It’s the middle of the busiest month of the year for me, and probably billions of other people worldwide; I’ve got holidays all month long and a book I’m frantically editing so I can make my traditional birthday release date. Six months later than I promised this time – but it’s going out the door if I have to light it on fire and have the fire department bust it out. In the midst of the holiday madness, the editing, the formatting, the creation of cover designs (the rejections of half finished cover designs) and the gift lust – I received a happy little mailer from BookBaby.

I saw red. Here I am, working my ass off, to conserve as much money as possible and provide the best books I can and here someone else is, charging for what is essentially the bottled water of ebook publishing. I thought the very concept of the “vanity press” was outdated, an antiquated idea from a time when going an alternative publication route was still for people who couldn’t string a series of interesting words together but really knew their writing was awesome. I guess I was wrong. Let me make this very clear: If you can write a novel worth publishing, there is absolutely no reason to pay someone else $99-$249 to format your book for you.

There is no reason to pay someone else $99-$249 to format your book for you.

You will make me cry. You will make your wallet cry. You will make Rudolf, Santa, baby polar bears, kittens, puppies and every Indie Author who has carefully penned article, after article, about how easy it is to do all of this yourself – cry.

Formatting your novel is, tedious at best, it is not hard. You can do most of it in your Word editing software. I thought I’d covered all the areas where it was worth putting your carefully saved funds and where it was not but as they say, there’s always room for one more. Formatting your novel is so easy that despite my current crunch sometime between now and January 24th – I’ll will start a newsletter, and one of the first things I’m going to cover in that newsletter is: how to format your ebook. The information will be totally free, so if you’ve been biting your nails worrying about how you’re going to format your first few ebooks for publication – go ahead and put your name on the list for the newsletter below.

So let’s recap. When to Pay: Domain Names, Editing (we all need fresh eyes on our work) Book Cover Design. When Not to Pay: Advertising, Book Formatting for Ebooks or Dead Tree Books. If I’ve missed an area of Indie Publishing you’re really desperate to see covered feel free to tell me when you sign up for the newsletter below.