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How to Self-Publish a Homemade Book in a Few Hours Introduction This is a brief summary of how, for a few hours on a quiet weekday, I was able to transform my workspace into a low-budget publishing house that went on to successfully produce one 16-page copy of a very mediocre short story. It was a great deal of fun, and believe it or not, I learned quite a bit along the way. An intimate look at the process: STEP ONE Choose what you want to publish. I decided to use my short story Seven Hundred Thirty Letters not because it's any good but because it was something I had edited just a few months ago. At about 2,500 words, I thought this would be a good length for a small book. Be sure your work has been carefully proofread and edited! STEP TWO - Part A Think of a cover design. I love book cover designs, and luckily, I had an idea of the cover I wanted for this story. I took a single moment from my story and tried to capture it in a photo. I arranged a bunch of shoe boxes with one envelope peeking out and took about eight pictures with my digital camera. STEP TWO - Part B Design the book cover. I reviewed the photos and finally chose one that wasn't too blurry and was large enough to be properly cropped. I used Adobe Photoshop to desaturate the photo and increased the contrast to give it a gritty look. I saved the photo as a JPEG and then imported it into Adobe InDesign, where I added a maroon colored box along with the title and my name. Adobe Caslon was used as the typeface. Right From snapshots to styled photo to book cover STEP THREE Create the page layouts and put in your text. Using InDesign, I chose a 5.5 in. x 8 in. book size and numbered each inside page using the Master layout feature.  I opted to use Adobe Caslon for my body text because for big chunks of text, you're best off using a very readable serif font like Caslon, Garamond, or Times New Roman. I didn't get too fancy with my layout and kept it clean and simple. Important note: make sure that the total number of pages is a multiple of 4! Left Laying out the pages in InDesign STEP FOUR Prepare to print it like a book. This is the tricky part. Make sure that when you print and fold up the pages, the page numbers are in consecutive order. You can only get this if the pages are separated correctly. For example, for a 16-page book, pages 1 and 16 would be one spread, 2 and 15 would be another, and so on until 8 and 9 make the middle. Luckily for me, InDesign has a feature called InBooklet SE, which takes my page layouts and exports a document that arranges everything in just the right order. I actually used to do this process manually back when I didn't know any better! Right Making sure the pages are fit to print STEP FIVE Print it! I have a heavy-duty HP Laserjet printer which I used to print the inside text of the book. It took me several tries before I finally got both sides to print correctly. Even with the little pic on Tray 1 showing me how to feed the paper, I managed to get it wrong a few times. For the cover, I used a thicker off-white paper with my HP Deskjet color printer. I didn't specify the setting so it printed in normal quality, which actually produced wood-like streaks on the maroon (which came out a more brownish color). I liked the overall effect and decided to keep it. Right Images from my printing adventures. STEP SIX Staples. Not so easy. It would be nice to have a huge stapler that print shops use for manually saddle-stitched books. But I had to make do with my Staples stapler. After neatly arranging the printed pages in order, I had to bend a part of the back cover to make sure the stapler could reach the spine. Once in the middle, I tried my best to nail dead center. Unfortunately, I missed by half a centimeter and had to try again. Thank goodness it's only one copy! Left No, it wasn't that easy. FINAL STEP Woohoo! A Book! Only a few hours after the idea of turning a short story into a book hit me, I found myself holding a physical copy of my self-published book. Humble yet real!  I even wrote in silly text on the second page to imitate the imprints on mass-published books. And the third page has a nicely spaced out rendering of the titles and my name. I couldn't resist taking a close-up shot of the spread to make it seem like some heavy-volume book. If you have a story, collection of poems, or even an essay that you'd like to keep somewhere in physical form (other than a normal print-out), a homemade self-published book can be a fun and easy solution. Right The final product, silly imprint, cool title, and sexy close-up. Right And one more closer look at the final product
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