How to Self Publish your Book On Cafepress

POD, or publish on demand is sustaining many small press companies. This is great news for writers and authors, who might otherwise never break into the book market. There is a huge demand for good non-fiction, but the fiction market is busting at the seams with established authors. Breaking in, is very difficult, and statistically, almost impossible.

There are many authors out there who owe their being published to the POD Press. Even, then, as the years go by, the POD publishers find themselves flooded with too many authors to publish.

The only road for many excellent writers to travel, is to self publish. This is an expensive undertaking, and even then, most self published authors have to fork out more money for the advertising packages. Most of them just don't make it out of the family bookshelf.

This all sounds very depressing. Ebooks is a cheaper alternative, but they have not really caught fire yet, even with palm readers.

SO - what is the aspiring author to do?

There is an answer...and it lies with CafePress. CafePress is usually associated with posters, Tee shirts, mouse pads and gimmicky buttons...none of which are of spectacular quality.

A few years ago they started offering a self publishing service. It was terribly difficult back then, to understand their upload instructions and the book quality was not very good at all. They were very limited in what they could publish and larger books had to be divided into two or more volumes.

Time has moved on, and the publishing section of CafePress has moved, along with most things on the internet.They can now allow the author to publish one volume of just short of 600 pages in trade paperback form, and have ring bound options and really neat booklets format for books up to 50m pages long.

It can be a hassle and an irritation to get all the page sizes and covers just right, but the experience has been character building for me. After many hours of frustration, I have decided to share the basic construction of a Trade Paper Back book with you all.

Firstly, you will need Microsoft word, or similar. As long as it can be written to pdf format, any word processor program will do.
1- Set up your page settings as follows:
Custom page size 12.7 width x 20.32cm in height.
Margins - Top 1.3cm
Bottom 1.3cm
Inside 3.2cm
Outside 1.5cm
Gutter 0
Header and Footer 1.2cm
Click Mirror Margins.

Once you have set up your pages, the first thing you need to do is allow two blank pages before entering any text.These blank pages are to be part of your book. they are called fly sheets.Then you can enter your text. Text is best in gourmand or New Times Roman. Bear in mind, the bigger the book, the more your base price is going to be...so avoid fonts like Arial. You will want to keep your text at no less than size 9. Preferably , bigger is best. Text should be spaced at 1.5 lines, but if you really are pushed for space, keep your line spacing single and make the font a bit bigger.

Chapter headings should be larger than the body text and either Bold or underlined. Bold and Underlining went out with Mary Queen of Scots! Make sure each Chapter starts on a new page, preferably on the right hand side. This holds true for all your important beginnings.

Front Matter:
The front matter, or those boring bits you normally skip reading , like the copy right page come first.

After your two blank pages, you put in a single page that has only the Title of your book on it.

The next page has the authors name and lists any other titles by this author.

The third page with text on it is your main title page. This has the Book Title at the top, the authors name on it and at the bottom, the name of your company and the date.

The fourth page is the copyright page. This page contains the rights of others to distribute, copy,use the book etc. It will contain your ISBN number if you have one. In some countries this is easy and free, in others, you will have to pay a small fee to get one. Ask at your library if you are not sure where to obtain one. Your copyright page must have Printed by CafePress.com at the bottom.This is also where you should put in your address, just in case some higher flying marketer wants to sign you up to write some more books!

The dedication page comes next. You may want to dedicate the book to someone in your family.

Following the dedication page, you can insert your Content page or Index.

After the Index or content page, the next one will be a page that has an introduction to the book, editorial notes, an about the author note...anything that you like really.

The main content of your book will follow on after this page. If the last page of the front matter ends up on the right...it will be fine to add a blank page to get your first chapter on the right hand side of the book.

Main Content Matter:
This is the longest part to prepare, as you have to write it...but the easiest bit to configure. You only have to worry about making certain the next chapter starts on a new page and that you have spell checked for errors.

Back Matter:
This is the back end of the book. These pages are for references, acknowledgements, glossaries and the like. You could add a page here telling people where to buy your book, or even include a tear out mail order form in these back matter pages.

At this point you should have a fairly size-able document. you will need to read it over...and over...and over...and over. Shall I say it again? Over and over. Make sure it all looks good and do another spelling and grammar check before saving it as a final draft.

Make certain you save your final draft in print view, in plain .doc format. Do not save as a web page or in any other special format. You still need to write this to pdf format, and if you don't want to go crazy getting the page settings right for printing, it needs to be in a simple format.

If you do not have an acrobat pdf writer/printer you have just come to a halt. Go and get one online. They are affordable, cheap, and if you are a pro writer you need one.

You convert your book by "printing" it. Instead of printing it to your BJC Canon, you print it to your new pdf software. (Some pdf converters work differently, but I am sure if you can write a book, you can read a help program!) You print it to your pdf program. Then you save it as a pdf file on your hard drive. You do not print it on paper. This pdf file is the book you wrote. It will be uploaded to the CafePress server, so make a few copies as backup.

Covers:
You will need a photo editing program. There are many out there, but my preferences are Photo-Shop, which is very expensive, or Photo-Suite, which is not. I use both of them together. In reality though, you can still put together a great cover with some thought and imagination and bit of photo editing on any program that allows the adding of text and borders.

Your cover needs to be saved as a jpeg file.The size of your picture needs to be bigger than the actual book. The book you are making is a standard 5 x 8 inches. The cover needs to be 5.5 x 8.5 inches. This is to allow a bleed of the image off the edge of the cover, so there is no white line on your book cover. because of this bleed area, do NOT put any text or other things you want seen, too close to the edge of your picture.

You make your back and front covers and save them. The spine cover will come last. You can only make it when you have uploaded your pdf file. Cafepress will not know how thick your book will be until you have started putting it all together. However, it will be 8.5cm in height and you could work on about one inch thick for a 300 page book.

Right...you have a pdf book in it's entirety. You have a front cover and a back cover. Now you need to sign up and become a member of cafepress. Join up here for free : http://www.cafepress.com . It is free for one of each product. If you decide you want to publish more than one book they will ask you to pay an upgrade fee that is totally do-able!

Once you have set up your shop the way you want it, you can begin adding products. The Cafepress page is easy to work with. Click add product, book, and select the Trade Paper Back option.

The next page takes you to an upload document form. Upload your pdf file and select it. This then takes you to your cover pages. You will be given an opportunity to upload and insert your covers. The next step is to add search tags. DO THIS...no search tags, no views of your product! After you have added your covers, you can set the price. return to your product page, view your book and buy one for yourself!!!

All you have to then is promote it.

It is the best feeling in the world to write, publish and print your own book, so go and get started today!