though these tools can be handy but they do not grab all the mistakes. While proofreading and copyediting, read the contents slowly as little errors will be missed on reading fast. Proofreading and copyediting your work once will not be enough; take a break of a day or two and then again go through the work again.

Not only poor grammar and spelling mistakes will make your work inferior but there are other aspects which need proper attention to make your work truly professional. Proper tone, sentence structure, smoothness and clarity will make your book look better. These all things are covered while copyediting and proofreading.

The published book should make you proud as a creator. The book loved by you will be treated better by others. You should not be embarrassed by any aspect of the book, whether it’s the look or the content or the idea.

Today I have created a 6 x 9 Indesign Book Template  and I decided to make it publicly available to the world, it has more of an professional touch to it hope that you like it.

6 x 9 Indesign Book Template Download

6 x 9 Indesign Book Template Demo

Please give feedback!

Exporting  PDF  from  InDesign

There are two ways of exporting into PDF from InDesign. The first one and the one I recommend uses the built in export features that InDesign has;  the second one uses Abobe Distiller. Taking in to consideration that InDesign was made to export to PDF we will use the built in option and we will leave the Adobe Distiller for when we export from Microsoft Word.

After you double check that everything is in place and its exactly how you want it, go to

1. File -> Export, choose PDF format, type the name of the file and click Save.

The window in figure 2a will appear on the screen.

Before I move on to explaining what settings you need to choose, I will talk a little bit about flattening and transparency. Whenever you send a PDF  file to a printer (in our case CreateSpace), you have to think about flattening, especially if you’ve used any transparent objects in your document (like  dropshadows, or imported Photoshop files with transparent areas). Transparency has to be flattened before it can be printed on a post script printer, because postscript doesn’t understand transparency.

CreateSpace requires that all submitted  PDF files are flattened  prior to submission.

Now that we know about flattening, let’s choose the settings that will flatten our document.

From the Adobe PDF Preset dropdown menu, select “PDF/X-1a:2001”, and from the Compatibility dropdown menu, select Adobe 4 (PDF 1.3).

Choosing Adobe 4 (PDF 1.3)  will ensure that your PDF files will print on almost anything and that is highly recommended, especially if you are planning on going with the EDC.

After that, select the pages and make sure that you leave Spreads off .

Click on view PDF after exporting, and uncheck Optimize For Fast Web View, if its checked.

After making these changes, the window should look like this:

You should skip the Compression tab and leave the settings as they are.

Click on the Marks and Bleeds tab.

Click on the Output tab

On the Color Conversion option select Convert to Destination (Preserve numbers) and leave the rest of the settings as they are.

Click on the Advanced tab.

Here you should type 0 to replace the 100% and after that make sure that you Select High Resolution from the Transparency Flattener presets.

Click Export and you are done.

Having a 3D Book Cover for your book  will not only increase your sales but also give the customer the feeling that they are actually getting something for their money.With this in mid I have created simple and easy to use 3D Book Cover Template that can be easly edited in PhotoShop and can be simple integrated into your website.

I have created a  new version of the 3D Book Cover, tell me what you think?

Book publishing has not changed since 1947. The business model is long overdue for alteration. The state of the Economy is not the problem; it is just the catalyst or final straw. Change would have come eventually.

The large publishers will consolidate, downsize and disappear. Agents will have few publishers to sell to. Brick-and-mortar bookstores will close as book sales move online. Many wholesalers and distributors will close with fewer stores to sell to.

Authors will deal directly with the online book and other “stores”.

What will the book industry lose?

Just the gatekeepers in the middle.

Self-publishing wins—traditional publishing disappears.

Don’t you love it when you find out you have been right all along?

Having a 3D Book Cover for your book  will not only increase your sales but also give the customer the feeling that they are actually getting something for their money. And with this in mid I have created simple and easy to use 3D Book Cover Template that can be easly edited in PhotoShop and can be simple integrated into your website.

How to use 3D Book Cover Template in Photoshop

1. Download the 3D Book Cover Template and open it with PhotoShop CS.

2. Open the Layers Panel from the flyout menu like dispalyed below.

In the layers panel you see two layers called  “front“  and  “spine” this are the only layers that you will use.

4.  Next you have to doble click on the “front” layer, after that a pop box will apear like the one sown below, click “ok” to continue.

5. The front layer will open a documnet as shown in the image below, here is were you will change the design of the template and after that you will colose and save the file.

After saivig the results will be seen in the orignal 3D Book Cover Image that you first opened with the changes made.
From here you can easily export the 3D Book cover into the diesired format.
And  you will do the same with the “spine” layer as with the front layer.