Self-publishing tools have never been more available, more refined, or more capable. At the same time, self-publishing itself is becoming both more attractive and more difficult as technology and the industry continue to evolve. Distribution channels are plentiful and accessible, and there’s an entire cottage industry of editors, artists, publicists, marketing gurus, and other vendors ready to help you get a book into the world.

There’s also an army of other skilled writers, not to mention the constant flood of spammers, scammers, and slop-artists fighting for their slice of the pie. It can feel a little daunting, especially if you don’t know how or where to get started.

For the purposes of this post, we’re going to assume you’re brimming with ideas and enthusiasm but new to the logistics of getting your novel out into the world. This is a nuts-and-bolts look at the self-publishing tools you can use to take a manuscript from initial draft to finished book. At every stage, we’ll look at at least one self publishing tool that doesn’t cost a dime, and we’ll even end with my own occasionally ludicrous method of drafting and releasing a novel.

For the Non-Typers

If you want to get your book on shelves, be those shelves digital or physical, you’re going to have to get comfortable with a word processor. But interesting enough, you don’t necessarily have to start with one. I’ve spoken to quite a few people over the years–including my own older brother–who would love to write a story, but don’t feel comfortable typing. Good news! Typing is now almost entirely optional.

My first book–actually, my first three books, but at the time I thought it was one long one–was written longhand. It filled nearly a dozen spiral notebooks. When the story was done, I was faced with the daunting task of typing the whole mess. In order to do so in less than a decade, that meant I also had to learn to type, since hunting and pecking was getting me nowhere fast. Nowadays, there’s a better option.

Dictation

Dictation isn’t new, but it has never been cheaper or more accurate. The options are nearly limitless, too, but I’ll go through the ones I feel are most accessible and most worth your time. 

First, if you have a phone, I guarantee there is some way to convince it to transcribe your voice. Android phones have a voice-typing option built into the keyboard, and dedicated transcription apps are simple to find. The best I’ve used is one simply called “Recorder”, though that seems to be limited to certain Google-specific devices. Many word processors have built in options as well, but we’ll be going into those tools in the next section.

If you’re looking for something a little more potent, two dedicated transcription programs I’ve found enormously useful are Vibe, for transcribing pre-recorded narration, and Handy, for transcribing on-demand. Though each of these are the product of AI, they come from the interpretive side of the technology rather than the generative side, so you don’t have to worry about them doing any thinking for you (unless you turn on features which I personally avoid). As a person who chooses to avoid LLMs, these are tools that I’m comfortable including in my pipeline. They can run locally, they don’t phone home, and they don’t editorialize. Your words remain your own.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

Another option for getting hand-written words into the computer is OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Even the best of these tools are a little hit or miss with handwritten text, though, so I hesitate to recommend them. If you’re interested in giving it a try, Google has a few free options that you can sample. Opening a photo in Google lens will let you extract text to copy and paste. Saving a photo to your Google Drive, then right clicking on your PC and choosing to open with Google Docs will do full page OCR. If you have good luck with either of those, maybe you can succeed where I have failed regarding efficient handwriting-to-text. But either way, once you’ve got the words onto the PC, it’s in the hands of the main tools of any writer.

Self-Publishing Tools: Word Processors

Whether you’re transcribing from a written page, working from speech-to-text, or drafting directly, by volume a word processor is where you’ll be doing the bulk of your work. The industry standard (for now at least) remains Microsoft Word. DOCX is a document format that nearly everyone who works with files can open and work with. That said, to be perfectly honest it’s been years since Word was my primary tool. We’ll get into my foolish endeavors at the end of the blog.

If you’re looking for a free alternative to Word, LibreOffice is generally what I use as a stand-in for the Microsoft product. It’s got a robust spellchecker and grammar checker, which can get you halfway to a clean edit. It also saves in all of the relevant formats for loading into publishing backends or distributing to editors. I wouldn’t say it’s feature-for-feature equivalent to Word–it can be a little finicky and has a learning curve if you’re used to Microsoft–but it’ll get you where you need to go and it’ll do it for free.

Another popular option is Google Docs. It’s a little lighter on features (but only a little) and adds dirt-simple document sharing and automatic cloud backup to the mix. It’s also web-based, so using it off-line can be tricky. You are also beholden to whatever Google decides, so there is a potential future where it’s taken away from you or put behind a paywall, so plan accordingly as with all software as a service options on these lists.

If you’re looking for something a little more authorly, a huge swath of the writers I know swear by Scrivener. It’s Mac-native, but has a Windows port, and I have written quite a few novels in it. It’s not free, but at a $60 one-time purchase it won’t break the bank. For that price you get a suite of features including templates, organization for notes, auto-complete for character names, and so on, and so on. It really is a powerful tool and it’s easy to see why so many writers rely upon it.

Another option I used for writing novels for a few years is Atticus. Like Google Docs, it lives in the cloud, with all of the plusses and minuses that come with that. The $147 price tag is a bit more of an obstacle, but it’s a capable word processor, and an even more capable finishing tool, as we’ll see in the next section.

Self-Publishing Tools: Converters, Compilers, and Formatters

It’s a little hard to get people to agree on a name for this next bit. I’ve heard them called everything from “eBook creators” to “Mastering Software.” But regardless of the name you choose, these are the tools that take the output of a word processor and convert it into an ebook or a print-ready PDF. For the budget-conscious, Calibre is an impressively powerful and completely free tool. Feed it almost any book or document format and it can spit out just about any other. If you want to produce a slick, polished output, you’ll be doing a great deal of manual pre- and postprocessing, but with enough time and energy, this can achieve almost any result. If you want something that is a bit less of a swiss army knife, Adobe InDesign or its open source alternative Scribus will give you bare metal access to every switch and knob associated with the formatting, layout, and production of print-ready PDFs.

The gold standard of turn-key tools for ebook and print production is Vellum, which produces slick and professional results effortlessly, though ironically I can’t personally vouch for it as it’s locked into the Apple ecosystem of which I am not a part. More recently Atticus has revealed itself to be a suitable alternative that is platform agnostic.

All of these, to some varying degree, can handle images, which is good, because every book has got at least one of them, which means we now move onto…

Self-Publishing Tools: Image Editing

The industry standard here is, alas, Adobe Photoshop. This is another industry standard that I have never actually used. A free alternative, if you’ve got the grit for it, is the GNU Image Processor (GIMP). It is a few notches lower on the user-friendliness scale, but I continue to do all of my short story covers with it. Canva is also an option that many folks swear by.

Putting it all together

Now you know your options, but how do you put them together? Well, that’s up to you, but for the sake of fulfilling the premise of this post, I’ll take you on a whirlwind tour of my dilapidated and inadvisable pipeline.

Step 1: Outline/Notes

This is done with good old pen and paper. The pen tends to be a Twsbi Eco fountain pen loaded up with Diamine Writer’s Blood ink, and the paper is generally a top-bound spiral memo pad. I jot down ideas until I feel like I know the full structure, then I move onto…

Step 2: Setting up the files

My system for typing has evolved, or some might say mutated, over the years. I started on OpenOffice, then moved to Microsoft Word, then to Scrivener, then to Atticus. Now I do my typing in Nano, a command line text program. (Don’t do this. Like the fountain pens, I do this because it makes me feel fancy and requires me to focus.)

I got used to having my notes available when I was using Scrivener, so I like to keep a separate file with my notes/outline in it so I can check it quickly and easily. I have it open in a separate tab of the terminal and mark off plot points as I complete them.

Step 3: Drafting

This is, naturally, using the aforementioned files and programs. Yes, I do my whole rough draft in Nano, and I do my formatting using markdown. Don’t judge me.

Step 4: Revision

When I’m done with the rough draft, I run my file through another command line tool called Pandoc to make it into a DOCX file. This is the point where I return to a sane pipeline. Once I have the DOCX file, I open it in LibreOffice to do spelling and grammar checks. Beta Reader Copies are produced via either Calibre or Atticus so that people can read them in their format of choice, and when I’ve got it buttoned up, it’s off to my editor.

A professional edit is generally the most expensive part of my production pipeline, and I only do it for my novels (not my short stories). That said, I’ve learned the hard way not to skip this step. I am pathologically incapable of producing copy that’s clean enough to be sold without intervention from an expert.

Step 5: Second Revision

When the editor gives the file back, I do a final pass to address their changes in LibreOffice again. As with Word, LibreOffice will let you work through tracked changes and comments, so you should be able to use it with anything your editor might send back.

From here, if I’m doing this through a publisher, this is the file I deliver to them. If I’m self-publishing…

Step 6: Format

I’ll take the cleaned up DOCX and dump it into Atticus again to produce both PDFs and Epubs using lightly modified versions of their templates.

Step 7: Cover

I let the professionals handle the covers these days. It begins by working up a brief to send to an illustrator or graphic designer. When they’re through, sometimes I’ll take the files they provide and do some light reformatting for the paperback covers or to produce assets for ads.

Step 8: Publication

Easier today than it has ever been, self-publication for me takes the form of four uploads. Draft2Digital, Amazon KDP, and Google Play each get ePub copies of my books. For paperback, I lean on Ingram Spark, which needs a PDF instead. 

And that’s that!

About Joseph

Joseph R. Lallo hails from Bayonne, NJ--the fabled birthplace of George R. R. Martin. He has written dozens of novels and novellas, including the international bestseller The Book of Deacon and the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series. In addition to writing, he has helped run the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson. Find Joseph and his books on his website at bookofdeacon.com.

Top Image via Pixabay.

Header Photo by Wolfgang Weiser on Unsplash