How to Self-Publish a Book for Free

The how-to guide for transforming a story on paper to an eBook + physical copy you can buy on Amazon (with Prime shipping) in just a few steps!

From a notebook to print: Christmas With The Cookie Crusher on Amazon

Over Christmas my 9 year old niece showed the family a 12-page story she thought of and wrote on her water-stained notebook — with graphics and all. I was impressed by the creativity at such a young age and immediately wanted to find a way to turn this into a real book for her. I thought that if she saw per book printed like all the other hundreds she reads it would fuel her creativity and encourage a little entrepreneurship. I had absolutely no knowledge on how to print a book, so I secretly snapped photos of the notebook and got started researching some options.

Converting the photos of the notebook to a typed document took the most time from this entire process. Apple & Amazon made the rest of the process surprisingly easy (I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised that the largest retailer in the world makes it easy to sell things).

If necessary, here’s your first few steps:

1. I used the Scanbot mobile app to snap the photos. It works great for multi-page documents, and by using the Black & White mode it will optimize the text to a slightly more readable format. This is a great toolbox app just to have for scanning any sort of document.
2. Google Docs has an option for speaking rather than typing, and it works pretty good. I spoke the entire pages to Google Docs and went back through to cleanup anything it missed.

Now with the story in a typed format, what’s left is converting it to an eBook that can be sent to a printer.

1. Download iBooks Author to convert the Google Doc to an eBook format (a PC alternative is BookType). For iBooks, choose the “Classic” template under ePub and go crazy. If you’re familiar with using Apple Pages or Keynote the Author app will be pretty easy to learn. When you’re finished, choose File · Export and save it as an ePub file.
2. Download Calibre eBook Management Application — this will convert your ePub file into a print-ready PDF that you’ll need for the next step. Drag the ePub file into Calibre, right click and choose Convert Books · Convert Individually. Change the settings to match below and hit Ok.
   - Output Format (top right): PDF
   - Page Setup: “Default Output Profile”, margins: 50 pt for left/right, 40 pt for top/bottom
   - Table of Contents: I added “Dedication” to the TOC Filter so that page wouldn’t show up in the Table of Contents
   - PDF Output:
   — Check Override paper size
   — Paper size: letter
   — Custom size: 6x8.5 inches
   — Check Add Page Numbers
   — Check Add Printable Table of Contents
   — Add a title for the TOC, and choose your fonts
   — For a children’s book 20px font size worked great
3. Sign up for CreateSpace (subsidiary Amazon) — this is the company that will give you a free ISBN #, print the book, and list the book on Amazon. While the site admittedly looks a little sketch based on design, it made the magic happen. They shipped us a physical copy of the book for $2.13 — that was a delightful surprise. I used their cover designer to design the cover, which was super easy as well. You’ll upload the PDF generated from Step 2 as the Interior file. The review process takes a few days, so be a little patient going through the steps.
4. Optional: CreateSpace has on option at the end to send your book to to the Kindle Direct Publishing site, which makes it available as an option for the Kindle alongside your physical copy on your Amazon product page. If you don’t list your book anywhere else, you can choose to enroll it in KDP Select which will give you a slightly higher royalty fee (which I recommend).
5. Optional: You can sign up for the Amazon Affiliate program and earn an extra ~4% on sales by sharing the link to your book with your affiliate ID associated to it.
6. Optional: If you used iBooks Author in Step 1 above, Apple makes it relatively easy to publish the book to the iBooks store as well. There’s decent documentation out there on how to do this…here’s a start. I ended up pulling the copy off iBooks due to lack of sales & I wanted to enroll it in the KDP Select through Amazon (Step 4). If you do desire the exposure in the iBooks store, I’d still wait 3 months when the KDP Select exclusivity window is up.

If you’re interested in looking at the finished result — head on over to the Amazon product page for Christmas With The Cookie Crusher.

The excited young author :)

For more detail on this method, I recommend checking out https://copywritingcourse.com/how-to-self-publish-a-book.