Melissa & Dave - Adventures at Sea

So Melissa's first book was published today!  Hooray!  Here' the description: "If you are a first time property manager this book is for you.  It contains a ton of practical and easy to follow advice on everything from figuring out how much rent to charge to maximize your profits to how to advertise inexpensively and effectively.  From how to set up your company and your website to how to run credit checks and evaluate ability to pay.  This book will help you to get up and running fast while avoiding the costly mistakes.  It's the "what we wish someone had told us" book."  It's basically every bit of wisdom we've picked up over the years managing rental properties all boiled down to the essentials.  You can buy a printed copy of the book at Create Space at a friends and family discount of 20% using the discount code NWZYLEA2.  Or at Amazon.  Or the Kindle version.

Melissa decided to self publish this one because she plans to market it to real estate agents.  The idea being that if they have a client buying their first rental property, then rather than spending their valuable time educating their client about how to be a property manager (something they may not be an expert in anyway) they can buy their client a copy of the book.  So with such a targeted audience it didn't make sense to give up a big slice of the profits to a publisher.

Melissa selected Amazon because they will print the books on demand.  So there is no need to buy a big publishing run of books - so no need to invest a bunch of money up front.  And because the integration to the Kindle format is slick.

Here is how it works:

1. Setup an account on www.createspace.com
2. Follow the wizard to create a book title.  They will walk you through getting issued an ISBN number and so forth so your book can be purchased from any bookstore.  An ISBN is the International Standard Book Number - required to publish a book as its the main database "key" for all published book databases.  Normally you have to pay for them (as much as $125 for a single ISBN number) - but CreateSpace will give you one for free if you use them to print your book (i.e. you can't change publishers later).  Though in bulk they cost as little as $1, so from CreateSpace's point of view paying $1 on the chance of keeping you with their publishing system seems worth the gamble.
3. Decide on the paper size format of your book.
4. Download their Word document template setup for the size of book you want.
5. Write the book using the template.  Its easiest if you write the book using the template as it does all the stuff for you like the table of contents, header formatting, etc.  It also reminds you to put in all the stuff like the acknowledgements and dedication and makes sure you have the right copyright notices.
6. I bought some images for use in the document from www.istockphoto.com for $210 total.
7. I asked about a half a dozen people to read the draft and give me input.  They all had great suggestions almost all of which I incorporated.
8. I had an editor review the book - 35 pages of text was $350.  Well worth it because he corrected a ton of stuff to get it consistent with publishing standards.
9. Upload the book to CreateSpace.  Their "reviewer" system then lets you flip through the pages the exact way they will look when printed so you can do a quality review.  The system will also warn you about things like low quality graphics.
10. Create your book cover.  They have an online wizard that lets you do the layout easily.  You can upload photos and so forth.  I just used some standard stock photos I had purchased previously from www.istockphoto.com for the Limerick Properties website for $65.  This way the "branding" is consistent between the book and the website.
11. Once everything is done, you submit the book for review to make sure it is printable - what this review entails isn't clear, but it takes about 24 hours to complete.
12. You then have one last opportunity to review the final version with the cover and interior assembled together.  You can also order a printed copy for review.  I didn't do this because there is no practical way to get the book here in Panama.  If I had ordered one it would have cost $2.15 + shipping.
13. Once complete, you hit the "publish" button, and you're done.  Automagically the book becomes available through any bookstore or online retailer.  They said it would take three days to show up on Amazon, but in reality it took only a matter of hours.
14. Then there are a few more steps to make the Kindle version operational.  Create Space automatically sends the publication files to the Kindle publishing platform.  You then logon with your Amazon account at: https://kdp.amazon.com/ and follow the steps to create your Kindle account (mostly tax information for the IRS for when they pay you royalties).
15. You then select your Kindle pricing along with a few other thing like the categories you want the book to appear in, and whether you want rights management turned on (if its turned off people can share your book without paying for it).  You then submit and your book goes through a review process that takes a few hours.  And then poof! it appears for sale on Amazon!

By the way, this would be a very viable way to publish something like a workbook for a workshop that would allow students to order and pay for their own materials.  The process is so easy that its become a viable way to distribute almost any sort of non-confidential printed materials.