Behind The Scenes of My E-Book Launch

My first book is out! I’m over the moon excited, if you haven’t been able to tell.

Here’s something you might not know. I never set out to publish Thirty Days, Thirty Ideas. I only ever intended it to be an event that we held here at PBW. I had just finished all of my stories of Days, though, and I was so afraid of self publishing it. I had so many questions I needed answers to. I needed to know I wasn’t going to screw it up royally.

I needed practice.

I learned so much through self publishing Thirty Days. Now, I want to share what I’ve learned with you, so that you know that you can do it, too.

Now, I don’t want to rehash the whole step by step guide to self publishing that I blogged about in July. If you’re interested, here’s the whole twelve step process to self publishing an e-book. Today is about the exact tools I used to create my book.

To create the book itself, I used Book Creator. Cost, nothing. I got it from the Play Store. I loved it because it took me about three minutes to figure out how to use. I was able to chose the text, leave pages blank if I needed to, type right onto pages when I wanted to and I could have added pictures if I’d needed to. I understand why my fellow blogger, Delia Writes, uses it. I loved it.  

I did not like that when I uploaded pages they did not fit, and I could not resize the font to flow better. I also wasn’t in love with the fact that I couldn’t change the font on the whole thing, and had to do it page by page. Totally slowed me down.

But the result! It looks so professional! I love it!

For the cover, I used Canva.

That’s right, the same site I use to create my blog images now has book covers. They are kind of limited in graphics, but I think I put together something pretty boss. I did intend it to look similar to my blog images, because that was a Paper Beats World book. But I also put together the cover for Days there. I like it a lot, and I hope you all like it too, when I reveal it next week.

To Publish, I used Gumroad.

I cannot say enough about this site. I was able to set up an offer code, make my own price, set my release date to the minute and provided code to put links to my store everywhere! I bought a copy myself, and the whole sales flow was super easy. Now, Thirty Days is in their store. I honestly have every intention of using them for every single self published book I produce.

With those three programs, I produced a professional book that I am really proud of. Now, for the almighty detail. How much did it all cost?

Book Creator- $0

Canva- $0

Gumroad- $0 (but they get a percentage of my sales.)

That’s right, the book cost me nothing to produce. Not a dime. I cannot recommend these programs enough.

So, that’s how I created this awesome book.

What do you think? Have you had any experiences with these programs, or any like them? Let us know in the comments below.