Self-Publishing Your Book in 2025

I’m getting closer to publishing my next book, Self-Guided SQL, and I’ve been reviewing the process for creating and uploading e-books. There will be a hard cover edition through Amazon but I want to get the e-book out of the way first.

Microsoft Word

There are a lot of tools that you can use to construct an e-book; an EPUB file is really just a collection of HTML files and graphics compressed into one file. At least for a textbook, my personal preference is still to use Word to construct the original file and then convert from there. Although it has its annoyances, Word provides all the formatting and writing tools I need along with precision formatting.

If you use Word for a complex document, I recommend getting familiar with a few features.

• Show / Hide Editing Marks: I have this feature turned on in the screenshot above. It’s not my normal writing mode, of course, but it does help when tracking down why the next line is being indented strangely or a page just isn’t flowing right. It also reveals the indexing marks and enables me to copy/paste/edit them directly rather than going through the menu. The feature has been especially helpful in navigating around section breaks that I sometimes get caught in.
• Navigation Pane: This can be turned on and off through the View menu. Just don’t get the menu item mixed up with Outline View as I originally did. Word automatically constructs the navigation from whatever headings you use in the document which can actually be an encouragement to better organize the document itself. For long documents, the pane provides quick navigation and a convenient overview. It also includes its own search bar for finding specific items.
• Table of Contents / Indexing: My last book did not include an index and I heard about this from various readers. I’ve never spent much time digging through indexes myself so I didn’t realize they were so valued but this book will definitely include one, even if it does mean an extra pass through the book to catch all the necessary terms. Inserting a Table of Contents is much easier as it also depends on your headings. Just remember to update both frequently and do one last update before distributing the document.

There are, of course, a lot more features in Word and it can be easy to get lost in the menus so remember that there are plenty of answers through Google and YouTube whenever you get stuck on something.

Converting to EPUB

Once you have your manuscript ready, you need to actually convert it into an e-book format that you can upload. Amazon will accept Word’s DOCX format and I might experiment with letting them do all the conversion but I think I might be better off ensuring the correct formatting on my own. For a basic book with a lot of text and some illustrations, it might not be a big deal but my books include a lot of specialized formatting such as tables, code and feature headings.

There’s also the question of where you plan to upload the book. My two main outlets right now are Amazon and LeanPub. Barnes and Noble is still a contender, too. LeanPub accepts the EPUB and PDF formats while Amazon will accept EPUB for conversion to its own Kindle format. So, my first task is to convert to EPUB and verify the book in that format.

Kindle Create will actually create an EPUB of a reflowable book in addition to creating the KPF file for a Kindle upload. I wasn’t really impressed with the output, though. It handled the headings badly and the EPUB itself was not well constructed; it had a separate CSS file for every section of the book.

There are plenty of online tools that offer to convert from DOCX to EPUB but I still prefer to keep things on my machine so my choice is still the Calibre e-book management software which is a free download (although donations are appreciated) and has a portable version that doesn’t even need an installation routine.

Calibre also enables you to edit the finished EPUB file in its native editing application and has an EPUB viewer that you can use to verify the appearance of the book before publishing.

I’m sure there will be some adjustments needed but, overall, Calibre did a great job of converting to EPUB.

Meanwhile, Kindle Create also has the option of creating a print replica version of a book which is often more appropriate for textbooks like this one. This version is true to the original appearance, much like a PDF, and supports features like audio and video and image pop-ups. The drawback is that it might not work well on all Kindle devices such as the paperwhite. I’m considering both a reflowable and print replica version for the Kindle if possible.

Of course, you can also send EPUB files to the Kindle using the Send to Kindle service.

Finally, the Kindle Previewer is another free app from Amazon that will let you preview both KPF and EPUB files. It will also automatically convert Word’s DOCX files and even seems to do a better job at first glance than Kindle Create, although that might be an issue of the settings I used.

Publishing

My primary outlets at this point are Amazon and Leanpub.com. Amazon, of course, is the path to the most sales but Leanpub pays higher royalties – 80% on any book above $7.99 while Amazon pay a maximum of 70% and that can often go down to 35% based on their rather complex rules.

Barnes and Noble has a flat 70% e-book royalty rate for authors which is attractive. I never saw much in the way of sales there on my previous books but that could have been partly the result of my own lack of promotion.

A simple Google search of “ebook publishing platforms” reveals a variety of other services to help in producing e-books, including Kobo, Smashwords and Lulu. Some services offer automatic placement of your book on other seller, like Amazon. Always pay careful attention to the services being offered and, of course, the costs. Generally speaking, you should be able to self-publish at this point without paying money out upfront. Anyone who asks you for money to help you get published is either a scammer or is doing something you could easily do for free.

When it comes to publishing the print edition, both Amazon and Barnes and Noble offer print on demand services so that the books can be produced as ordered without requiring the author to pay for an inventory up front. Amazon seems to provide a better deal based on my estimate for this book with a 60% royalty on print books as opposed to B&N’s 55%. Amazon also has lower printing, retail and distribution costs. All of this adds up to a better royalty for me.

The Hard Part

Once you have the tools in place, it all comes down to banging your head against the keyboard, day after day, until enough words come out.

In the introduction to my upcoming book, I include a statement on my use of A.I.. While I will use it as a research and editorial assistant, I do not copy and paste A.I. generated content. I write the words myself and I take ownership of them.

I am including this statement because I believe that quality content created by humans will remain inherently more valuable than that generated by an A.I.. There is no shortcut to true quality or substitute for the willingness of an author to associate their work with their name and reputation. There are also serious issues of intellectual property, copyright and reliability raised by the training of A.I. tools. Authors and readers both have a responsibility to provide and demand responsibility and transparency in the use of A.I.

Other book publishers will do what their own integrity allows and only time will tell us where the struggle between A.I. and human ownership of content will end.