DMR #22: Derek Murphy – What are the most important tools for creating your own book?

David: What are the most important tools for creating your own book? Where you should you self-publish your own book? What are the most effective techniques for promoting a newly published book? Those are just three of the questions that I intend to ask today’s special guest, Derek Murphy. Derek’s a bestselling author and book design expert and has been a leading voice in how to use design to sell more books. He’s also finishing his PhD in literature while running over a dozen book and publishing related online businesses. Derek, tell me a little bit about the software that you recommend to produce books? Derek: A lot of people recommend Scrivener. Scrivener is a word processing software that’s specifically for books. It’s a little easier than Word because inside of Scrivener, you can organize different chapters and you can make notes and you can make a bulletin board to collect ideas or research so that you have everything for your book together in one place. Then, you can go through it and edit it. Scrivener also has a pretty good export to Kindle or ePub. From making e-books from your Word content, a lot of people like it. I wouldn’t use it to format print books because I think people use Scrivener to finish the book and to write it. You could an OK e-book because e-books are really simple. It’s basically just text. To design the interior, you should match the style with the book cover. You should use the same fonts and it’s important to have everything laid out well and very professionally. You can use Microsoft Word for that but Adobe InDesign makes a much cleaner looking book. Like the book cover, it’s very difficult to do it yourself. If you’re going to do it, you want to find a nice looking template where you can just use something to start with and just tweak it and add your content rather than just making it up as you go or trying to do it from scratch.