Tulip © Maud Guilfoyle, watercolor, 7 x 3 inches
My experience has been self-publishing e books rather than books in print. As I pointed out in a previous post, February 19, 2013, I am able to produce several e books for the cost of one book in print and there are no shipping costs. As I build up my mailing list and audience it will be financially feasible to publish books in print. At first I tried to format e books myself on my imac with pages software. When I started the first e book, Art School Portfolio Handbook, my mac was four years old and I could not use the newest ( at that time) version of Pages that offered ePub. I tried it on a friend's newer mac, and after several days realized that computer did not have the operating system needed. I heard a program on NPR radio about Smash Words and began researching companies that offered various self publishing services. I wound up selecting BookBaby because I have art images throughout my e books. Even though e books are more streamlined than printed ones, it is still important how and where the images appear. By choosing the Premium package I can review the e book proof before it goes out to e retailers. I create my e book proof using Adobe Creative Suite Cs3 (using Indesign and Photoshop), convert this Indesign document into a pdf, then send that to Bookbaby. Bookbaby will post your e book on your selection of ten different e retailers. I chose Amazon/ Kindle, Apple/ ibooks, Barnes and Noble/ nook and for my most current e book, Art By Two, I added Kobo because they work with independent booksellers. To be fair, my experience is solely with Bookbaby. I did find the following post comparing Bookbaby and Smashwords very informative: http://selfpublishingadvice.org/blog/bookbaby-or-smashwords-best/ at http://selfpublishingadvice.org/blog/
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