Tools for Self-Publishing Heroes

Self Publishing your first book can seem a little daunting at first. Where do you begin? Should you hire people to design your cover? Do you even have the money to hire people to be involved in the process? In this article, we share the free tools we use to publish our books. They are all free and you don’t need to have a degree in rocket science to use them. We will devote separate articles to these life-saving tools in the future. For now, here’s a little summarization of everything you need to print your first book.

Design

We use Canva to design our covers and use this template for the inside of our books. It’s free for you to use. You can adapt the designs as you see fit. Canva provides a free account and gives you a bunch of free templates that you can adjust. They offer paid design elements as well.

We write more about designing your book in this article.

Printing

So you designed your book and you are ready to print. You don’t have to spend tons of money on a pile of books that get stacked up in your living room until someone buys them. Kindle Direct Publishing gives you a free ISBN and as an author, you only pay the printing costs when you buy your books. It’s an on-demand service which will list your books on Amazon’s marketplaces and handles the printing and posting of your books when someone actually orders one. No stock, just great books.

E-books

Kindle Direct Publishing has a special editor for converting or creating e-books as well. It’s called Kindle Create. You can download it here.

Promotion

We use Canva again to design our business cards, flyers, press-kits etc. You can also buy reasonably priced templates at Creative Market.

If you have any other super useful tools you use, and you want to share them, please leave them in the comments.

Disclaimer: We don’t do affiliate link stuff, we just share the tools we use, so you can use them too.