As a writer with no money to purchase many of the so-called ‘must haves’ to produce my books, I made a point of searching out the free resources on the net to help me on my self-publishing journey. Here are the products I’ve used – and continue to do so:
Word Processing
Word/Microsoft Office. I already had this and had bought the old 2003 version ages ago. I could not afford to upgrade. Since then, Microsoft has made its Office package freely available online via https://www.office.com/. Remember, this is web-based. My recent – cheap – solution was buying the licence on amazon, you get a bit of paper with a code and download and that’s it. Reading the reviews, I worried a bit about it being a con, but no, it all works. You can go here to have a look. Mine cost £19.99 so it has gone up a little but is still incredibly cheap. Top tip with Word is to use styles to control the formatting of your book, this saves a lot of time and angst.
Libre Office is open source software, offering Microsoft Office equivalents and also allowing you to save in .doc/.docx. I used to use it when it was known as OpenOffice and I didn’t have Word. (And yes, there is also google docs!)
Desktop Publishing
Scribus. Free desktop publishing software. Another open source package, this allows you to explore desktop publishing and delve into typesetting and tighter document control. Don’t just convert a Word doc to a .pdf, use this to create a professional-looking book. I’ve used this for about a year and it is very good for a free product and I learned a lot about print production. I could not afford Adobe’s prices so it was great to find this one, available here. I have since moved on from Scribus to Affinity Publisher after researching cheap InDesign equivalents. This is much easier to use and I bought it for a one-off cost of £49 when it was on sale, after having a go on the free trial. You can get Affinity Publisher here.
Ebook Management and Creation
Calibre ebook management. Free here. You can import your book and convert it to whatever output format you require. I used to use it to generate .mobi files from the .doc source in order to check it was okay. Nowadays, I tend to use it to create epub files. This is an excellent resource for creating ebook ARCs!
Sigil is free open source software allowing the user to create and manipulate epubs. It allows more control and greater format design possibilities than elsewhere. I will say this goes down to code level (which can also be accessed as in Calibre) and I haven’t touched upon it too much as I didn’t want to get sucked into the rabbit hole of css styles and the like. Perhaps one day! I do like the idea of being able to work at this level though. Available here.
Images and Video
GIMP – GNU Image Manipulation Program. This is absolutely brilliant for creating book covers, graphics or whatever. It does a lot of what you would expect Photoshop or Corel or other packages to do, but is free! Get it here. Note: book cover templates can be downloaded from amazon here. Other publishing outlets may vary so check with them also!
Other free graphics packages include InkScape which I have not used much, although it is very good in creating shape poems for poetry. It allows you to manipulate text in an easier manner than GIMP. There is also Krita, for more artistic endeavours and is a package I really want to spend a bit of time on.
Note: some of the above packages might not appear to be that intuitive at first. Top tip – check out the gazillion YouTube videos you find for pretty much anything you might want to know!
Free Images and Videos. Of course if you’re creating your own book covers, internal illustrations, or videos you can find free source material from places like Pixabay, Pexels, and Unsplash. I have also found images from Wikipedia that are Creative Commons licensed and there are other places to search, but generally, these are my main go-tos.
ClipChamp is a free video editor and is available via Windows. It is a bit basic but very easy to use, drag and drop, and allowed me to have a go at creating my first videos for TikTok.
ShotCut is a more complex video editor and offers much more scope and I am only at the very early stages of learning to use it. But it is free and that’s good enough – and I can always go to YouTube! Download here.
Audio
Audacity is free audio editing software and can be downloaded from here. I’ve used it to work on audio files of readings, again I am at a very early stage with this package.
Page Setup Information
Margins are the bane of self-publishing. Ensuring you have your document page and its margins set to the right size is critical. I tend to go to amazon here to start with. Requirements for Ingram Sparks are here.
Stephanie Ellis 