Quite a while ago, on the desk-top far, far away...

That has not imagined not only writing their own guide, but seeing it in print on Amazon.com, having a copy for their shelf, getting 'five copies for my mother'?

Well, you can now take action for a $99 charge and some cybernetic elbow grease. These pages will show you how I did it, and odds are you can do it too. I have been studying for several years about Print On Demand, the nifty new techology where you place in PDF documents on one end (One for the address, one for the insides) and a beautiful, perfect-bound, bookstore-quality book comes out another. I have also seen the technology in motion at an document imaging tradeshow (that's my job, by the way.)

I have known other folks who have used Print On-demand (POD) as an easy way to self-publish, including my own personal father. My problem with that is I've no place in my garage for books, I don't want to get involved in the process of selling and delivery books, handling returns, and so on.

Suddenly, while Googling some thing this morning, I came upon some fantastic Goo. Amazon, the online bookstore, has consumed a POD publisher named BookSurge, making it another Amazon team. Now I could publish it to Amazon/BookSurge, just take my book project, pay a fee, and VOILA! my book is on Amazon for everyone to get. It ships within 48 hours, BookSurge pays a 25% royalty to me within 60 days, I will also obtain five copies for my mother in a discount!

I sent BookSurge and was assigned an account manager, who I'll call Joseph (because his name is Joseph). I asked concerning the details of writing a book. For $599 I could obtain the hand-holding, send us your manuscript version of the publishing, or if I was bold, courageous, and could format my own PDFs, for $99 I could make use of the Author's Express system to distribute my book projects.

Because my book generation project was designed to be the precursor of many more titles, $99 felt just like the approach to take.

I ran throughout the site, getting example PDFs, submission guidelines, and whatever else I can find. The site recomends using Adobe -something or another- for text formating, and Adobe Acrobat 6 (not 7!) for PDF creation.

I decided from the git-go that Microsoft Word and PDF Factory Pro will have to work with me, because that is what I had o-n my desktop, and I do not need to spend weeks learning another desktop publishing program, although I am sure it is a good one.

Besides, I was already thinking about writing this page, and I wanted to come up with a procedure most everyone could be comfortable with.

Really the only secret I took is that my cover is plain-text, with no pictures onto it. I decided my first book will provide generally if not entirely on Amazon, and a fairly cover isn't that important there. Visit http://www.amazon.com/glass files to check up how to acknowledge it. Whatever the case, I will always return and enhance my model (The additional payment for resubmitting either the inner or the cover is $50, after the book is published.)

Sample records and an entire step-by-step explanation of how I formatted and published my three books (therefore far!) reaches http://www.actasif.com/bookproject.