Getting a new phone? What do you do with the old one? There are many things you can do with an older device. How about a document camera or webcam? Learn with Geeks On Tour in Episode 201 of our Button Show.

Show notes coming soon.

I have now self-published my fourth book, Learn Google Photos. I am no expert on self-publishing but I do know how easy it is and I wanted to tell you about it. We use Kindle Direct Publishing for both the printed paperback as well as the Kindle eBook. There is no charge for the publishing process and all you have to do is provide a Word document or .pdf file of your book.

The eBook on Kindle is available for your readers immediately and the printed paperbacks are printed on demand, so there is no up-front charge there either. You set the price for your book and it gets listed on Amazon for people to buy. Amazon subtracts the cost of printing and shipping and splits the rest with the author, paying royalties of usually 60%. In the settings for your account, you include your bank account information and the money shows up in your account once a month.

The last part, for us, is to take the paperback books we get from Amazon and change them to spiral bound. Amazon does not do spiral binding, and we find it so much better for how-to books to be able to lay flat. Here is a little video on how Jim rebinds the books.

The basic steps to self-publish your book are:

1. Write
2. Edit
3. Design a cover
4. Publish
5. Market

When you start writing, you want to be using the right formatting for the end result. I started with the Word template provided by Kindle Direct Publishing. I was able to use the same Word document for submission for the paperback book as well as the Kindle book, but I paid close attention to all the guidelines and tutorials provided by Kindle Direct Publishing. For my book, I used a lot of images and they have special considerations over and above the text formatting. I found this YouTube video that helped a lot because it was so detailed. The same YouTube creator also has a video on formatting chapters with headers and footers as part of her complete playlist of step-by-step tutorials.

A word about editing. You cannot proofread your own book! You simply won’t see the places that you mistakenly wrote their rather than they’re, or or repeated a word. (See?) I had two editor-friends proofread my book for errors. I also hired a professional editor, Beth Anne Carr, to help develop the book as I wrote. For a technical, how-to book like mine I found a developmental editor to be invaluable. I am so close to the material that I sometimes don’t see the forest for the trees. She helped me rearrange my topics and pay more attention to my readers’ perspective.

Your book cover: As my friend Nick Russell says: You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you’ll sure sell a lot more books with a good cover, and he recommended the artist that he uses. She also did the cover of our Google Photos book and I highly recommend her as well: Elizabeth Mackey Graphics.

Marketing: “Writing and publishing your book is the easy part,” says Nick Russell, “then you have to market it. You need to market it not once a month or once a week, you need to market it every day.” As a New York Times Best-Selling author with 42 self-published books on Amazon, Nick knows what he’s talking about. You may know Nick from his years as a full-time RVer and publisher of the Gypsy Journal. He still keeps a daily blog and he markets books every day.

Then again, if you’re not trying to make your living at it and you just want to have your book available, you may be satisfied with just getting it up on Amazon and having a link to send to people. There is no minimum sales required to keep your book on Amazon.

You can do it.

The bottom line is that you can do it. If you want to write a book, do it! The publishing process is free and really quite easy. If you want to learn more, check out our YouTube show Episode 200. It will stream live on Sunday, 9/26/20, at 2 p.m. Eastern time. After that, the same link takes you to the recording. We will discuss our experience with self-publishing as well as interviewing Nick Russell on his experience.

Using Google Photos, you can make an album and then invite people to contribute photos and comments to the album. Once they have done so, you will see their name appear in the corner of the photo thumbnail. It’s a great way to collect photos from everyone at an event or on a trip. Then you can even print a photo book of the results. The only requirement is that they use Google Photos. The image below is a sample. A group of us from a dive club took a trip to Bimini and we all put our best photos into one shared album.

Create an album

1. One person needs to start the album, they will be the owner.
2. You can just create a regular album by
   -selecting a photo or two,
   -click the + at the upper right and choose Album (you could also choose “Shared Album” and it will prompt you to share at the end)
   -Give the album a name and click the checkmark in upper left to finish

Share the album

1. Open the album created above and click the Share button
2. To share with a few people, just choose them from your contact list that displays, or search by entering their email addresses (this must be an email address for a Google account)
3. You have the option to type a message where it says “Say something” then click the send button
4. To share with a lot of people, choose Create Link, then copy the link and paste it where your audience can see it, like in an email or a Facebook post.

Now the people you shared with can click the link or find the album in their Google Photos Sharing section. They can open the album, join it, and add their own photos. The key is the album option called “Collaboration.” This is on by default, you can see it by opening the album, clicking the 3-dot menu and then Options.This is all covered in chapters 8 & 9 of the Learn Google Photos 2020 book.