Self-publishing, like me? Check out ebookpbook.

I've written four books. Three have been self-published. Or, to use the term Amazon has on my Break Free of Dogma listing, "independently published." 

Last year I praised ebookpbook after this firm ably prepared for just $79 an electronic/Kindle version of a previous book I wrote. See: "If you're looking for a book design firm, I highly recommend ebookpbook."

That book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, cost a lot for the paperback interior and cover design. Wanting to support a local graphic design firm, I paid them $3,000. That may seem like a lot, but it was in line with what book design companies I checked out via Google were estimating for a book like mine.

So with Break Free of Dogma I had the folks at ebookpbook do the interior design. They also made some adjustments to the cover that I fashioned myself courtesy of a Kindle Direct Publishing template. See above.

This is how much ebookpbook charged me: $249. Fifty dollars was for the cover work. Interior formatting and ebook preparation was $199. 

That's amazingly reasonable. You can check out how the interior design looks by heading to the Amazon listing and clicking on "Look Inside."

By the way, there are a few typos in the 85,000 word, 307 page book. I'm responsible for them. I didn't use the ebookpbook copy editing service, figuring I was capable of doing this myself. I just missed several typos and have vowed to be more careful with my next book.

Which I'm planning to have designed by ebookpbook also. Next time I'll probably have them design a custom cover, since most of the books in their "Portfolio" section look more attractive than the cover I created.

In case you're wondering how ebookpbook manages to do such a good job for such little money, the main reason is that they're located in Chennai, India.

But as noted in my first blog praise of this firm, I would never have known this if I hadn't asked Jason Pearce, the person I worked with last year, where he lived -- since he'd reply to my emails at times that indicated a decidedly distant time zone.

With Break Free of Dogma I worked with Vidya, who was equally competent, professional, timely, and organized. The only time her being in India came up was after I sent her this message:

Vidya, I just read a story about the horrible water problems in Chennai, India, and remembered that Jason said he’s lived there for 14 years. Don’t know if you are in Chennai, but if so, I wanted to express my sympathy for whatever problems you and others may be having. Global warming is causing temperature and precipitation extremes, and the world isn’t doing enough to stop carbon pollution. Very sad.

Vidya replied:

Thank you for your concern Brian. I do live in Chennai but fortunately managing with the resources available. Some parts of the city is very bad, especially the poor, who cannot afford to buy water. I live in an apartment here with three other neighbours and buy water of about 12,000 litres every 3-4 days.

It's marvelous that the Internet has made it so easy to communicate with people halfway around the globe. That said, I'm not recommending ebookpbook because they're in India, but because they make it possible for authors to get their book published at a very reasonable price with ease.

Break Free of Dogma consists of 93 posts from the early years of my Church of the Churchless blog. I basically copied and pasted content from my blog, and sent ebookpbook a manuscript with minimal formatting. No matter. They fashioned a good-looking book from that material in just a few weeks.

Few authors make much money from their books. I'm certainly not raking in the dough from Break Free of Dogma sales. That book was a labor of love for me, not a personal profit center.

So being able to have ebookpbook fashion books at such a reasonable cost makes independent publishing feasible for authors who aren't willing or able to either design a book themselves, or pay someone thousands of dollars to do this.

And that's a gift to the entire world.

Comments

[Rain Trueax]

I do all my own covers, which enables me to change them when i feel something else would look better. My husband does the formatting. For his work, he gets half the sales lol, which, of course, he'd get anyway. Getting images comes through businesses like CanStock, Deposit Photos, and Stencil for which I have paid for getting images by sometimes memberships and sometimes individual images. It's play for me and I use it when I am tired of writing or editing. Grammarly is pretty good on catching typos or mistakes but sometimes chooses worse words. I've used it but opted out of a new membership this time. D2D gets your books wide if you don't want to be in Amazon's Kindles Unlimited, which requires the book only be on Amazon. We are right now looking into getting Library of Congress numbers as some libraries only accept books with one. (Maybe all libraries as I only looked into one of them in Arizona.)