Oct 15, 2014 4:08 PM If I knew that the market for a collection of essays was so very small, I probably would never have done it. That is, write over ninety essays in the past two years. I don't want to look back and feel as if I wasted my time writing all of them so have decided to publish a book on Create Space. Does anyone here have any advice on getting my ninety plus essays and approximately 175,000 words into a book form? I have written an introduction, self edited all of them, and don't care if the book runs longer than usual. If it doesn't come out in perfect form, it doesn't matter too much because it's mainly for personal use. Five copies would be good for now and maybe more in the future if I can ever find people who enjoy my one to six thousand word essays on a range of personal and intellectual topics. Do you have any ideas or suggestions? Do you know of a publishing company, or an individual for that matter, who would just take the essays from my website or from Microsoft Word and just get it into book form? Again, they wouldn't have to bother reading any of my essays - just make sure the formatting looks decent. I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable fee for all this. I was on Create Space last week and after reading the articles there, I felt very confused and overwhelmed by it all. Formatting, fonts, cover design, and uploading my essays on PDF files - now I can understand those who say that writing the book is the easy part. I am not interested in selling my work to the public - or at least not yet. This is mainly for personal reasons. I don't need anyone to edit or proofread them, since I have taken the considerable time in the past two months doing the best I can in that department. I don't need anyone to read and comment on them either. I am a very verbal person and the type of person who would enjoy my essays would be that sort as well, so I don't care about having a great cover design. If I had to, I would take the time to learn whatever was necessary. For now, I don't care much about formatting. My essays are currently in private publishing mode on my website at WordPress. Although it's probably a simple process after all, I'm not looking forward to having to upload PDF files on Microsoft Word to CreateSpace. I read about PDF in an article at Create Space and had little to no idea what they were talking about. I use my computer a lot for research and writing but have little to no idea how to create and upload documents and really don' t want to learn unless absolutely necessary. I don't want to sound stupid or plain lazy, but this may very well be the last book I will ever write. I therefore don't want to waste time and go through all the aggravation of doing it all by myself unless I really must. I just want to get the book in my hands and tell myself that I actually did it. Whatever happens after that will take care of itself. Bill
Hey Bill, Why don't you take a look at lulu.com? They offer handy ms word templates and you don't have to create PDF documents. You can publish your book as an Ebook via lulu and sell them on Amazon after you get an ISBN number.
You can check out my article on Self Publishing here in the Article section, Bill - https://www.writingforums.org/threads/my-first-attempt-at-self-publishing.134816/. When I did mine on CreateSpace I downloaded OpenOffice - but if you have Microsoft word don't bother ( as long as you save your writing in a word doc file ) There are also some links in the article for templates as sometimes the templates they offer you at CreateSpace don't work well.
