And that’s what a self-published writer is: his own publisher.

 I got the Kindle requirements down without too much trouble, and my two books are up and available. Sales are slow, but I’m not doing a whole lot to promote it, pending having my print book available. I figured out Smashwords, and both my books are available there, and in their premium catalogue. That means they are distributed to the Apple iTunes store, the Sony Reader store, and elsewhere. That hasn’t helped me much so far as I have no sales there. Of course, I haven’t done any promotion to speak of, because I’m waiting till I have my print book available till I promote.

So why isn’t the print book available, and when will it be available? I finally began the process this week. On Tuesday I opened my CreateSpace account. This is an Amazon company for self-publishing print on demand books. Also on Tuesday I read instructions and watched the training video.

On Wednesday I began the process of getting my book, Documenting America,  printed. I created the book in the CreateSpace system, got an ISBN for it (the freebie kind), and pulled up my MS Word file and did the reformatting needed to go from e-book to print book, including changing the page size to 5.5 x 8.5 inches, one of the CS standard sizes. Finally I was ready to upload my book to CS. I learned it had to be converted to PDF first, and here I was stuck. I only have the Adobe Reader, not Adobe Acrobat, the program that lets you create PDF files. Getting that I soon learned would set me back $139 or $179.

I was aware of several low cost or no cost alternates, but rather than go to the trouble of finding and downloading them (it was getting kind of late), I decided to e-mail the reformatted book to my office and see if I would be allowed to use our office software to create personal PDF files. This morning I learned I could use it, and so created the file on my noon hour. Problem was, it didn’t create 5.5 x 8.5 inch pages. It created 8.5 x 11 inch pages, with the print limited to the middle 5.5 x 8.5 inches less the internal margins I set.

So I did what I normally do when faced with a problem like this. I read some of the help and experimented with the menu system. I soon saw where I could convert the PDF writer to write to 5.5 x 8.5 inch pages, and created a new PDF file to overwrite the other one. Except, the new file still had 8.5 x 11 pages. Did it twice more to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake, with the same results.

So I did what I normally do when faced with a problem like this. I went to look for CreateSpace forums, where members help themselves work through problems. Found the forums, joined them, and began reading. I found the question I had asked several times in a couple of threads, but never answered. Some of those threads run twenty pages or more. At the moment I haven’t the heart to read the twenty pages. Maybe I’ll start a new thread.

So I did what I normally do when faced with a problem like this. I went and got my lunch and ate it, along with some chips I’m not supposed to have. Through all this time, I set aside writing in favor of publishing. I’d rather be writing. But writing won’t necessarily lead to books in print, sales, and readers. So do the publishing thing I will.

Somehow I’ll get some help with this PDF conversion, and get it right. I suspect that in 2 weeks to a month I’ll be holding books in my hand and have them available to sell. And I’ll rejoice.