Self publishing is generally thought of in terms of a few different options. A good portion of self published authors end up turning to vanity presses. Some authors choose to have a small print run of 500 or 1000 books (or more) done by a local printer. Others opt to use a POD service (like CreateSpace or Lulu) to publish their book. And still others just go the ebook route, making their book available through the Kindle or sites like SmashWords.

I make a living writing. It may not be a great living, but then again, I don’t really work that much (less than twenty hours a week on paid work). I’ve been making at least a portion of my monthly writing for almost two years now.

Book trailers are a great, fun way to get the word out about your book. They’re just like movie trailers, just for—you guessed it—books. If you manage to get your book trailer video to go viral, the interest and sales you can generate can really make a difference to how well your book does.

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time researching self publishing in an effort to make sure I’m well informed as I proceed with self publishing my own book. One of the things I see over and over again are statistics about how self published books sell so poorly.

If you’ve been reading this blog for long, I’m sure you already know I’m planning on self publishing a nonfiction book in the coming months. Self publishing has a long history of being ridiculed and looked down upon, so why in the world would I decide to do this to myself? Couldn’t I find a traditional publisher? Why in the world would I risk the future of my writing career by self publishing the first book I ever publish?

This article is a technical look at setting up a template in Adobe InDesign. It is not a beginner level tutorial and expects you to have some familiarity with InDesign. I’m including this here because when I was looking for information on setting up book templates I found tutorials severely lacking. Starting from scratch seemed a bit daunting and was discouraging at first. Hopefully this tutorial will make things easier for others doing the same thing.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m currently writing a non-fiction book (details on exactly what this book is about will be revealed within the next month or so, once I’m a bit further into the project). When I first got the idea for the book, I planned on writing up a proposal, an outline, and a couple of sample chapters, and shopping it around to agents and publishers. It’s a long process, finding an agent, and sometimes an even longer one to find a publisher.