This is a good point. It’s not a problem I’ve had to deal with myself (I have extremely good spelling and grammar, I posted most of my books to my blog first so was able to crowdsource away the more egregious errors, and I got four or five people who were knowledgeable on the relevant subjects to read over the finished MS before publishing) but it is a problem for people who don’t have those advantages.
Of the self-publishing sites, I find Amazon’s Kindle process ludicrously simple (just upload a Word doc, and it Just Works), and Lulu’s print-on-demand almost as simple. However, Lulu’s ebook process is near-impossible, while Smashwords’ is straightforward (your document needs to be formatted in a particular manner, but they give very clear, simple instructions on how to format it).
The only problem with any of them, for me, is that none of them accept plain .tex files (LyX is my word processor of choice), because that would make the typesetting process simpler—for them as well as me...
This is a good point. It’s not a problem I’ve had to deal with myself (I have extremely good spelling and grammar, I posted most of my books to my blog first so was able to crowdsource away the more egregious errors, and I got four or five people who were knowledgeable on the relevant subjects to read over the finished MS before publishing) but it is a problem for people who don’t have those advantages.
Of the self-publishing sites, I find Amazon’s Kindle process ludicrously simple (just upload a Word doc, and it Just Works), and Lulu’s print-on-demand almost as simple. However, Lulu’s ebook process is near-impossible, while Smashwords’ is straightforward (your document needs to be formatted in a particular manner, but they give very clear, simple instructions on how to format it).
The only problem with any of them, for me, is that none of them accept plain .tex files (LyX is my word processor of choice), because that would make the typesetting process simpler—for them as well as me...