DIY Computer Repair Book...

by Monte Russell
(Glendale, AZ, US)

...a DIY Publishing project

Genre: Computing

I own the website DIY Computer Repair. I get large #'s of requests for help. One reader suggested I put it in a book. After thinking it over I went to the web and did research on computer repair books and e-books. There are a ton of books published over the years. But as for published e-books for download on the internet - very slim pickings.

I bought three, downloaded a couple of free ones and read through them. Now I have been working in the computer industry for over twenty years so these over-hyped e-books really disappointed me.

Ok, I’ll write an e-book, can’t be that hard, after all I created a web site and it has over two hundred pages of high quality content.

Oops, it was a big job I lolled myself in to.

The first draft was only 90 pages. After looking it over and comparing it to the other books (including a Dummies book and a Complete Computer Repair book), it looked and read just like them. It was hype.

I am not going to rip people off.

After thinking it over I pulled two college textbooks off the shelf. One is a handbook published in 1978. I read through some chapters, looked over the index; this book has a lot of info that is pertinent still today. I modeled my book after that book as far as layout.

I started to write, write, and write. Now I have over 300 pages and some images. I asked people I know to read it, tell me what they thought (not proof for grammar and spelling).

About a week later the reviewers gave me the news, the good, the bad, and the ummm – ugly. One said I need to go back to the regular job, two said I need to go back to school and take English this time, six said if it was published they would buy it. One said his dog ate it.

My wife thought I was crazy but went through it helping with the grammar and the word processor checked spelling. Yea! I have a two pounds, three hundred page paperweight. Well kind of.

Some reviewers and my wife said more pictures! OK, so I added in more pictures over one hundred and fifty in total now I have 350 pages.

At first I was thinking of hard copy publishing. After reading through the terms, the cost, and then the clincher: signing over my rights to the published work for a royalty of less than a dime on the dollar I asked myself is there a better way?

Yes! Self publishing! How do you publish you own work? Easy, you buy or get the free program that will take a text document and turn it into a pdf.

I've been reading pdf’s by Hardware and Software manufactures for years, even helped make a couple when I worked for a large company. I was never involved in the actual publishing of the pdf or digital product.

When the document was proofed it was ready to convert over to pdf. Ok, what program do I use? I went to Adobe’s website and checked through their products, whoa, you can make three car payments on a Porsche for those. Instead I settled on a program called pdf995.

This is not a crippled program but it does have popups unless you buy it. I suffered through the ads for awhile. The conversion went ok, but it is a learning process. I ran the document through the converter four times before I had a product that I could have reviewed.

Now what am I going to use for a cover? I thought about getting some images of a computer that had been damaged by incompetent repair. One problem: I didn’t have one nor could I afford to destroy one for the picture. And I didn’t want my cover to look like every other book on the shelf. After talking to a friend that does book cover art for a living about how much it would cost, I decided to make my own book cover. Heck how hard could it be to make an image?

Almost as hard as writing the dang book! At first I used Microsoft Paint. This was the easy part, I had an affiliation with a computer part sales company and had made a catalog of their parts on my web site. After checking with the company about using their images I cut them down and placed each computer part image in the base image background. So far so good, after two days I had a pretty decent image. I sent it to my friend to look over. He sent me some suggestions to incorporate. Back to work again for a couple of days. Now I am closer, I had the image with the website logo across the top. I felt very proud! I had a book and a cover.

Time for a real review. I went to Mechanical Turk and setup a survey for the book; I separated 10 pages and put them on a webpage for easy reading. The questions I wanted answered were:

Cover: How do you like it, if you don’t like it why?

Each Page: Readability. Content, do you understand the instructions?

Format: is the layout good, bad, or UGLY?

If you want a real hard look at your product try Mechanical Turk, it is an eye opener. There is nothing like a critic that is going to buy your product. The reviews (and I paid for these!) were really critical, not only of the cover but of the content. The only one that made an impression was a fellow computer tech: ‘Do you really think you can sell this garbage?’ After talking to him he gave me some pointers that resulted in another revision.

This is where I find out my art work is lacking; one of the reviewers said she liked it but it needed some words. Ok, what kind of words? ‘I don’t know, something to break up the layout a little.’ So now I have a problem. I can put text on the image but it covers up the images of the computer parts. Paint just can’t do layers. So I send my friend an email and ask what do I need to put the text on the image and not cover up the computer parts images. His answer: Fireworks – besides you will need something you can use to manipulate the image to make the digital cover. I asked him how much he would charge me to make the cover. His answer: About the cost of Fireworks plus three months!

So now I have Fireworks, a good investment. Now I have to figure out how to do the text on the image, then design the actual cover. My friend is getting tired of emails so he sends me a small tutorial on making the e-book cover, cool!

Not being the artistic type my first cover was really a box with the image on it, ok but very plain. By the end of the first month of working on this project I have an e-book that I think is a viable product. I setup another review through Mechanical Turk, put up some new pages and the new cover. I setup it up for twenty five surveys, ten from computer users and fifteen from the general public. Of the twenty five surveys I had eighteen that were in the outstanding category, another six in the good category, and one in the fair category. None in the bad category. Ok, I have a product.

Now how to market my product? Well in the internet there are a lot of ways, from digital delivery, to a cd, to actually turning it in to a real hard copy book. Digital delivery is easiest, build a web page, put your product on it, and collect the money. Umm, no. You need to know how to market the product; you have to have a sales page. I am not a salesman, I am a technician. This sales page has caused me a lot of heartburn. I get spurts on the sales; some days are great but most are dismal. Once I get the sales page to actually sell the book I think I will have a winner.

The CD of the e-book has three percent sales to visits so that page is ok. The hard copy sells at about four percent to visits, I need to get more visits to the page. Because of the pay processors the e-book, the cd, and the hard copy need to be on separate sales pages.

The hard copy is done through a Print On Demand service.

The problem I had to take care of when I decided to do POD was the different fonts I used in the original digital document. It seems that Arial does not print very well, tending to grow unreadable over a large number of pages. Great for a website but for a book the reader's eyes tend to tire faster. So I had to go through the document and change the font to either Times New Roman or Veranda.

Almost ready, the POD service I choose only prints the cover page in color, the rest of the book is grey scale, and the images need to be 300 dpi maximum resolution. Than means checking and reducing the images, all 150 of them.

The last chore for this is preprinting the document to a pdf that is eight inches by eleven inches and in black and white. My pdf995 is the regular version to print the eight by eleven is only available in the Pro version. So I bought the program, ah, no more ads, now I can print the pdf that will be the finished product.

When I decided to make my four e-books available on cd I checked the POD service that I use for my hard copy, I found out that I would have to design my own cd jewel case cover, insert, and the cd ISO that would be burned to the end product. And it would take a week for the product to be produced then mailed to the customer and then the cost was high. So I found a company that the only thing they produce are cd and dvd products. It is a lot cheaper and the turnaround time is three days.

It was not really a nightmare but it was a learning experience and it had a very steep learning curve. Although I am self employed the time take away from my business to complete the first book will take a long time to pay back, not in monetary terms but time not producing for my business. I think if I knew what I was getting myself in to I may not have done it.

So in hindsight I am happy that I now know how to write a book and how to publish it without loosing the copyright to a company that may or may not sell the product, after all I did this for my readers not to enrich someone else that could care less if someone saved some money by doing it their self!