Jude's Almost Daily Blog: Write Your Book! It Can be FREE if You Do it Correctly.

I say "free" and what I mean by that, is that it didn't cost me any out-of-pocket money to write and then publish my book. It was literally free, but you do have to have a computer with Word, and you do have to have internet access. I'm not talking about 100% totally free, but you don't have to pay a big-time publishing company, or even a small boutique publishing company to publish, format, and/or design your book. You can (with a bit of patience) do it yourself. I'll explain.

I'm going to use "Murder Book" as an example because I have paid for every other book I wrote prior to Murder Book, to be formatted, edited, published, and then printed and distributed. You do still have to pay if you want to promote it, but I bet there are ways to do that by word-of-mouth, and other formats such as Tik Tok, and Facebook; the list is endless.

OK, so you want to write a book, and you've got a story to tell. Great, get your computer, and be sure you have a word processor loaded onto it. I use Word by Microsoft; others may use Google Docs or any other format. I prefer Word. I really preferred the older versions, but then again, the new versions probably have more capabilities when it comes to the actual formatting of the book. It's a trade-off. I wrote Murder Book in about 2 months' time. I started it in genuine in June, but I had started a bit before that, just sort of playing around with outlines and such. We'll say I wrote it in two months. Then, I called around, hunted the internet for places to just take the document in Word, which was 83400 words or so, and to just format it using a 5"x 8" book, and I needed a cover for it too.

I ran into three major problems. (1) Either they could format it and not do the cover, or (2) they could do the cover, but didn't want to format the book, or (3) they could do both and they were really expensive. I tried contacting folks on Fivver who were talented, experienced, and needed a good reference, as they are usually cheaper. I found GREAT people, but some of them seemed REALLY shady. I had a gal promise me to do the formatting for $10 and that just seemed crazy since I had paid an actual professional publisher over $700 for the same service a few months back. Why or how could she do it for $10? Turns out I was being RIPPED OFF by the publishing houses. I can do EXACTLY what they did for zero cost! NOTHING.

The lady who wanted to charge $10 told me how. I sent her $10 by the way. I don't count that as part of my book prep, it was more or less a thank-you. She appreciated it. She told me how to do the format, which two videos on YouTube to watch, because they were really close, but a little different; she felt it was good to point out their ideas and methods were really good, but they do have slightly different results. I watched, I learned, I took notes, and then I applied my new knowledge, and guess what, it worked. I managed to format my book in less than 30 minutes. I can do the next ones much faster, but I was learning how, and even 30 minutes isn't bad. I waited four weeks for one publisher to get my book formatted and sent to me for approval. I did it in 30 minutes!!

You write your book, and you save it as a PDF. Then you go to Microsoft tools and you input all your needed measurements. I'll actually make a blog soon with all the directions. That will make people happy. Anyway, I wanted to know if I had the ability to possibly make a cover that I liked as well. Turns out I do. I watched about four or five videos, and the ones I found most helpful suggested that I go to Adobe and download it for a month (free trial) and then go to Canva and do the same. Canva has a 30-day free trial as well. I went to Adobe Stock, and I downloaded 10 free photos that I may want to use in the future for books. I think I screwed them up when I downloaded them as I resized them. Don't do that. I may have to do another free month using another email address to get the same photos but in their original size.

Once you download the photo you want you upload it into Canva, AFTER you download the KDP book cover format template, which also is free. You just have to find it. If you use the Canva book design tool they tell you where the sites are, and there are more than just KDP, but I know they do 5"x 8" books, so I went there. You have to do a bit of research, trial, and error, practice, and have patience, because you have to get the spine width to fit your book size. My book has 395 pages. It is 83400 words, and I am using regular paper, nothing fancy. You'll find that fancy adds width. So, once you have figured out your sizes, you add that to the Canva template, and you upload your photo for the cover.

The front cover is what you're uploading, the back cover is handled differently. You choose your texts, you put them in, you choose colors, you change fonts, but remember if you use a font that is not open-sourced, you may have to get a license to do that. That can cost you, so remember to also do your research to find the fonts you need and want. There are thousands that are free, you'll probably find many you can use. When you get the front cover done, you read the instructions on Canva to show you how to upload the solid color for the back, stretching it over the entire border of the template. If you don't stretch it the distributor will kick it back saying the size is off by fractions of a fraction of an inch, but it matters. COVER THE DAMN TEMPLATE.

Done. You have created your book in Word, you have saved it in Adobe as a PDF, uploaded it into MS, and formatted it, you've researched to find out how to change your chapter styles, your headers, your footers, your numbers, heck, you've even done your freaking cover for FREE!! WOW! The next thing you do is upload each, two separate files, into your Ingram Spark account under new titles. I use Ingram Spark, you can use KDP or whoever you want. Ingram Spark is not charging to upload a title. It used to cost $50 for the book and $50 for the cover, but they had a bit of competition recently, and they dropped those charges. Woot!! (again, if you want to promote the book it will cost you, but writing it and getting it to the point of distribution doesn't have to cost you.)

I paid $1250 for "Faith Walks" to go from my computer to being a book. I paid the same or close to it for "Of Kilted Pleasure" and for "Jude's Almost Daily Blog Book". I paid about $700 for my less than 100-page poetry book. NOT AGAIN. "Murder Book" looks as professional as any of my other books, and I did it for NOTHING. You can't count the cussing, fussing, screaming, or wall-kicking moments that I had. I will be so much better with "Pinball", in fact, I've already downloaded the cover for "Pinball" and about four other books I will write. I know they will all be about the same size, so I used that same template. If they are not that size, I'll simply fluff and stuff until they reach that size. I'm happy with my newfound creative side.

Was it easy? HELL NO. But, I did learn a great deal not only about book creation but also about myself. I won't format for others, but I will do what my associate did for me, I'll tell people which YouTube videos to watch, and where to find the right templates. I'll list the steps below. Let me know if you're wanting to write a book and publish it for NOTHING. I'll send you in the right direction if I can. Woot!!

(email: jude.stringfellow@gmail.com)