So - you have gathered your material - your fiction, your biography, your expert's guide, your photos, your stories, your poems, your family genealogy, whatever - and you want to turn it into a book. But you're not sure what to do next.

• One thing needs to be clear from the outset: are you wanting to be an independent (indie) author or not? That is, are you wanting to build a career for yourself as an author of your own books, or are you just wanting to get 50 - 1000 copies of a single printed edition out there and give an e-book a try as well? If the latter, skip the next paragraph.
• If you're serious about being a full-time "indie" author you're also talking serious investment of time and money. Indie stands for independent  (of large established publishers). You find a small local publishing house or you are your own publisher and that's all perfectly legal. But you need to be sure your material is good enough to give you a fighting chance as an independent author, and you will need the services of professionals to help you.  Indie authors play the field - some books may be published and distributed by small-scale publishers, others sold only online, some by the big publishers, some you may take all the way through by yourself. Costs will depend on the level at which you want to pitch your book. If you want to be low key for a start, e.g., a small print run and maybe an e-book, it will cost you less and you can distribute it yourself around family and friends and special interest groups. You will still have to pay for cover design, editing, layout, print-readiness and printing. If you want to look "professional" and aim high,  be prepared to kiss goodbye, just for a start, to $$1000s - not just for text and photo-editing services, book and cover design, quality  (colour) illustrations, and the technical preparation of the PRINTED and e-book versions of your book, but also the probable services of an editor, or agent or publicist or distributor. If you are thinking children's books, an illustrator is going to be essential and can cost up to $4000 a book. If you are going to get the book into e-bookstores the book will need to be prepared technically as a digital file to meet specifications. Text heavy fiction with maybe a few illustrations and designed cover is cheaper to prepare for e-bookstores. But complex non-fiction (e.g. with indices, footnotes, bibliographies, references, diagrams and photos) is time-consuming and much trickier to prepare, espcially as a "reflowable" e-book (which most digital books need to be to work on a wide-range of devices). You will also need to familiarise yourself with the evolving range of digital bookstores and work their systems to give your book maximum exposure. Whether your book is printed or digital you will need to set up a website, a blog to give your book traction and begin to use social media. And after all that, your book might still struggle! You will need to market, market, market and stay the course. Indie publishing is not for the faint-hearted. Do your homework. Online publishing is a lot faster than traditional publishing but it's highly competitive and still an evolving business from the technical side. But increasingly services are available to help indie authors find their way in the big, wide competitive world. If you're serious about a future in the world of indie publishing, you have some serious commitment ahead of you.      
• If you never planned on being a full-time  indie author anyway but believe a book of yours has potential as printed/e-book versions in a niche market then you're facing much lower costs and BriarsBooks can help you. You might be looking at an initial short print run of maybe 50 - 100 copies with a local printer, and more later if the book begins to move. And you'd be prepared to put the book on just one digital store - probably the most popular and accessible, Amazon Kindle - just to see how well it does on the international market. OK! That takes a lot of pressure off you and off your budget. If your book has been checked and double-checked by yourself, kind friends and family you can save yourself the expense of professional editing. But it still means you're going to have to pay a technical person to prepare the book for printing. (See costs). Printer's costs will be additional to that. But then the book is in your hands and you can sell it and distribute it as you wish. And that original outlay is a one-off cost. Small revisions will cost very little to make and you will only have the printer's bill to meet second time round. If you want to create an e-book as well, that will be a further bill, and your costs will be lighter if the conversion is made from the computer files of the existing print version rather than prepared from scratch.
• Most self-publishing authors print between 50 and several thousand books in a print run. Unless you've got a large and ready market it's safer to print a small number, see how they go and print more on demand. It gives you the chance to make improvements in the next print run or correct the inevitable (usually minor) errors discovered after printing. Costs per book will fall gradually the larger the print run.
• The quality of digital printing is improving all the time and digital machines using toner can do as good a job on the average book as large traditional offset presses using CMYK inks. But small print runs on large presses are very uneconomical. For self-publishing authors digital printing is definitely the way to go.

How to prepare your book for print and e-book

• If you're wanting a professional-looking result don't try to do the entire book yourself. It's a tricky process to get a book to print and you're best leaving the production process to someone skilled. They are (usually) experienced users of book layout software, know the requirements of the printing process and the technical pitfalls. BriarsBooks offers that service.
• Whether your book is for a niche market or for grandchildren, family and friends, make sure your content is well-organised, and not confusing to follow. Try to avoid jargon - unless you're writing for specialists who understand it.
• Your material must be given to your book designer in electronic form, ie., typed out in a computer program like Microsoft Word or a similar word processing program. In the production process the book needs to be "imported" from such a program into higher level production software. (There is no other trouble-free way to prepare books today.) Hopefully you are typing your book into a word-processing program yourself. If not you will need someone to convert your handwriting to electronic form for you before you pass it on to your designer/producer - who will otherwise charge you for the service.
• It is VERY important that you do not spend hours on your computer trying to carefully format the way you want the book to look. All your hard work will be stripped out by the pre-press software because a book cannot be prepared for trouble-free printing unless that happens. Word processing programs - and there are quite a number - can introduce all kinds of hidden characters and formatting instructions that can cause technical problems down the line. Prepare only a page or two to give your designer an idea of the kind of thing you're after, but give them everything else in basic formatting only, i.e., paragraph text and headings/sub-headings. Or take along a book that looks like what you're wanting. Discuss what you want with the designer until you're both happy with it. This is often a process. NEVER give your designer your book layed out using table formatting. It may appear to keep things in nice regular lines (inside Word), but a whole book in tables is a nightmare for layout software and has to be completely dismantled. Use tables only when you are dealing with true tabular data.
• Your book may need editing. The more eyes that see your manuscript the better. You tend not to see your own mistakes. Friends and family can help here. But, depending on the quality you want, a professional edit may be desirable. BriarsBooks offers that service. You don't communicate by being unclear or ambiguous. An edit can improve the reader's experience.
• If your book is to include illustrations get them looking as clean as you can before giving them to your designer. Scanning and printing picks up all smudges and flecks. Or be prepared to pay your designer to do that for you. Same with photos. If you are happy that blotchy, torn, faded  photos or photos with a strong colour-cast are scanned and placed in your book, that's fine, but if you want them improved that will be a cost you will have to meet. Photo scans will pick up finger prints, creases and every blotch. BriarsBooks offers a scanning and photo restoration service.
• PHOTOGRAPHS from clients are usually a headache for designers. If you possibly can, use photographic prints as your source and get them scanned at 300ppi or (preferably) 600 ppi (pixels per inch), or get your designer to scan them. NEVER give a book designer a photo that you have downloaded from the internet unless you know what you're doing. Typically they are 72 or 96 ppi and will shrink to a quarter of their dimensions in the book (because of the requirements of commercial printing), forcing the designer to artificially create about 3 new pixels for every existing pixel to bring the photo back up to size - a sure-fire recipe for furry images. Usually a rescue job can be mounted but it's a fix-up. Generally clients don't realise that a photo that looks large on screen shrinks to tiny sizes in a book. One client sent me rare photos for a book and they were mostly 72 dpi - off the internet. Unfortunately, the front cover design had to be built around these images and their small size compromised the design because I could not enlarge the photos without making them soft.
• You will need to think about copyright (the restrictions/permissions placed on readers who want to use material from your book), whether you want an ISBN number (and barcode) or not (so your book can be inventoried by the National Library and inquiries referred to you). You will need to think of a title, about the kind of paper you want to use in the book, what sort of cover stock (most self-published books are "paperbacks" using a strong flexible card), and whether you want special effects like embossing, or foil. Your designer can help you make these decisions.
• Have a reasonable idea what art you want for the cover. Do you want to use a photo, create a design yourself? Do you want the designer to do it, or friend or family member?
• You need to decide on the size of your book. A5 is a good size. It's easy to hold in the hand and it fits snugly into standard envelopes for posting. It also fits printer's sheets with very little paper wastage. (Don't forget you're paying for the number of sheets of paper printers use and if you can get 2 A5 pages out of a sheet rather than only one larger page, you've been economical.) You might need a larger format, but you need to do your sums. Your designer will be able to get printers' quotes for you that will help you decide.
• Your designer/producer will consult regularly with you during the design and production of your book. The traditional way to do this is to send you regular pdfs so you can view progress and print out the pdf if necessary. A pdf is a computer file that opens in software (Adobe Acrobat Reader) now present on most computers and devices. If you are not computer-savvy you will need to take trips to view the designer's progress if you live locally, or view it on a friend's computer and/or get a friend to print it out for you..
• Many people ask about turning their book into an e-book. BriarsBooks provides that service.

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