[NewsPoster]

Self-publishing -- once known as the "vanity press" -- has been around for decades. If you had a burning desire to be a published author, but mysteriously the conventional literary "mafia" couldn't see the value in your heartbreaking work of staggering genius, you could pay to have books created for you in the hopes that this would lead to your "discovery." It rarely worked out that way (until 50 Shades of Gray took that path). With the advent of desktop publishing in the late 1980s and the emergence of e-books into the mainstream more recently, authors can now take much more control over their literary fate. In this new Summer Project, MacNN is going to show you what we mean, by putting out a book ourselves over the next eight weeks. Read on to find out more.

Much of the stigma of self-publishing or e-publishing has vanished, and it is no longer simply the province of authors who couldn't get a "real" publisher to put their book out. Not anymore. One can still rush-print their rejected novel, but they can also do it properly, with as much control as desired or letting a third-party company handle the mechanics of it all.

We're going to show you the ins and outs of e-publishing, and I'm going to specifically show you by example: I'm William Gallagher, an author, and this is what I do for a living. Not usually so publicly, but each step is one I've gone through many times with publishers and more recently for myself. I'm still learning, and the whole industry is still changing, so I'm planning to tell you what I already know, and find out the rest as we go.

You're going to find out exactly what you can do, exactly what is possible, and what you should do both with technology and with publishing skills. I'm not going to pretend it takes 20 minutes, nor am I going not going to pretend we can cover it in one go. Instead, this is a MacNN Summer Project, and over the next eight weeks I will make a book.

A real book. Not a test, not an experiment, and not playing with what books can do. In mid-July, there will be a new book on sale -- and it will be there because doing I am doing it myself on iBooks, Kindle and in paperback. I call it a book because it is a proper print and e-book, and I'm doing it that way because it is the best option for me, for my readers, and -- this is key -- for this particular book.

Over these eight weekly Pointers articles, you will see a lot of strong opinions -- but you will not once see a single pixel of criticism about traditional publishers. I won't call them legacy publishers, I won't call paperbacks dead-tree books, and I will not be saying that online-only is best, or that e-books are the future. What I will do is take the lessons I've learned writing proper print books, and show you where e-book tools are good, where they are poor, and what you need to look for. The publishing revolution gives authors much more freedom, but with that comes more responsibility than just writing the story and sending it off.

Hopefully, these eight specials will be a complete workshop for you on writing and publishing books: it continues to be a workshop for me on exactly that. For this new book is not a MacNN title, it's not a sample done to illustrate some software or other, it is a real book that would've been done with or without this Summer Project special.

I am very proud of the fact that I've written books for the British Film Institute, and co-written ones for the BBC and for the Radio Times, beginning with The Beiderbecke Affair.

They've all been projects that mattered enormously to me, and they've all resulted in books that, after several years, I still give author talks and workshops about. However, there is one title that I am especially proud of, and which I think is the single most beautiful title I've ever been involved in -- and you can't get it yet.

It's a British media book that's coming out in a coffee-table special edition, a giant 170,000-word title with a design I think is to die for. The day I agreed to write it and signed the commission, the publisher showed me a mockup of the design, and even that was gorgeous. I can remember how physically daunting it felt that I'd just agreed to fill that with words.

I did, too. It took me about 16 months to write, and I'm avoiding telling you the title because such an exquisite and gigantic book is a big publishing job. While I've delivered my writing, the book is easily still months and months away from being on sale.

Two years ago, when I had signed that contract and was deep into planning out this forthcoming book, I had an idea for another one that would fit in perfectly with a workshop I'd been asked to do for the Birmingham Literature Festival here in England. It was a workshop for writers, about beating distractions like Facebook and children, about getting started and keeping going. It was about staying creative, yet becoming more productive.

I called it The Blank Screen -- because that's what we writers sit in front of, and that's what we writers spend our days filling -- and the workshop was sold out. The workshop was such a success that I think I've done it 30 times since across England, but whatever time I get to do it and whomever I do it for, there is always so much more to say that I knew it needed to be a book as well.

There was just about enough time to write the book before that first workshop -- especially if I followed my own advice and was creatively productive -- but without question there was no time to get a publisher for it first. I've done that, I know that an immediate yes can still take a year before you get to a contract.

So I wrote, designed and published The Blank Screen myself. It's been one of the biggest-selling books I've ever done, and it's the only one that got so much response that I ended up doing a sequel. That's called Filling the Blank Screen, and last summer I started planning a new series of related titles that would be more specific, more detailed about particular issues for writers.

The result is going to be The Blank Screen: Blogging.

It's to have all the technical aspects of blogging that you'd expect -- from setting up Wordpress to writing in MarsEdit on OS X -- but it is also going to have much more important information. Such as what to write about in your blog, and especially what to write when your mind is as blank as your screen. Editorial tips I learned from having had columns in magazines and on BBC News Online, discipline drummed into me from real deadlines and my own self-imposed one from nearly 10 years of blogging for myself and others.

I planned all this out in OmniOutliner, I wrote in Pages and Word, I sketched out designs in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign, I recorded interviews with bloggers in Evernote, I transcribed into Scrivener those interviews using a bare-bones but very useful OS X app called Transcriptions. Everything was going along exactly as it had with my previous books, until two things happened.

One was that an interviewee proved to be so interesting that she changed my mind about the entire book. Rather than just having the odd quote to back up a point of mine, I decided right there on the phone to her that I was going to turn over some chapters to the writers I'd interviewed. She's the British poet Jo Bell, and you just wait until you see what an amazing thing she did with blogging.

The second thing to happen was Vellum.

This is a publishing application from 180g, a company formed by ex-Pixar staff. It's an application that takes text and produces rather beautifully-designed documents that you can then submit to Apple for iBooks, Amazon for Kindle, and whatever it is you submit Nook books to. I was assigned to review it for MacNN, and kidded with the developer that I'd stress test it with a real book.

I'm stress testing it with a real book.

They had me at the name Vellum, to be fair: it's the perfect name for an application whose makers care about the books produced through it. Yet they really had me at the point when I was working on my book, flowing text into an InDesign template, and contrasting the result with what I was getting from Scrivener. Vellum is a template-based application, so it has the same problem that maybe everyone will pick the same templates, but the look of my book in this app was enough to change my mind.

You know that even when things work out well, there are still things you'd do differently if you were able to go back. Take this Summer Project as your chance to see how to do things differently. I'll catch you up on the writing and the research that has already gone into the book, then I'll show you what happens as we go through the many tools and options for publishing. Ultimately we will publish using Vellum, and see how that fares in the real world -- but we'll also talk through the alternatives that you can, and that I have, used in the process.

You can expect a lot of recommendations and analysis of software tools: I'm a software nut, plus my book is all about blogging software. You can expect that each of the eight weeks will equally tell you about the non-software parts of the job: what it actually means to edit and get editors, what it really takes to get a cover and why that matters.

Throughout the Summer Project, you will come to details about particular software tools and services that you'll want to know more about. Those will be covered separately in new and revised reviews that myself and colleagues are writing now for MacNN. There is no better way to learn a tool and definitely no better way to review it than to apply that software to accomplishing a specific, real-world goal. That's what the whole MacNN team is doing right now.

When ebooks and self-publishing first started, history repeated itself. Just as they had when the Internet began, people said that this was fantastic: you don't need publishers anymore, you don't need editors. Then the first self-published books came out, people read how bad they could be -- and now understood why yes, you do need publishers and you do need editors.

You will not have the skills to do everything you need to do to produce a book -- at least, you won't have the skills to do it as well as you'd want. The MacNN Summer Project is about writing and publishing books using the tools and the services we all have, the skills that you have, and the getting of people who can do the bits you can't.

Eight weeks is a serious ride. Yet we hope you'll follow along, and you genuinely can have a book at the end of it. Look at us, look at me: on the 17th of July, I will have another book out.

-- William Gallagher (@WGallagher)

Part two of this series continues here