While Tim and I were waiting for the paperback to go live, after double-checking the second proof copy, we decided to upload the Kindle version. We expected it to take a few days to go live, but it happened within hours – a big surprise! I’d sent some e-book versions out to some of my followers, members of The Anne Boleyn Fellowship, in advance for them to “beta test”, and they’ve already started adding their review to the Amazon page. This is a great help.

While I’m waiting for the paperback to go live, I’m working on getting the buzz going about my book. I’m fortunate in that I have been running my blog, The Anne Boleyn Files, for three years and so have an established following through that site and also on Facebook and Twitter. I’ve also updated my Goodreads profile to an author profile and have been filling in extra information about the book on Shelfari – phew! Lots to do! I will be sharing everything I do in future posts.

If you want to check out my book, then please go to:-

• The Anne Boleyn Collection – The Kindle version from Amazon.co.uk
• The Anne Boleyn Collection – Paperback from Amazon.com

Here’s a video Tim made for the Anne Boleyn Files birthday and The Anne Boleyn Collection launch:-

Although you may be tempted to kiss it and stroke it forever, what you actually need to do now is examine it carefully and proofread it. Here’s a checklist:-

• Drink copious amounts of bubbly to celebrate being an author.
• Get a photo taken of you holding your book and bombard friends and family with it. Also keep it to put on your blog/website.
• Front cover – Is it how you wanted it? Is the wording correct? Does it all line up? Does it look fabulous?
• Spine – Does it have your title and last name? Is it readable? Is it correct?
• Back cover – Check the blurb for errors. Does it say what you want it to say? Does it sell your book? Is it honest? Is it enough of a teaser? Does it look good?
• Size – Is the size right for the amount of pages? A shorter book may be too ‘floppy’ in a larger trim size
• Inside – This is the hard bit. You need to read every page carefully and highlight any typos, grammar/punctuation/spelling mistakes, any formatting issues etc. For example, I noticed errors like a space before a comma, pages which were meant to be blank between chapters but which had chapter headings/page numbers at the top etc. Be harsh, you want your book to be perfect.
• Make changes to your file, saving it as “revised” so you know which one to upload on to Createspace.
• Upload the revised version and order another proof. If you’ve been thorough enough then this will be the last proof you will have to order.
• Wait patiently for it to come.
• Repeat above steps with second prove and approve it if you’re happy with it.
• Wait for Createspace to release your book!

Of course, if you’re going to be selling any copies of your book, you won’t be twiddling your thumbs while waiting for the proof to arrive, will you? I’ll be talking about this in another post.

• Wrote the book using Word (or OpenOffice, which is free) – It’s essential to do this using built-in styles for formatting. Don’t be tempted to do any formatting, such as using fancy fonts etc. at this stage.
• Read, and then re-read the book – Do this until you are completely happy with the words you have written.
• Proofread and edited the book – For this book, I didn’t pay to get it copy-edited as this was a collection of articles. I will definitely be using a copyeditor for future book projects as required. It’s so hard to spot your own mistakes, isn’t it?
• Spent some time looking at books that I liked the look of, taking into account the color of the paper, the size and thickness of the book etc.
• Went to Createspace and chose an industry standard trim size for the book (in this case 5.5″ by 8.5″) and downloaded their template – This template tells you about the page size and margins etc.

• Formatted – At this stage, you could simply(!) paste in the words you have written into the template provided. This would be the first step in formatting your book for print. However…
• Tim likes to use InDesign programme to create the books as he likes the level of professionalism it creates. Therefore he took my Word document and put it into a template within InDesign. Remember that the whole thing could be done purely within a Word document if you don’t know or have InDesign.
• Tim set up a template to exactly match that recommended by Createspace, with inside and outside margins set up correctly. He then set up some default page templates for the book such as having the page numbers and chapter titles in the header space. Inspiration for this layout was taken from books I had selected as looking like I wanted.
• Tim made sure that the pages of the content of the book looked good within the layout, and only now started formatting the heading and body styles. The plan was to keep things as simple as possible for the layout.
• We researched online and selected “Garamond” as the most suitable font for use with a historical book printed using Createspace. It looked very professional.
• The books we liked the look of had indented first lines on paragraphs, and so this was the style we selected for the book. The other alternative is blocks of text with spacing between the paragraphs, but I didn’t like that as much.
• After the font sizes and titles were how I liked them, Tim went through to make sure that there were not any pages which just had one word on them. We’d made the decision to have new paragraphs start on a right hand page, so there were a few areas where the wording needed to be tweaked to make the book hold together better.
• Once the layout of the main content was mostly done, Tim created a title page for the book (at the front!) and some table of content pages. It is vitally important that this is done near the end of the process, as things change so much while you are playing around with the heading sizes and paragraph indents.
• Tim also created some pages at the back of the book which advertised my website. After all, if someone has read right to the end then they probably like what you’ve written and might want to see more!
• Then it was time to go back through every single page to make sure that nothing strange had sneaked in. It’s amazing what you see with a fresh pair of eyes.
• Tim created a “.pdf” file ready for upload to Createspace
• Tim uploaded the PDF to Createspace
• Createspace then had to check the file. It only took them a few hours to do this and to email us saying that the file could be printed as it was without us having to make changes.
• I logged into Createspace and ordered the proof copy, choosing the priority shipping so that we’d get it nice and fast
• Breathed a sigh of relief and then started pacing up and down…

Boxes of unsold books - not what you want!

I knew that I had to go for POD (print on demand) rather than vanity publishing because I knew people who had gone down the vanity publishing route and lost out big time. They paid to have their books printed and bound and had to order a stack of them upfront, which, of course, cost them a lot of money. They then had to store the boxes of books in their garage or attic and then find buyers for them. Financial stress, emotional stress and marriage problems caused by one’s spouse tripping over and then cursing the boxes of books preventing them from getting to the freezer. I think that the people I knew managed to get rid of the books in the end but it cost them financially and put them off self-publishing for life.

But publishing your book doesn’t have to be like that. Obviously, you can go down the traditional route and put together a book proposal, try and get a literary agent and then a publisher. I’m actually going down this route at the moment for family saga of the Boleyns. I have an agent who is interested and I have put together a book proposal for him to give me feedback on. But, sometimes a project just isn’t suitable for traditional mainstream publishing and that’s where POD comes in.

The main POD options are Lulu and Amazon’s Createspace. Both will allow you to print on demand, i.e. print a book when a customer orders one. No large upfront costs, no boxes of books filling your garage and no financial ruin. They also guide you through every step of the process – phew! I chose Createspace because I’ve always had good experiences with Amazon and because I knew people who had used them and I knew what the finished product was like, and I was impressed with the results. Obviously do your own research into the pros and cons of each service and choose what works best for you and your book.

I’m still in the process of self-publishing – I only finished the finished manuscript at the weekend – so I can only tell you my experience so far, but in my next post I’ll share the steps that Tim and I went through to get The Anne Boleyn Collection on to Createspace.

If you’ve read my last post, The Anne Boleyn Collection Idea, you’ll know that we had the idea of producing a book of our most popular Anne Boleyn Files articles to celebrate our 3 year anniversary. “Easy”, you say; “not really”, I say.

OK, I had over 800 articles to play with, so I had the content and my wonderful husband Tim, hero, web designer and techie wizard – yes, I’m sucking up to him here as I will need him again! – made me a wonderful spreadsheet of the most ‘commented on’ articles. I then I set about copying and pasting them into one big file. That was the easy part. As I read them, I started to think that this was not going to work. Many of them had things like “Today, I’m going to”, links to other posts, quotes from history books and biographies… They just couldn’t be used as they were. Rewriting was needed and this also called for more research, actually depending on primary sources rather than what other historians said. If I needed to discuss an historian’s opinion, then I needed to do it in my own words, not their’s, and reference them properly. Headache.

Fortunately, I always reference my articles anyway, but there was still stacks of work to do and grey hairs started sprouting rapidly.

The rewriting obviously took time (I’m mad so I actually managed to do it in a weekend, I just didn’t eat, sleep or talk) and then I had to proof read and edit them. I was eventually able to give Tim a document with all of the articles in, one after the other, and we then discussed their order. We put them into groups according to subject, and then Tim started to format them ready for self-publishing. The decision to self-publish the book was a no-brainer. The book was a celebration of the three year anniversary of The Anne Boleyn Files (17th February 2012) and so needed to be out quickly, plus it wasn’t really commercially viable for a publisher. Publishers look for books, not collections of articles. We needed to self-publish, and by that I mean POD (print on demand) rather than Vanity Press. There was no way that I was going to spend a stack of money getting 1000s of books printed to then have to ship out from Spain, no way José. I needed a print on demand service, a service where there was no upfront cost, or a minimal one, and a service which would give a quality end product that I’d be proud of. Hmmm…

Now, I was already working on a book on the Boleyn family but Linda got me thinking. I had three years’ worth of articles on the site, over 800 posts – yes, I’ve been a busy girl! – and the site was very popular and interactive, with people commenting on posts and discussing things. It would be easy to find out which were the most popular and then collate them in a book format, or so I thought!

Lightbulb moment. What a great way to celebrate our three year anniversary, use my hard work and share my research. The Anne Boleyn Collection was born, in my head anyway.