As you go through the self-publishing process, you might find the array of tasks before you overwhelming – design a book cover, get a photo of yourself, proofread the manuscript, format the text, upload the text, pen a cover blurb, write then send out press releases, etc. etc. etc. – and you’re a writer, not an artist, marketing professional, or book publisher. Given this, you’re probably relieved to see self-publishing houses offer such services.

But which of those services do you really need? And are they a good deal?

You probably need some of the services that self-publishing houses offer. Unless you have experience working with publications beyond writing, you simply may not have the expertise to put together a professional-looking book. The good news is that even if lacking such experience, you still can do it on your own by reading guidebooks, such as this one, so long as you are willing to make the time commitment.

Still, you have to know when you’re out of your league. For example, I’ve designed some of my books’ covers and contracted designers to handle the rest. While I can do basic design work, the more sophisticated the artwork, the less capable I was of pulling it off. For those complex projects, I searched out design experts with the necessary skills and software.

But needing some of the services that a self-publishing house offers doesn’t mean you need to purchase them from a self-publishing house. Such houses typically charge more than what freelancers would (Full disclosure here: I offer some editing and self-publishing services as a freelancer.). In addition, many self-publishing houses don’t offer the most personal service; after all, they have hundreds of clients on any given day who need work done, so often templates that don’t best meet your needs are used and little contact with you beyond generic-sounding emails occurs. Further, you probably aren’t getting the best expertise when going with a self-publishing house. Their employees tend to be straight out of college, and while they may know their self-publishing house’s systems really well, ask yourself who you want designing your book cover – someone with several years of experience or someone who started a few months ago and uses a template?

The downside of not going with a self-publishing houses’ suite of prepackaged services is that you now become a general contractor. Finding freelancers requires you to shop around. First you’ll need to identify some freelancers. A simple Google search or going to websites where you can bid for freelancers’ services (such as Elance or Guru.com) is a good way to start. Next, when soliciting bids, you need to clearly state for freelancers what you want them to accomplish for you. Be specific when explaining yourself. Consider asking freelancers to answer a few questions about themselves – such as years of experience, seeing a portfolio, how they charge for services, turnaround time, and references – to help you make an informed decision. Finally, while how every author arrives at a final decision of who to contract always is a personal matter, consider balancing the elements of cost, experience, and meeting your specific needs. In short, don’t make a decision solely based on who’s the lowest bidder. Proven experience almost always trumps cost if you want a quality product.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks:

Suffering from writer’s block or need to add some spunk to your writing? The problem may be that you need to change up your routine.

To that end, try this tip: Try writing part of a story from the point of view of a character whose gender is the opposite of yours. What difficulties do you encounter in telling the story? Does your character consist of stereotypes of that gender?

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Another way to tighten your writing is to leave out the laugh track. In comedy television shows, fake recorded laughter often is added to suggest that an audience is present – and to suggest to viewers at home that they also should find a joke humorous. In your story, a laugh track is present when you also give readers hints about how they should react. American writer Lewis Shiner coined the term.

Possible examples of a laugh track in your story might include characters laughing at their own jokes or crying when they feel emotional pain.

If you’ve written your story well enough, the reader shouldn’t need to be told that the character is laughing or crying. The reader will feel the humor or inner turmoil themselves and can imagine the characters guffawing or weeping.

Indeed, by directly telling what characters feel, you run the risk of readers disengaging from the story. That’s because a laugh track is telling rather than showing and so is a form of countersinking.

An exception (and there’s always an exception!) is when characters have an emotional response that isn’t “ordinary,” such as laughing at an extremely inappropriate joke. This can help give readers a sense of what the character is really like – in this case uncouth and depending on the joke possibly racist, chauvinist or just plain strange.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 350 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks:

In today’s publishing world, you need to sell both a paper and an ebook version of your title. There are plenty of readers for both platforms and many who prefer one over the other, so to limit yourself to either a paper or an ebook severely limits your potential number of buyers.

While the same content generally appears in both the paper and the ebook versions of your title, there are differences between the two platforms. Knowing those differences can help you plan how your book will be presented in each platform and make each version better.

Ebooks differ from paper books in five major ways:
• Page numbers – Ebooks do not have page numbers because the reader can change the font and font size, meaning there’s no analog between what’s seen on the ereader’s screen to what’s seen on a paper book’ page. Most eboks instead tell a reader what percentage of the book they’ve read or thumbed through.
• Interactivity – A paper book can list a website URL and a bibliography of other titles to read. As an ebook can be linked to the web, simply touching word or a title can take you to that source.
• Article-like content – Though hardly true of all ebooks, the short magazine-like approach to content is quite common among titles written primarily for electronic consumption. In contrast to a paper book, the small screen lends itself well to short paragraphs and belleted points.
• Nonconducive to pictures/poetry – Because the font sizes can be changed and the small screen size, ebook wreak havoc with line breaks in poetry. Pictures also are limited in size; while a paper book always can be made larger so that photographs run larger, all ebooks must fit a single size, which is that of an ereader’s screen.
• Price – For the moment, ebooks invariably are less expensive that paper books. That only makes sense, as an ebook can be sent electronically via the Internet to your ereader wherea a paper book requires trees, printing plants, warehouses, and trucking to create and then delver the book to a reader.

The upshot of these major differences greatly effects you during the self-publishing process. For example, you’ll likely need to format the title twice, once for your ebook and once for your paper book. You may want to add links to your ebook and not spell out the URLs. You will have to consider how photos are sized for the two different versions. You’ll have to determine and set different prices for each platform. And those are just a few of the obvious differences.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 350 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks:

Suffering from writer’s block or need to add some spunk to your writing? The problem may be that you need to change up your routine. To that end, try this tip:

Think of a time you’ve faced personal turmoil in your life. Write a page about the emotions you experienced during that difficult time.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

When telling a story, you’ve got to have conflict in it. If there’s no conflict, you have a wooden story that starts nowhere, leads nowhere and ends nowhere. As E.M. Forester noted, “‘The king died, then the queen died’ is a plot. ‘The king died, then the queen died of grief’ is a story.”

Forster’s quotation is apt because a good plot is about at least one character under adversity. Conflict typically arises from the characters’ perceptions, needs and wants. As each character has an urgent personal agenda, your plot really is a synthesis of its individual characters’ efforts to achieve their agendas.

Let us suppose that we are writing a historical fiction novel about a lone Roman legion stopping a barbarian invasion. The agenda of our hero, the Roman commander Gauis Camillus, is to persuade the Cauci tribe to join his legion so that they may hold out against the invading barbarians. The agenda of our villain, barbarian King Hagena, is to conquer the former land of the Cauci so that they have space to live as they face pressure from the expanding Vandi to the east. The Cauci’s Council of Elders’ goal is to stay neutral.

As these conflicting agendas intersect, each character faces adversity. For Gauis, the Cauci aren’t receptive to his idea, then finds his legion surrounded by Hagena’s advancing army. For Hagena, Gauis’ legion refuses to yield and at night raids his army’s supply lines. The Cauci council refuses to join the Romans even when Hagena begins to burn their villages. For the Cauci, they first feel the pressure of Gauis and Hagena and then watch both sides become increasingly violent toward one another on their home turf.

Types of Conflict
There are five primary types of conflict that your characters can face:
• Man vs. nature – When the forces of nature, such as storms, deserts and volcanoes, that hinder a character from achieving his objective. A thunderstorm that leads to a river flooding, for example, might delay Hagena’s army as they are forced to find another route to meet the Romans in battle.
• Man vs. man – When two individuals struggle against one another to achieve their objectives, such as Gauis and Hagena.
• Man vs. society – When a character or small group challenges the mores and values of their culture or its political institutions. Perhaps one of the Cauci objects to the Council of Elders’ decision and advocates joining the Romans.
• Man vs. God(s) – When an individual or a small group fight God or the gods. Possibly one of Hagena’s officers begins to question if his people’s god really favors them as they face setback after setback against the legion.
• Man vs. himself – When a character has an internal struggle because of conflicting desires, wants and needs. Maybe one of the tribunes disagrees with Gauis and finds himself struggling between loyalty to his commander and his inner belief that his men will needlessly perish if a different course of action were taken.

When developing conflict in your story, follow these guidelines:
• Maximize conflict by pitting two forces against one another – This either can involve opposites facing off (as with Gauis and Hagena) or involve an internal conflict.
• Every scene should present the main character with a problem – If this doesn’t happen, there probably isn’t much point to the scene.
• Conflict should allow the character an opportunity to change the course of events – Adversity alone rarely is enough to carry a story, though it may help create reader sympathy for your character.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my guidebooks for plotting your story:

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – E. L. Doctorow

“Every novel should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.” – Peter De Vries

“To the composition of novels and romances, nothing is necessary but paper, pens, and ink, with the manual capacity of using them.” – Henry Fielding

“The historian records, but the novelist creates.” – E. M. Forster

“When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: ‘House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.’” – Neil Gaiman

“I have a theory of my own about what the art of the novel is, and how it came into being….It happens because the storyteller’s own experience…has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.” – Lady Murasaki, “The Tale of Genji”

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Suffering from writer’s block or need to add some spunk to your writing? The problem may be that you need to change up your routine. To that end, try this tip:

Select a genre that you usually don’t write in. For five minutes, write a passage in that new genre.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks: