 Okay. Welcome to Writing, Publishing, Books with Free Software by Mr. Nathan Haines. Mr. Haines is a local community council member of Ubuntu and California's leader in the Ubuntu community. Please. Thank you, Mr. Haines. Thank you very much. So, as I've introduced, my name is Nathan Haines and I'm a lot of things, but first and foremost, I'm a computer enthusiast. I'm a programmer. I started when I was 12. Actually, when I was 10, I got my first computer and the only thing it did was turn on, in about two seconds, green screen, extended color disc basics for Microsoft Copyright 982. The computer was 8 years old by then, but I didn't know any better. And I learned the program. DOS came out, got my first PC. Programming was fantastic. And the other great thing that computers are great for are games, and I'm an avid gamer. Unfortunately, I tend to buy games on Steam during their winter or their seasonal sales, and then never play them again. And good old games has only exacerbated the problem because they're like, so if you have 62 cents, you can get Bio Menace. And I'm like, I downloaded that from the bulletin board in 1993. I should get this. And I actually did play for about an hour and a half, and hopefully I will play once more. But as life is on, I tend to taste games and no longer savor them. But I still have the heart of a gamer. And of course, I'm a computer technician. I've been a freelance computer technician for something like 18 years now, which is odd. Actually, if I think about it, no, I have a birthday in April, and then it will be 20 years. And I'm going to stop thinking about that right now. So I've had a lot of experience with computers using them, enjoying them, having fun building them, tweaking them. And when you're 12 years old and you break your computer, you get the family computer, you get really good at fixing it before your mom finds out. So that led to my life choices there. I'm also an Ubuntu member. And that means several things. I'm one of three leaders of the California local community team, and we're local for a short. We're crazy about Ubuntu. And we do things like we provide speakers in the California area for things like speaking engagements, stall fest, release parties, and scale qualifies as a speaking engagement. So we worked alongside Canonical and a greater global Ubuntu community to bring speakers from all over the world for Ubicon Summit actually on Thursday and Friday, and I think tripping out a little bit here and there. And I can't claim responsibility for having Mark Shutterworth here, but I was sort of involved in the process a little. I'm also a member of the Ubuntu Local Community Council. And we help sort of mediate issues for local teams all across the world since they tend to be by country, and in the U.S. it's by state. So if there are any questions or any help or one new one starts up, we help make that process as smooth as possible. But the reason I'm here today is because I'm also an author. And so I've written lots of things in my life. I've written a lot of tech writing for work. I'd find no documentation and I would write some documentation. Am I about to say, that's really great. You should do that from now on. And that's where the vaunted other duties as required in this job applications comes in. I've also written introductory magazine articles for tutorial articles for Linux Identity Magazine. And just this year I actually sat down and wrote an entire book beginning Ubuntu for Windows and Mac users. It's published in September. And it's a good book. If I do say so myself, it's sort of, you know, there's all these books, Linux for Beginners and so on. This book assumes that you're already a computer expert in Windows and Mac, but that when you come to Ubuntu, things are different. And so that can be really frustrating. You're a computer expert, but everywhere you turn into Ubuntu is you're kind of stymied. So the answer of course is just to get a little bit of context and understand what's going on. And everything's really easy. It's like being in a foreign country and they have stoplights, but you're in Germany and the red light starts blinking which is kind of weird, right? And that means get ready to hit the gas because it's going to turn green. Also stay out of the zebra stripes to crosswalks when it happens. Or if you're in Germany, if you go to a bar or a restaurant and it's full, you walk up to a table of people and you say, it's 10.05, which means is this seat taken? And then you sit down among strangers and you chat. So no big deal once you know that, but to start out, there's no context. So this book kind of walks you through installation, gets you familiarized with the interface and then sets up a bunch of tasks. If you want to do this, you can start here. This is what it looks like. If you want to organize your photos, you use this, listen to music, you do this. A little bit of command line stuff, but not, here's how you use command line. It says in the book, if you want to use command, learn to use command line, go find a different book. But here's some fun things that are really useful on the command line. And then we do virtual machines and stuff. And it's not only great if you are learning Ubuntu, but it's also great if you maybe have a friend, if you love Ubuntu or another Linux distro, if you have a friend who wants to get started but is intimidated, this is the best way to start. So Ubuntu for those of you who don't know is a complete solution for your computer. It keeps everything secure up to date because if you use an SES for the next five years, you get security updates and bug fix updates. And it's built entirely with the exception of one or two drivers and firmware, entirely for free and open source software. So Ubuntu is what I'm going to use to describe some of the publishing process. And in fact, this book was written 100% completely in Ubuntu, aside from some Windows or Mac screenshots. So if you use a different Linux distro, then you already know that all distros are the same and equally as powerful and capable in the right hands. But if you are here at scale for the very first time or if you are watching online and you want to get started, Ubuntu is a fantastic place to start. So this talk is about writing and publishing the book using free software. And the first question that comes up of course is why publish a book. And there are many reasons. Some people have a story they want to tell and some want to connect with others. I myself have a bunch of, I'm a budding want-to-be novelist like most people. All Americans have the next great American novel in them. I don't because I want to write sci-fi, but as opposed to mainstream literature, literary fiction. But it's a human sort of desire to want to connect with others and tell stories. As far as we know, we are the only creatures on Earth or in the known universe that actually do tell stories that can come whole cloth out of things that have never existed before. And so a lot of people get stuck on that very question. Well, why should I write a book? And is what I have to say important enough? And I would say humans are storytellers in their nature. So I would say you are wrestling with this story. You have a cool story you want to write down, but you are afraid to share it. Don't worry about that. It's a human need to tell stories. I wrote my book here because I wanted to connect with others intellectually. I wanted to help share some knowledge. And I do talk to that local Linux user group, but I can't be everywhere. So this is of course a great way to get that word out. And everyone of course dreams of fame and fortune and being the next Stephen King or JK Rowling. And that probably won't happen, but there's good money to be had by publishing as well. And of course, you know, it's hard to be the most famous person. But you can definitely get the word out there. So publishing a book really has two sort of sides to it. There's traditional publishing and self-publishing. Now traditional publishing has sort of been around for the last 575 years. So printing presses have been somewhere around 1440. And so we have almost 600 years of tradition. That's why they call it traditional publishing. Before that, of course, you wrote with a paintbrush, skipped an ink on Papyrus Preston Reads. Before that, you pushed Reads into clay tablets. But traditional publishing, the printing press changed everything. And so if you wanted to, now for this book, you didn't have to hire a room of scribes in a scrubatorium. And so many of those things in traditional publishing that don't really make much sense in the last decade or so are because this is the way they've been doing things for a very, very, very long time. And as things, as the publishing landscape changes, there's just some inertia. So I'm going to describe that process in detail. Now self-publishing has sort of been a dirty word for a very long time. It really started in, well, in the old days you could get that Papyrus or that vellum and you just start writing letters. And that wasn't really very efficient. And it was when the Mimeograph machine, the Zero Graphic Coffee machine really sort of came into being where people could type or they could write things and make lots of copies. So we have in the 50s and 60s, especially the 70s and 80s, fanzines and underground presses. And then you also have vanity presses which are companies that purport to help you publish your book and really discharge you for all the different types of steps that you would, a publisher would normally pay the money for. And then you have to buy a bunch of copies of your book. And then you have to sell copies of your book outside the trunk of your car. And none of the national chains buy books that way. So vanity, publishing, vanity presses really gave self-publishing a bad name. And it's only been in the last, really the last eight years or so, and really caught on in the last five years that online independent author publishing platforms like Kindle Direct Publishing through Amazon, Nook Press through Bunton Noble, iTunes, bookstore, Google Play Books, Lulu Press, Cafe Press and so on have really made self-publishing physical books really cheap, really easy, and something that has, especially in the last four years, become really legitimized. And so if you've heard of self-publishing and you think of vanity publishers, things have really changed. Let me talk about that a bit. So traditional publishing is pretty straightforward. It hasn't changed in a long time. The first step is to write the book. If you want to publish a book, you write the book first. It seems a little silly, but the way it works is that you write the book, you revise a few times, share it with some friends, you get their comments, maybe take their feedback into consideration, make sure you proofread it. And that's the only time that you're ready to actually contact a publisher. So they only take finished completed fiction books. Now there's an exception to that. Nonfiction books aren't sold, the whole entire manuscript, they're actually sold by proposal. So for my book for example, a friend of mine named, dropped me to an editor who was looking for Ubuntu authors and so I got an email and said, would you pitch a book? We were looking for this or that. And so I wrote a table of contents, so on. He described why I was an expert qualified to write a book about Ubuntu. And then they came back to the comments and I made some adjustments to the table of contents to the outline of the book. And they said, great, we like it. Go ahead and start writing the book. And we signed the contract and then I started writing the book. But traditionally fiction you have to actually have a finished book. So the way that works is that you typically submit a manuscript to literary agents and they take a look and they decide whether or not they think that they can sell your manuscript to a publisher. And then they accept or decline the manuscript. And if they accept it, if they reject it and you keep submitting to other agents, if they accept it, then they'll take your book and the agent will submit to publishers and see if they can get any bites. If you're really lucky, two or three or four publishers want the same book and the rights go to auction. Most of the time it just takes a while and one or two hits will come. They'll send a contract, you can review and so on. The publisher, when they want to buy your book to publish, they'll offer a contract. You always have the copyright on your book. You always own the copyright on your book. But what you're doing is you're actually selling your publishing rights which is a subset of copyright. So you own the book but you're giving away the right to distribute the book. And so most publishers actually want what are called first print rights, either in a certain area or in the world. And so what you want to do is have something that's never been published before. If you post it online on your blog, you have electronically published it and can no longer sell the first publication rights because you've already published it online. So you want to be a little tricky. You can get away with a couple of excerpts or maybe a first chapter. But basically if you're going to sell your book traditionally you want to keep it offline. So you don't have to sell all your rights at once. You can say I'm only selling North American rights. I'm only selling print rights. I'm only selling electronic rights. I'm not selling film rights or radio adaptation rights or audio book rights. If you didn't know that you could do all of those things, you should probably have an agent because agents do that every day. All their lives, that's how they make money. But there are some people who are a little worried about agents and so on and every publisher has a policy on whether or not they allow what's called unsolicited manuscripts, which is where you send directly to a publisher. Most don't, some do. And mostly they only allow agent submissions which means the agent goes through. And so there are various pros and cons that I invite you to explore before you decide to send your book out. So if your book's accepted, the publisher offers a contract. If you like the contract you sign it and the publisher takes it from there, the end. And you will eventually be published. There's some back and forth, some proofreading, but they take care of most of everything. Self-publishing is completely different. Self-publishing, you're the publisher. So you take care of all those next steps after you write the book and it's accepted. So the way that works is the first step is still to write a book. And then because you're the publisher, once it's finished and you've done some revision, you are going to hire a couple editors. And there are lots of different kinds. There's copy editors, there's developmental editors. So a developmental editor which is something I sort of do on the side is that you take a story and they take the story and they read it. And they take a look at how the plot flows and they see are the characters consistent? Is the grumpy mentor in the beginning is he just really happy and go lucky at the end? That's probably an error. Or they'll take a look and say, well, we're not really sure what the plot is, what the important point of the book is until maybe four or five chapters is in. You should know what the story is, three pages in. And they'll take a look and they'll help shape that. Copy editors or line editors tend to some gray area but they tend to basically go through, make sure all the punctuation is correct and grammar is correct and so on. Sometimes you can have them look for like dialectual things. And I have one self-publisher who is British and she writes romance novels where usually one protagonist is British and one is American and the last couple they've all been American. So my job is to make sure everyone is speaking the right form of English is one of my jobs because she almost completely nails it but the mistakes are invisible to her. So every so often the heroine of the story will have been stood by the counter which we don't say. And my favorite recently was the protagonist, the male protagonist walked into the bar and saw all his friends at the bar necking back beers. And I knew exactly what she meant right away but the American protagonist said, oh look at those guys necking back beers like that. You can't say that. So that's why you hire an editor. Also she hyphenates everything, everything, no one's hyphenated which is fine for British English, not so fine for American English. The point is we want it to be one way the entire book through and she decides which way is right. I just make sure when I'm editing that it's the same way each way. That's the most important thing you can ever do because if somebody picks up your book and reads the first five pages and there's spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, it's just weird to read. They will put the book down and never buy anything you ever write again. Cover designers are also important. When you're self-publishing you come up with a cover. Now I can make my own covers and in fact you'll see a little bit later on a cover I did for a friend of a friend short notice for like just a book he wanted to give his Christmas presents he wasn't selling. And I think that's a perfect example of why you should hire a professional and not me or not do it yourself but it's a decent cover and you'll see what a cover entails. A layout designer takes your manuscript and makes it look pretty on the page or in electronic form and you can spend a lot of time learning the technologies to do that or you can hire someone else to do it and get back to writing. So if you're a do-it-yourself kind of person you can definitely get in there but if you do want to write a lot and maybe make some money off of it you might be wasting your time. Of course if you learn it once you may invest the time in once and then not have to hire anyone but everyone has different skills. And self-publishing because self-publishing requires so many different various skills that have nothing to do with each other some people can do it all, some people are really good at a couple things or we like to do. I know one person who loves to do their own covers I can't stand doing covers so I don't or I charge a lot for it. But there's no shame in that so at some point you're probably going to hire to hire someone else to help you. Last up of course is to publish the book. And in traditional publishing courses the publisher takes care of that so I'm going to talk about what all that means but I do want to sort of talk about money because that's the thing that nobody ever talks about. But one of the reasons we like to publish books or to write books is to get some money and there are plenty of people who write for free but if you want to write more seriously money helps. So money comes to you in the form of royalties. And again the system is completely different between self-publishing and traditional publishing. So with traditional publishing the way this works is that you get the contract to write the book and you sign the contract and you start writing and the publisher pays the author an advance on royalties. Now I'm getting ahead of myself. A royalty is when the book sells, the book seller gets the money, the publisher gets the money from the book seller and then they pay the author a percentage of that. That's what's called a royalty. And it's paid for every book that's sold. So in traditional publishing the publisher pays an advance on royalties. So when I wrote this book I got money before the book was ever on sale, long before the book was ever on sale. And so that was one of the things that made it easier to write the book. And so the breakdown is a little different for a publisher but typically a publisher collects, so a publisher sells the book to a bookstore and the bookstore doesn't pay the list price on the book. The publisher instead pays about 45 to 60% off of the book depending on the contract for the vendors. Amazon asks for a lot of money off but they don't return the books if they're unused so it's different. And so the publisher only gets about 45 to 55% of the list price of the book. And they pay the author depending on the contract 8 to 15% of net profit. And if you have an agent, the agent will take a little cut of that. He'll take usually 10%. Now if you're a new author it's usually 15% that's kind of interesting standard and maybe if you sell lots of books it kind of goes down. But the agent will get some money when you get paid. And so like I said the publisher will pay you actually in advance. So the bookseller gets sort of the gross profit, right? And so when you think of the, so this isn't for the, this is you walk into a bookstore, right? The gross profit goes to the bookseller who only gave the publisher maybe 60% of that, maybe 50%. So of the gross profit for, at the cash register, right? And then so from that, that net profit to the publisher that's where your royalty comes out of. So in fact I'll give you an example. So this book was published through A Press and because this is a standard contract that is on their website I can tell you that they offered a thing. Let me double check and see if I'm getting hit on myself. So basically they said we'll give you, here's our contract. They negotiated everything. They liked the outline. They said here's the contract. I said great. Write it over, slept on it, woke up. And I wrote them back. And you should always negotiate your contract, always. They're going to give you the worst one side contract ever usually, right? And so your job is to just push back a little. So I've read the contract. I love the contract. Almost everything about it was absolutely perfect. I didn't like the end of rights version because it wasn't clear what triggered the end of rights version. But when it happens, if it happens it was very clear I got this back and that back and I didn't own the cover but I owned everything else. It was actually pretty cool. So everything was covered. I said this is pretty good. Although what happened was I took a look and of course I was interested in the royalties. And they said we'll pay you a $1,000 advance on royalties and it's specified. A lot of places will pay you like 25% on signing contract. And then you write a bit and halfway through you get another 25 and you finish it, 25 and you publish it. It's tending to be a little less lately. But they said every time you hit 33% of the book submitted and approved for print will give you 33% of the $1,000 royalty. I thought that's pretty good. So I liked that, thought about it, emailed my editor and I said I love the contract. The one thing is while I told them I said I thought they should pay me three times that I thought would be a good thing because they had a really aggressive writing schedule and I said well I'm a freelancer and I'll have to write instead of taking jobs. So they said you should pay me three times, $3,000. And they wrote back very nicely and Sweden told me they thought it didn't matter what I thought. And that didn't go anywhere. They said it was a standard contract and they couldn't change that and so on. So I wrote back and said I understand. I said well unfortunately five weeks isn't enough time to write this. I think it will be longer. So can we relax the publishing schedule? I said absolutely. And so they said I had I think two and a half months and 14 months later the book was on sales. So I blew my schedule a little bit. But you don't feel free to. I said I wanted three times more than ever willing to pay me and they didn't leave my email and send me this down filter. They explained and we went back and negotiated. And it was actually pretty quick because I didn't like the contract. But you want to be careful about that because once you sign it you're locked in. And so for this $50 book list price I get about if you go through everything. Actually my royalty starts at 10% which is a lot higher than usual. It goes up pretty quick. But for this first 400 copies of this book $50 book I get something like $2 or $250 or something like that. I got published September 27th. My first royalty statement should come any day now. So we'll see exactly. It's about $2.25 or something. But they did a ton of work for me as well. Self-publishing is completely different. For self-publishing you are the publisher. And so because you're self-publishing and you're usually going, well you get 100% of the net profit basically. And so usually you're selling directly on an online digital book seller like Amazon or Noop Press. So you get 100% of the net profit when you are selling. But the way that works is that you have the list price and your storefront, Amazon or Noop Press or Smashwords and so on is going to take a fee for everything they're doing. Web hosting, bandwidth, storage, payment processing, which is actually really expensive. So you will typically get about 70% on Amazon. I think it's 65% on Noop Press or something like that. Certain prices on Amazon you can get 35% instead of 70. I'll note that 35% is still 6 times what you're going to get with a traditional publisher. And I think it's 21 times if you use 70. So Amazon really wants eBooks to be between $299 and $999. So you get 70% of the list price. If it's $198 or $10 you get 35%. So you have to sort of price accordingly. Although note that if I write a novel or a short story and I sell it for $3 on Amazon for $299, every single book that sells I get $2.08. So that's not too bad. So there is money to be made in publishing. And this is for eBooks. When you actually publish actual physical books you can create PDFs and go to Create Space or Lulup Press or so on. So for a 300 page technical book sort of like this, and if you price it $25 you're going to make $10.50 because it's going to be about $13 to print. And so anything above that you get a novel for $799 or $899 you might make $1.50 or so for a physical book. And so that's something that you can sort of look at the pros and cons and weigh the benefits of it. So just to recap, the royalties are completely different between traditional publishing and self-publishing. So for traditional publishing you sell the rights to publish your book and you get like 10%, you get 5% of the list price, right? You have teams of experts working in your book and you have access to bookstores and libraries and so on and that can be really advantageous. And so for self-publishing you find it higher in your own team. You still need the same people or at least the same roles. You cancel on yourself but a bad cover will sink your book on Amazon. There's too much competition. A good cover and a good blurb will make your book set stand right next to all the traditional published books. But you will find it higher in your own team. On the other hand, you get to keep the entire creative control rights and marketing for your book. So the publisher, the traditional publisher chooses your cover. If you're self-publishing you choose your cover. So if you don't like the traditional cover they might change it to make it some minor changes. But maybe you get two changes but like a one replacement. But if you don't like it it's too bad that their team is going to decide it. So you have to kind of decide what's important to you. But most importantly, I mentioned Vanity Presses. In traditional publishing all money flows toward the author. That's really important. You'll find agents out there non-reputable. But you'll find agents out there who are taking submissions. They only charge a $25 reading submission fee so when they read it they'll get back to you and accept or reject it. Or if they've accepted $50 to start saying it's publishers there are publishers who will sell you a low priced value package to edit and lay out your book as you self-publish. Those are scams. Every single time you're asked in the traditional publishing world to pay other people money to help publish your book it's a scam. What happens, I wrote that book. I got $1,000 for the book. I got $1,000 because it's in their subscription program. I don't get any more money. I don't have to pay back that $1,000. So I got $2,000 to write this book. I got $330. Months before the book was published a third of the way through the book I still could have walked away and not owed any money back. They hired editors. They hired cut-out layout designers and everything. And hopefully they make their money back. I think the book's doing well but I won't find out until I get my personality statements. But it's not my problem if the book isn't doing well if they didn't make their money back. I suspect they have. No one asked me for any money ever. Nobody gets paid until the back end when the book starts selling. I don't get paid until I earn out that $1,000 advance royalty. So my book, my share of the book has to earn out $1,000 before I see it checked. But I got it in advance. I got paid. Now when you're self-publishing it's a little different because you're the publisher. So obviously you're the publisher so you pay for your cover. You pay for editors. But you only do that in the context of you're the one publishing the book. And then when you start selling books you keep all the money. So there's a little investment up front. But you should not pay all-name author-marking solutions. For example, if they scan company they just want to sell you book packages. And then once the book's ready you're on your own to sell. Don't do that. You can get very reasonably priced services. And you can actually join a billion, any one of a billion indie author communities online and those communities will help you sort what's working and what isn't. So the first step of publishing is when it's time to write. And so that's what this talk is really about. So when it's time to write there are some tricks to remember, some really basic steps to remember. I didn't go so far as even to take tricks. The first thing is that you pick a word processor and it can be a lever office writer. It can be focus writer. It's a really good minimalistic writer that's actually in the venture repositories or your favorite tech center, which obviously is either to get it from Nano and definitely not Emac or by VI. But it doesn't matter what you use to write. All you need to do is get down words on paper. Actually I wrote the entire book in a lever office writer. I do kind of like focus writer. But when it's time to write what you want to focus on is actually just writing. When Macs came out in 1984 office productivity dropped everywhere because people started spending all their time in MacWrite changing font sizes and this one outlined and this one is Helvetica and here's Times and here's some margins. So when you use Word Perfect it was a doc text-based thing. You couldn't see any of that. When you're on a graphite interface you can and you want to sit there and make it look really pretty. And that will keep you from ever writing a book. So if you choose a word processor, nowadays word processors do everything. They do desktop publishing and so on. A word processor back in the day was just a fancy electronic typewriter. The idea was to get words into an electronic system, maybe edit them a little bit and then print them out. So if you use a lever office go ahead and pick a header font to the initial first line and dent, maybe your body font, and then don't touch anything else. Use the header style, use the full text style, and just write. Because styles are good but contents most important. And in fact even writing this book I got a bunch of templates and they said we want you to only use styles, don't use direct formatting. But if you have trouble with the templates, the styles, don't worry about it. Just write this type of text in and we will have people who are double-checking everything anyway. So just make sure you write. And the most important thing of your book is actually the content of the book, not the way it looks, per se. So you can even use a text editor with no markup at all because if you traditionally publish they wanted double line spaced in career 12-point or times in enrollment anyhow. So you'll have to throw away all that formatting anyway. If you're self-publishing unless you're doing it yourself, the editor will probably throw away a lot of that markup and reapply it themselves. So you're just wasting time, you're procrastinating. And you don't need help procrastinating when you're writing a book. There's plenty of opportunity. So I wrote my book about Free Software about Ubuntu entirely using Free Software and Ubuntu. Aside from a couple of Windows and Mac screenshots for demonstration purposes, everything else was entirely in Ubuntu. Even the Windows screenshots were in Ubuntu in virtual box. So when I got the acceptance letter and the first missile templates my publisher said, welcome aboard and we want you to write using Word and we have these special templates for you. So here's the templates, here's the fonts. So this is how my publisher expected me to write. But it turns out I told them, well I intend to write this book in LibreOffice until or if it actually causes any kind of problem, I'll switch to Word if that's what it takes. I'm going to write it on LibreOffice. So my publisher expected me to write the book this way but how I actually wrote the book was this way. And it looks very, very, very similar. Now the fonts in the template aren't perfect, but even when I was using the publisher provider fonts the names didn't quite match up in Office on Windows either because I did grab the trial of Office 2016 and install the fonts just to make sure it looked something similar before I got to work. They had a great template document showing all the styles. So I just uploaded that. I just opened that, took a look so I can do that. So the book goes through post-processing through print. So the fact that some of these fonts might not be perfect, some of the layout might not be perfect, there's that weird font thing in the middle or maybe it's a projector, a sharp spot, it didn't matter. And so the first page of each chapter had like a swoopy line, decoration thing, chapter 1, swoopy line, and then everything. That hardly ever worked right on my system but it didn't matter because all the books went through post-processing. You stripped everything out of Word, some XML type of processor, and then it went to press. So it wasn't a problem. And so what I would really recommend if you're writing your first book is start with LibreOffice Writer. And the nice thing about LibreOffice is it lets you work with others even if they're using Word. So even though my publisher was actually using Word probably 2010 or 2013 or something, I don't know Orcair, I was using LibreOffice. And LibreOffice allowed me to work with others. LibreOffice has a track changes feature and it's actually compatible with Word tracking comments. So when I actually wrote my book, I'd write everything in LibreOffice, save it in open document text format as I was writing. And then my last step before I sent it to the publisher was just save open up file, save as, save as docx, and then send it over by email and then when I got it back it was docx and since it was just minor revision we kept that format at all their comments and so on. So it's completely compatible with Word and it's gotten better and better so LibreOffice 5 is fantastic. And of course your editors or beta readers can install LibreOffice for free. So if you're self-publishing and you have someone who said can you read my book and it's an ODT format and you say I don't have LibreOffice or I don't have Word, you can say here's a copy of LibreOffice. So that's one of the nice things about free software is you can provide that software to others and then they can install it. LibreOffice is really the enterprise grade word processing office week, word processing spreadsheet, presentation software, this is LibreOffice of course. And they'll thank you forever. Of course the downside to that is that you will be responsible for anything at all that happens to the computer or anything electronic in their home. So two years from now when Microsoft fell, it's your fault and they need you to help fix it because it happened after they installed that LibreOffice that you recommended them. So that could be a downside. And then of course any season editor may already have Word and you probably don't want to try and make them use a tool they're not comfortable with like LibreOffice but you can take those Word documents right back and it's no problem. So I recommend using LibreOffice to track revisions but some of you out there are going to say well what about source control, a bizarre git or a subversion. I'd say that's probably overkill. I like the idea of it. I very briefly considered it before deciding that was crazy. But the problem is it's really good for tracking changes but not good for tracking comments. And so if you just want a really complicated way to get a diff of one revision to the other, version control will do that. But the most powerful thing when you have an editor is that they can leave comments on text and so you lose that with source control. Unless they are going through the document every time they make a change they make a change, save it, and then check it in and with a comment commit message. But that's good luck finding someone who will do that I think. So this is what revising looks like in LibreOffice. And as you can see this is one of the first chapters back from the editor. And there's some comments there. So this is all done in Word and they display perfectly. So what we have here is that, as I can see here, the slide is too small. So this is Solitaire and I want to show in this chapter that you can run Windows programs using Wine and so on. So I have here I'll write Solitaire and I have here Windows Solitaire running in Wine. And I thought that was really funny. And so my lead editor actually here said, please add a reference to this figure, 2-11, before it shows the text up above because I wasn't doing that in my first two chapters and I got them all back and got to change every single one. My tech reviewer here, he thought that because when you install Wine there's a Notepad program that is not actually Notepad, but looks just like it, that people might also expect to see Windows Solitaire when really I grabbed this from an old Windows XP install or something and ran side by side. So he said, please clarify that this does not come with Solitaire and you have to go find your own Windows programs but they run here. And so that's the kind of thing that I thought was making a quick joke and then people said this could be confusing. Fix it and told me how to fix it. And when somebody just was 100% completely right, he's actually helping on the AV team so he might be listening right now. Thanks, Jess. You were great. He was completely right. Typically when somebody, you get feedback from beta readers. Editors tend to be a little more on the ball but you get feedback from beta readers. If they say something's wrong, they're right that it's wrong. They're wrong on why it's wrong. So you don't have to follow everyone's feedback perfectly. In general I found that all my feedback was pretty much exactly on the ball. The interior layout actually is the next step in the process. You want to have your manuscript basically locked down and completely written because if you have pagination and so on and all sorts of things all set up and then you go and add an extra paragraph, it can bump everything off and then you have to redo. If it's like Chapter 1 for example, you have to redo the whole book. So you want to make sure your manuscript is finished. So it's the next step in the process after you've actually written the book and it's been edited and it's ready to go. LibreOffice can be used for simple things. I've actually done this. You want to use sort of a style feature and the page format option. And you don't want to do direct formatting rather because if you select everything and change the font and then you copy-paste something and add a different style, the font is not the same. You just want to tell all headers have this font or this big. All default text is this font and this big and so on. In fact, because you remember what I said, you should not be doing this when you're writing your book, playing with fonts and so on. You can write the whole book and if you used header and default textiles you've got the form option, you've got the style properties and then you can put in fonts and it just changes all throughout the document. You can see how it works. It changes everywhere and you don't miss any headers or chapter titles because you select it all and you're changing it. Scribes is actually the best way to do just real serious desktop publishing and unfortunately I don't have tons and tons of experience with that but it really is kind of a nice way to – it's much like Adobe InDesign or so on where you can actually specify text boundaries and wrapping around images and if you were really serious about it, that would be a way to go and you get really fancy. If you're doing something simpler, LibreOffice might work. And if you're doing electronic books, you actually use a program called Sigil is what I recommend. There are actually a lot of them but Sigil is an ePub formatting editor for eBooks. And so an eBook is actually just mostly CSS and XHTML so it's really simple but for that reason you don't want to do that in LibreOffice or in Word or in Scribes. So this is what the first page of the book will look like. And this is a project – the text is in Greek but it's that project I mentioned that for a friend of a friend I formatted a book. It was actually a memoir one of his clients had. Her father had created a food company back in the 1800s and you would recognize it on the shelves today and in the 40s he typed up on the typewriter his autobiography. So he borrowed it and a secret to her had it typed up, sent it to me, I laid everything out. So the chapters away at the top, there's no headers or footers as there never is on a first page. The facing pages blank, chapters at the top with a special font with small caps. There's what's called a drop folio where the actual text begins lower. And those are all details that you may not have recognized. You may not have known that every book starts that way but if you had a book where it's just page-to-page and the headers are there and the page numbers, you'd mainly say this looks kind of weird because it's not like every other book you've read. So these are the details that a good layout artist can create. Interior page layout looks like this and of course it is. You said the top, you have the title and the author and the page number at the top and they can go different places but there are details. So that again doesn't go on the first page. Any title page, front matter, it's all different and the interior is laid out completely differently. And an e-book for example will look like this. So whereas a print book will, you'll lay out so it looks basically like what you'll see on the printer page. And in fact, actually this is a PDF that did go to create space and was printed and came out just fine. This is an example of Sital. Now this isn't my book. This is actually the beginning of Pay Me Bug by Christopher B. Wright. And it's here because it's one, I love the book. And I have it on the Kindle. I'm reading through it right now. But also because it's licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-A-Like 4.0 license. And therefore I didn't have to ask anyone for permission. Although when I was writing my book I needed to show off a calibre which is an e-book management software. And I asked him and he was happy if I could use a screenshot of the first page and he said yes. So thanks Chris Wright. So if you've ever used a HTML editor, this looks really familiar. Complex Formatting doesn't work in e-book devices so it's really simple. Simpler is better when it comes to e-books because I have an e-ink Kindle and I almost never use a tablet unless someone paid me to make their book look good and I make sure it looks good everywhere. My tablet, my phone, my e-ink Kindle, and so on. For pleasure I only read on e-ink devices. So you really want to make things really kind of simple. You see all the chapters are actually broken down into separate HTML files. And so Cigil helps you sort of work through that. Because it is a different process going from LibreOffice to say another program like Cigil, I know I think he doesn't use Cigil. I think he used something else. But this is what comes out. So Cigil can help you make that change. But you also might be better served hiring someone to do it for you. It shouldn't be too expensive. Last of all, you do cover design. Cover design is different between printing and e-books because print books need full wraparound covers. Whereas e-books don't, the only thing that e-book needs is actually just a front cover. And so you can use Gimp or Inkscape. Those are great graphical tools that you are going to use. And so for print books, so an e-book can be inspirational to have the cover in front of you, the cover art. It's like a short story. But if you are writing an actual print book, you should wait until everything is completely laid out. This is the last step in the process because the spines be so big, and depending on how many pages are there, and that's how big the picture has to be. So you want to make that the last step in the process. So this is a template for a create space, whatever it should look like. Anything in the red is called the bleed area. It's so close to the edges that when they have the automated machines, it goes through the press. They cut everything automatically, and it might shift a little bit here and there. They can't guarantee anything in there is actually going to be visible. So you want to have a little bit of extra blank space around there so that it's not white edges where it misaligns. Or so your title isn't cut off at the top. And so this comes last. And when we look at an example, so this is another Greek example of the book I laid out for a friend of a friend. And this isn't the actual title and not the actual copy. In fact, we didn't have trademark or copper clearance to worry about there. So I used the images he gave me for this. I actually had to purchase two stock images. So this cost me way more than the actual cover I gave him. But this is what it looks like. You see the cover is the back cover on the left, the spine in the middle, and the actual cover on the right, on the bio pool clothes and so on. So that's how this sort of looks, the barcode and so on. So I like to think of this as the perfect example for why you should probably hire a professional. But the client was very, very happy and that made me happy. So the actual, as far as publishing a print book goes, traditional publishing means the publisher takes care of the step. But if you're self-publishing, then you want to use print-on-demand. Now print-on-demand typically prints PDF files. And so there are a lot of different places out there, trade space, IngramSpark, Lulupress and so on. This book getting started at Ubuntu 10.04 was actually printed at Lulupress. And I'll have this around. You can look at it, you know, after the talk. It's actually really well done. You almost never know. This book was actually traditionally published and they still use print-on-demand. And it's a great book and you, again, would never ever know. And that way they didn't have to print 10 other books and then pay for warehousing, for example. But basically you create a PDF that looks just like the ones I did exactly how it looks on the page. And then you pay basically just a set cost. And then if you sell it, you can pad the list price so that you get the difference. It's pretty easy. Publishing an e-book is a little different. Most e-books stores actually support either Word documents or e-Pub documents which is a standard. And there are a lot of different companies and you're going to want to sort of look around. Amazon has Kindle Direct Publishing, there's Press, Smashwords, iTunes, Direct to Digital, Google Play Books, there's all sorts of places. KDP or Kindle Direct Publishing is probably where you want to go unless you hate Amazon for some reason. But if you hate the largest online bookstore in the world, but you're trying to sell your book, you have to have temper your expectations. But they have a really good royalty rate. And technically it's not a royalty because they're just a storefront, they're not really the publisher, which applies to everyone here. If you go exclusive with them, there's a couple extra terms and promotional offers that are kind of neat. And it's a 90-day window where if you hate it, then you can just let that lapse and you can go off. So it's as easy as uploading a file and then you're done. So as you can see, you can basically write and publish a book using pretty much only free software on your end. And it's a pretty simple process, LibreOffice, Inkscape, Gimp, and you're pretty much done. So Joel, if you're doing e-books. So I want to leave you with one last note as regard digital rights management. So I like to think of it really as digital restrictions management. And traditional publishers usually give books, well, when you're traditionally publishing, they have this final say on e-books as far as DRM. DRM, of course, means when you buy the book you're locked to certain devices. You can't read on any others. I'd recommend that DRM is not really helpful for self-published books or traditional publishing books, but that's not your call then. If you're self-publishing, DRM only affects paying customers. Someone strips the DRM and then distributes it. None of those people got the DRM, so it doesn't affect them. And actually there's a plug-in for Libre where you type in your Kindle serial number or something, and then every single book, every time you plug in your Kindle and it syncs all the new books to your computer, it automatically strips the DRM, like the time it took to transfer over the USB cable. So DRM is optional on all these self-publishing bookstores, and I recommend that you just forgo it. Sometimes people download a book and like it and they go buy it, or sometimes they say, this is really good, I'll go buy the rest of the books from the series or other books by the same author. In fact, I read the first two chapters of Painty Bug online, loved it, saw it was kind of common. I said, that's really generous of him, and now I'm going to pay him by going straight to Amazon and paying, I think it was $4 for the type of book, and I've never regretted it. So that's pretty much my time, and that's the talk, and if you have any questions, I'd love to take them if we have time. So I have a lot of questions with you first. The question was, so did I have an agent before with some publishers, or did I already get one? So I got name dropped, so I got a direct solicitation and then could just submit my proposal. I don't know how big agents are in necessarily nonfiction, but agents only represent completed manuscripts. So you'll have the book first, and then you'll submit the book to the agent, and then the agent on your behalf will start looking. So you'll find the agent once your book's finished. If you submit to a publisher, and because they allow it without the agent, and they accept it, you're best served by finding an IT lawyer to negotiate your contract, or an agent then to represent you. So I have this book that this giant publisher has been willing to want to publish. Then agents will be much more likely to take them on, because they only get paid when you sell, and it's a done deal by that point. To find a reputable agent, you can look online. There are lists, duotrope, I think, list literary agents. You find your favorite books that are in the style of the book you're writing, and you find out what their editor is. It's usually on the copyright page. So that you're not submitting a crime thriller to a romance agent, for example. So that's the best way to do it. Questions? The 6x9 format that you had is obviously bigger than paperback and smaller than hardback. That's a standard. Is that a specific name for that size? It is industry standard. I think it's called B5 size. I'm not quite sure. So the one you're looking at is, you're thinking of a mass market paperback, and you can't find any one online that will print on demand that size. It's like 5.58 inches by something. I don't know why. So 6x9 is kind of similar. You can do I think 5x7. It sort of just depends. But when you create space, for example, there will be a giant list of formats, and they'll do score formats and bigger formats, but if you want extended distribution in bookstores libraries, you have to pick an industry size. And they'll list them all. We offer this industry size, standard, non-industry standard, all right there. Did you pick the 6x9? I can't tell from here on your side. I think I picked, I think I did. That's a good question. Yeah, 6x9, because that's the kind of size you wanted. It was a guess. It looked a little more regal. But yeah, I'd probably go 5x8 or something on a fiction book. Yes, so you and then... Back there. And two, a friend of mine published a book I think with Lou. I think it was. She was self-publishing. And for the cover, they wanted some PDF, they wanted PDF files, but there's some sort of exotic flavor of PDF. I don't know if you could talk a little bit about that. I've never published myself through Lou. So the first question was, where did I get the template? So a create space, you sign for an account, your Amazon account, you say I want to create a book, you pick the size, and then there are templates for you. There's more templates for the interior, which I ignore some better at that. And the cover templates I follow religiously. This actually came from, it says on there, it actually I think was from, there's another little company that does it, but I don't see it. Oh, booknow.com, they give free things because they want to sell you something. But this is free, and I'm hoping you'll do some of their services. And I just did it because I wanted the barcode on the book already. Instead of leaving that to create space, but they'll do that normally. And as far as Lou, so the cover creates space, I just wanted a PDF, so I did everything in Inkscape, and then just save as PDF. And I didn't need anything special. So I would check Lou again because things are changing so rapidly they might be a little more. Are there options in there that you can check that makes the publishing and printing a lot easier is probably what they're talking about. Certain sentences for publishers, that's probably true. I was lucky enough to be able to ignore all that through create space. I don't have an Inkscape anymore directly, but when you export the PDF in LibreOffice, you can save options, and there's a ton of different things that can definitely be used. And then just a second follow-up question. When you're doing your research, should you try and figure out if there's anything like that that will take a LibreOffice and convert it to say sigil, or is it all, both are separate processes? So I like to basically strip all from, so basically what I do is my process that people pay money for is I take their document, word document, grab a chapter, copy and paste it into gEdit, and then paste it to sigil. And then I do apply the markup myself, and I can't craft the CSS file. And that's the easiest way because I don't want any other changes. A lot of authors actually take Word or LibreOffice and they save as HTML. And then they can use bookmarks and so on. And they have really good results with that. I grew up in, so the web was started in 1992, right? We first started seeing it at home. So 1994, 95, I had a text editor, HTML editor, one side was the HTML code, the other side was like a preview. And that's how I learned to edit web pages. So as you can tell from my website, so that's how I like to do it. I was, in terms of writing the book, do you say it's 20 chapters? Do you create one document and you're writing in that one document? Or would it be more advisable to say break it into 20 different files as chapters and then reassemble it? And then the other thing that I'd like for you to talk about in self-publishing, kind of the cost in terms of the quantity, versus quantity, number of pages in terms of your experiences as a self-publish. You have to pay for that upfront. So in regards to whether you break, you have one giant document for Manuscript or you break it up, it really depends on the length of the document. Most of my clients will sort of take a, I'll give that 60,000 word novel and it'll be one giant document. That's fine. I have to seek around to copy-basic chapters. For the traditional published book, they actually wanted everything in a single chapter by chapter, each document. And that made it easier because I would finish a chapter and I would submit it and that was done. Whereas if I had, and then they'd work, do some work on it, if I actually had a, if I was self-publishing and writing a novel, I would probably just do it in one document because I'm really lazy and don't like to handle that many documents. But it really is a matter of preference. The one thing is if you're writing something long, if it's just text, you'll be okay. If you're writing something complex, you'll plot the figures and pictures and so on. It really is best to have separate documents because if the document gets too big, it can cause problems and make the word processor unreliable. So I would say that. As far as upfront costs and self-publishing, there really are no upfront costs anymore. What you can do is you can get everything ready to publish, put the e-book on Amazon, put the print book on, say, CreateSpace, which is also going to Amazon. They'll take an extra cut there. And then you can order your own copies for cost to give out, to give as gifts or whatever. But you never pay anything upfront. When you go to CreateSpace, you'll find that they have black and white are color interior. They have the cream color or white color for pages. That's the same cost. You can actually go in and there's a price calculator. This size trim, because that's the amount of paper they use, this many pages, you can see exactly what that will cost to print. And then from there you determine if they're for gifts, just for yourself. That's what you pay. If you are going to sell it online, then you can from there figure out what you want to market up at. Any other questions? One and then two. Nate, I just have a quick question. How much money? Do you know if anybody is making any money doing this? So I worked really, really hard to get some sci-fi novels up under my own name. I've done some technical consulting for some Roman authors, and so I went through the process, wrote some nonsense to 3,000, 5,000 words for a story. I just went through the process to know exactly step by step. And I actually made, I shouldn't say, I made $2,000 last year with very no effort. So basically picking backing off of their experience. Between scale and getting a ghost writing offer from someone who's making a lot of money, he's like, if you write a $15,000, I'll give you a template, hit the beats here. If you write $15,000 for a story, I'll give you $1,500 for a story. And if you really won't keep doing it, maybe we'll increase it if it does well. He made $680,000 last year. And he's making about $20,000 every month. And he's doing some ghost writing, does his own writing. And he's had a lot of experience. He's shared experience in that private group. He's the nicest guy I've ever known. When I said, let me make sure I know the process. I'm selling books so they're formatting right. I'll go through. I just did, I ignored his advice, did one book. He took me three hours to write. He did another, took me another six hours. Wrote another book, did the marketing, different cover, different types of photos, styles, keywords, blurbs. And I sold about eight times more. I made I think $160 that month on that one book. So if you're writing on Kindle right now, if you're writing short stories, if you keep publishing short stories, you make a few hundred dollars a month usually once you learn what's going on if you pay attention. If you write novels, you can make substantially more than that in the right genre. Romance is really big right now. Sci-Fi and fantasy are really big. Literary fiction can be big. You kind of have to swap to the draw there. There's some luck involved at any rates. But you can, if you want to do a side job, you can make a few hundred dollars, a couple hundred dollars a month. And it's fine and you get paid for it, right? If you want to actually do it for real, there are only certain genres that you can really make a lot of money in, but it is totally possible. Any other questions? Over here. Indexing. I noticed you didn't mention that. That's an art in itself. I've done a lot of foreign language indexing. Do you know how important an index is for nonfiction? Did you do it yourself or did you find it out? Good question. So especially because my book was sort of a past schedule, my publisher was, writers were very concerned. We were at about chapter and a half left. I said, so what about Front Matter? What is going on there? Like, you know, we really want you to concentrate on the task at hand and we can do that really quickly. And I said, no, I want to know what I have to write. I'll think about it in the back. My brain will percolate. And I'm not going to waste any time until I'm done, but like it will help me and I don't worry about it. And they were like, okay, here, right? And then I did exactly that. I looked at it, flipped through it. So this was pretty cool. Wrote a temporary placeholder dedication for the book. And then I went back to writing. So in the Front Matter, I had the Table of Contents, for example, and they were very clear. Do not waste any time doing your Table of Contents instead of writing because you're behind schedule. We have people do that. And they said the same thing. Once the book's finished, they said, what's we going to conference call in Skype? I said, what's next? They said, well, we take this. We finish the copy. It goes here. It goes to the Proofers. You look at that. At the same time, we send it to indexes. They actually have a firm listed in the copyright page of my book. The firm that actually went through and indexed everything. I did get a copy in PDF form just before it went out. It looked good to me. I got the final books out. And of course, there's one error. There's one entry that loops back to itself. This, see this, something weird. I probably should have caught, but that wasn't my job, so I don't know. So it was none of my problem. And traditionally, in traditional publishing, you don't have to worry about it. In self-publishing, if you're doing nonfiction, there are ways to mark certain subjects that later on, lever office can create an index for you. For a nonfiction book, depending on the length, like for this a reference book, my book's a reference book. So the index sort of makes and breaks the book because it's meant to be picked up in red. And the table contents is really nice and clear. I wrote it that way. But if someone wants something specific, they can go and make them fire foxes. It's mentioned here and here and here. You can see it's mentioned here and here. So indexing for nonfiction is super, super important. I would say if you're self-publishing because it's such a unique skill, you should probably hire that out. I know it's nothing I ever wanted to do. And so far I've been very lucky and succeeded in that goal of never indexing myself. Other than that one error, I thought the index was actually perfect because the index things I never would have considered being the index. So it's one of the things like layout or cover. You really want to have an expert do it. I would publish with A-Press again in a second. They've been nothing but fantastic and helpful. Anytime there's a conflict or concern, they see to my expert knowledge which was great. And on the other hand, if I were writing anything shorter than this, even nonfiction, I'd probably do it myself because I can make a little more money that way if there's a question. Of course, how hard would it have been if I hadn't had an in to break into the publishing industry and become an author? The answer is not hard at all actually. Well, I know one of the persons who got in contact and they loved the suggestion, but now that I think about it, I recommended them too, so I guess that doesn't count. I was told very clearly when I finished this book that as my editor sort of changed his decisions that she is in charge of picking out any of the two books that they published. So I've already been to authors, have them email proposal. Now, just because I recommend someone doesn't mean they're going to publish the book. They want the proposal to be fine. The only difference is they know to expect it. So having that can help. If you have a friend who is an author, for example, and you have a manuscript in their style, you can have them send a letter. Or when you send a letter, you say, you know, this is my manuscript, and usually you start a query letter with a synopsis at the end, so I admire the book you did here for my friend. You submit and queue to you. You work for their script and they recommend that your services, they love you as an agent. With the caveat that when you say, you know, you represented my friend, that must be true. You cannot send a query letter and say, so my good friend Stephen King said that you'd want to look at this, right? That's not going to help you. So it can be a little more daunting, but other than the fact that they asked me, as it turned out, but if I had submitted to, I want to say submissions at AFRES.com, but I don't know, I e-mailed her directly. If you're at AFRES.com or any publisher, you should find a place for submissions. And it's scary to just send a query letter or so on, but in real life, that's how books get found and published. I had a little bit of a leg up because they were expecting something. I got to ask them, well, because they're like, you don't give me books, you give me suggestions. What would you like to write on when you feel comfortable? I said, well, what kind of books would you like? And they didn't really want to tell me because they didn't want to tell me what their publishing goals were for the next two years, right? Because they don't want to tell a difficult that, right? But they did give some suggestions. Whether it's beginner, intermediate, or advanced level books on this topic or general topics. So then I was sort of on my own. So it's actually pretty easy to break in, easier than you would think. Yeah, that's nonfiction. It's fiction, you have to have the book. Nonfiction, yeah, you find a publisher, you find who it is that books you admire if it's in that style, because that's what they sell. Yeah, you go there and you can, so go to their website, look for their submissions page. They'll say, they'll tell you exactly what they want. And if you are smart, you will give them exactly what they want because that's the easiest way to discount a problem author, who's going to knock you things the right way and create lots of work. They can't even get the submission right. So double-check all the submission guidelines. They're not hard, and yet people still don't do them. It'd be a certain font, this and that, they'll say, I want this or that. Actually, when I said, yeah, I'd like to write a book, they actually gave me a guide. I believe A-Press said, we want this and this and this and that. And it was pretty easy. It's probably online. A-Press is really open. I'm going to use some idea what's suspected. Any other questions? All right, well, thank you so much. Thank you very much, Mr. Dean. And so before you go, on the back table, there is a pamphlet of information about this. So I have a question. Who has a friend who they want to use Ubuntu but is afraid to use Ubuntu? You don't count. Anyway, I have a friend who, yeah, or someone who is just starting out and just kind of wants to know where to start. Because I will give this copy of my book for free to other people. Do you want it? No, you can have it. Thank you.