Has anybody wrote a self published book?

[Stephen Houmard]

Has anybody wrote a self published book?
I have seen many HI books/PDFs on the net, how was the experinace? what kind of funds do you recive? was it worth it?

[Benjamin Thompson]

Has anybody wrote a self published book?
I have seen many HI books/PDFs on the net, how was the experinace? what kind of funds do you recive? was it worth it?

I can't imagine why a publisher wouldn't want it.:rolleyes:

[Stephen Houmard]

?
Now I'm confused...
a self published book is not for a publisher...why would they want it? thats the point.
There are many self published books on HI on the market now, hell there are SPB on about everything.

[John Arnold]

?
Now I'm confused...
a self published book is not for a publisher...why would they want it? thats the point.
There are many self published books on HI on the market now, hell there are SPB on about everything.

I believe Mr. Thompson was cracking wise regarding the spelling mistakes, etc. in your post.

[Benjamin Thompson]

As John said, just messing with you.
I see plenty of them on ebay, usually on disk. I even bought one once, it was on roofing and was a waste of money.
I would go on ebay and look at some of the sellers. Check their feedback and you can get an idea of how many they are selling. You will probably be disappointed.

[Bob Elliott]

Me thinks you guys are falling for a prank.:p

[Ted Menelly]

This link below is from Google books. You can read a serious amount of books on any subject from Google books. This page has a bunch of 2003 Carson Dunlop books. 500 and some odd pages.

Me thinks if you were to write a home inspection book you may have a lot of free competition.

home inspection - Google Search (http://www.google.com/search?q=home+inspection&tbs=bks%3A1&tbo=1&oq=home+in#q=home+inspection&hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=bks:1&ei=bMD-TNz8NIS8lQePntz8CA&start=10&sa=N&fp=44253eb2e797c355)

[Dana Bostick]

Has anybody wrote a self published book?
I have seen many HI books/PDFs on the net, how was the experinace? what kind of funds do you recive? was it worth it?

Hi Stephen,
First, it's "written" not wrote. :D If you are considering writing professionally, it must be with correct English.

Yes, I have used Amazon's "CreateSpace" print on demand system to publish a book. There are lots of self-help guides for this activity so do your homework.

The one basic tip I have for you is to NOT use a fancy word processing program like Microsoft's Word to write it to start with. Use a very simple text editor like notepad and do the writing in plain text. Make each chapter a separate "master" file. Later, it will become apparent why this is useful.

Using a fancy word processor like Word etc allows the bells and whistles of formatting, pagination and layout to get in the way of the writing. Believe me, it happens. The first time I tried to use Word, I spent more time re-doing stuff over and over to make it "look" right. Waste of time! All that stuff gets handled AFTER you are done writing during the book layout phase. You will use a "template" to make the book look good and simply drop the chapter file into it. The template will handle the formatting like margins, indents, spacing etc.
Graphics (pictures) all pics for a book should be "print quality", that is minimum 300 dpi and be jpeg, or png format. Set up all the graphics in an external editor like IRfanview (free) before placing them in the book. DO NOT use the word processors graphics handling to resize them, it will screw it all up.
Have fun!
Dana