Indie Life

It's officially the second Wednesday of the month, which means it's Indie Life time! This is a monthly feature hosted by the Indelibles to promote, encourage, and support indie authors. Don't forget to visit the site to read other indie author posts! 

The word 'indie' itself is kind of a misnomer when it comes to indie writers. I say this because we don't do it alone, despite the implication. Sure, I write my own books, just like any other author, but I publish them all on my own. Other than that, it takes a lot of other folks to help put my books into readers hands. 

It would be great if I could do it all by myself (I'd save a lot of money according to my taxes) instead of outsourcing things like cover art, formatting, editing, etc. Then again, it's a great deduction to have come tax time. Make no mistake, I usually earn back everything I put in to publishing a book the first week it's release, but still... 

So a few months ago I decided it was time to learn how to format my own ebooks and save a little bit of money. I've never had any issues formatting for print, but formatting ebooks is an entirely different beast. 

To be honest, I'd never really given it much thought until I saw a request from an author to review his book, How to Format Your Novel for Kindle, Nook, the iBookstore, Smashwords & Createspace in One Afternoon. Ed was offering up a free copy, so I asked if I could read it. Only, I also had to purchase Scrivener in order to make heads or tails of it (I downloaded the free trial first to see if I could actually do it before I actually bought the program)! And boy, am I ever glad I made the investment! As promised, within one afternoon, I learned how to format an ebook! Plus, purchasing Scrivener was cheaper ($45) than paying someone to format one of my books. 

Warning... this tutorial is for Scrivener Mac users (sorry PC people). 

I know. I'm totally behind, as I know everyone pretty much uses Scrivener as their writing software, and I could kick myself for not having purchased it sooner. 

And once I learned how easy it was to format, I realized there's more value to being able to do it myself than just saving a few bucks. I can now go back and edit/change my books at any time. I can now write short stories and publish them as often as I'd like. I can now be in control when it comes to release dates.

I owe a lot to my format guy Ted at Dellaster Design and will always keep his contact information handy in case I have a project that only he can work his magic on, and I'd recommend him to anyone not ready to tackle digital formatting, but it's a great feeling to be able to do it on your own... indie style!