A friend recently asked me if it cost a lot of money to
publish my first three books. I said it
wasn't much at all, but I didn't tell her exactly how much I spent.
There are a number of sites that offer a lot of help to self-publishers. Many also offer peripheral services for an
extra cost. However, by doing most of
the work yourself, you can save a lot of money.
For instance, for the original artwork I wanted for my first
book's cover, I contracted with an artist friend to do an exchange of materials
and work. I'd make her dog a sweater
with custom designed elements using materials I had on hand in exchange for the
cover work I had in mind. We did the
exchange and I was thrilled with the art work, but unfortunately when it came
time to publish, the art work would not work for the cover design no matter how
hard I tried. I ended up downloading
the free program Gimp and put images together from NASA and the ESA for the
background and used Gimp's tools to add the text. However, I needed another design element to give more of a hint
at what the material inside the book was all about. I ended up looking at several sites and signing up for
Dreamstime. For $15.00, I purchased
enough credits to download multiple royalty-free images for four books. I could have stretched it further if I
hadn't radically changed one book's cover after working on it for some
time.
Another program I used was the Paint program that comes with
Windows. I used it to modify a free
image of the SR-71 stealth plane so that I could use it as a spaceship on
several of my books' covers and more easily created several elements I wanted
to use in Gimp than I could have had I used Gimp to make them.
Note that images from NASA and the ESA as well as many other
agencies are considered in the public domain and as long as you properly credit
where you got the image from, you don't have to pay to use them. This makes it easy for a sci-fi author to
download images of planets, moons, and starry backgrounds galore. Using Gimp to crop and custom rotate the
images makes it really easy to vary the images, and of course you can resize
them as well.
As for everything else, I didn't pay for editing, but I did
pay a test reader by providing her with a Kindle so she could more easily read
my book, but I consider the Kindle more of a gift than a payment. That and more of my time is
all I have invested in my first four books.
I will need to buy more credits for Dreamstime in the future, but for
now, the combination of pictures I've taken, free-to-use pictures others have
taken, and free programs to work with them have kept my publishing costs to a
bare minimum.
