My So-Called Pseudo Self-Publishing Journey

Hi Gretchen,

Wow, you're really going for it. Good luck!

I'm very much a beginner to all this and still trying to bash out my first short story - so I'm a little concerned I might be 'telling Grandma how to suck eggs', but I've been doing a bit of reading.

You might find 'Write, Publish, Repeat' by Johhny B. Truant and Sean Platt quite insightful on the self-publishing side of things. They also run the 'Self Publishing Podcast' which seems to be quite popular.

I read 'Writing Journal' by Scott Haworth, which, although I found it a depressing read, went into detail about the highs and lows (mostly lows) of self-publishing, especially in respect to running promotions etc.

Hope that helps somewhat. I don't really have any quality advice, so please accept my encouragement!

For centering, just use the "text-align: center" attribute for the paragraph style that you want centered:


For page breaks before, the attribute is "page-break-before:always;"

Make sure that your styles cascade appropriately, i.e., that these paragraph-level styles are not overridden by a <div> style, for example.

You can use a distributor to get the books into iTunes or you can use an uploading service. You don't need a Mac to manage the books when they're there, so the one-off fee might end up being a better deal than a cut of the royalties. I know the Formatting Fairies do it, but there are probably plenty of other services. Otherwise, look at Draft2Digital or Smashwords.