I am amazed that in this day and age so few writers self-publish, because we live in a unique time when it is possible to do so effectively. Print publishing remains a daunting and largely hopeless task for individuals unless they are individuals with money and time to spare, in my opinion; although you can create your own perfect-bound books and get them out there if you want to. It just isn't free, and even if you totally bust your balls promoting the damned things you're likely to sell very few of them. And many people find Internet publishing (HTML et al), while cheaper, to be intimidating in its use of markup languages and computer protocols.

So be an E-Publisher. Electronic publishing - not Internet, necessarily - simply means a text produced in electronic format. Personally, I think most electronic publishing sucks. Sucks big piles of shit. I'd rather have my arms and legs crushed beneath Zamboni machines than read an E-book, to be honest with you, and fear that the marketing muscle of today's corporations will someday soon force E-books on us. The one compelling aspect of electronic publishing, however, is that it can be done effectively for free. Free is a pretty compelling reason to toss aside your prejudices and start spitting out horrible E-books.

A clarification first: Many people assume that by E-book I would be referring to some proprietary format of digital publishing controlled by a huge company like Adobe or Microsoft, requiring some sort of handheld decoding device or computer software. I'm not, though. If your purpose is to transmit your words in a typeset electronic file to readers, you don't need to use some bullshit piece of proprietary software like Acrobat - and although I use Acrobat to archive the past issues of my zine, I would recommend that you don't. Technologies like PDF or the various E-book formats are very useful for people who have heavily designed, graphic-filled layouts in their publications. If you're publishing fiction, or any kind of text that has minimal graphics and simple layouts, you don't need anything more than a computer, a word processor, and possibly (but not necessarily) an Internet connection.

There are Luddites in the zine/DIY-publishing world who cringe whenever computers are mentioned, and that's fine, as long as they leave me alone. If you think the `purity' of a zine is only preserved when manual typewriters, or pencils, or perhaps sharp stones dipped in the blood of your dinner are used - fine, continue to publish that way. Leave the rest of us alone.

To publish an E-book, in all truth, you need only the following:

• One (1) cheap-assed computer, or access to same. This doesn't have to be some cutting-edge monster. An old 386 running DOS, or an ancient Mac running System 7.5.5, will do just fine.

• One (1) free Word Processor. Don't buy one, it isn't worth it. If your cheap-assed computer doesn't have something preloaded you can use, there are free ones out there, many of which are extremely powerful. There are even good ones for DOS that, while visually unappealing in today's GUI world, will do the job. The Word Processor you choose should have the capability to read and write Plain Text (.TXT) files and Rich Text Format (RTF) files, at a minimum. Any other formats supported will be gravy. If you have an Internet connection, you can download small, free programs that will make it through even the slowest modem, no sweat. If you don't have an Internet connection and nothing was preloaded on your computer, well, it's a lot harder. Send me a letter detailing your operating system with $1 postage and I'll send you one on disk, how's that? (Check out the article Free as in Beer elsewhere in this book for ideas on getting cheap PCs and software.)

• Something to publish.

Optionally, you can also have an Internet connection of some sort to set up a free web page and free email account. This isn't necessary, but can make distribution of your E-book easier and cheaper.

Okay, so how can you be an E-publisher once you have these things in hand? Simple. Follow these easy steps, and you're there:

1. Keyboard your project. The first step is to type whatever you want to publish into the Word Processor (duh!). Start off by saving it as an RTF file; RTF is a pretty standard format that almost all word processors in the world can read fairly accurately, and it preserves basic formatting like bold and alignment from processor to processor. Keep the layout simple: one column, standard-sized pages. DON'T use lots of weird fonts and a million fancy layout tricks. Just keep it simple, use at most three fonts (and choose those from the standard stuff: Courier, Times Roman, etc) and keep the style to a minimum too: bold and italic. Forget color. Keep graphics to a minimum too. Also, double-style bolds and italics, because when you're done with the RTF file, you're going to convert it to text-only so people will have the choice. Text-only is the lowest common denominator of text files, able to be read by just about every word precessing program in the universe.

What do I mean by double styling? Well, let's look at the title of this article. In RTF, I'd keyboard it as follows:

Looks okay - it's not high art or anything, but it looks like a layout to me, babe. Now, when this file gets converted into a plain-text file (via a save-as in your Word Processor), this is what it's going to look like:

You can see that by adding asterisks around bolds and italics, and giving the chapter openers some simple surroundings, you've got formatting that will survive in a plain-text file, meaning that no matter which version your potential readers get your book, they'll be able to make sense of it. If you don't double-code your style, your text will be completely vanilla, and a lot is lost. After you've finished keyboarding and creating the alternative plain-text file, you can go back into the RTF file and delete the asterisks for a cleaner look, if you want.

2. Now, it's a simple matter of advertising your E-book somehow. You've got an RTF file and a TXT file which will probably fit on one floppy diskette. The floppy diskette is getting forgotten in today's age of CDRs and Zip Drives, but it remains a hugely useful and undervalued media. They're cheap (about 70 - 90 cents apiece) and cheap to mail, and you can fit War and Peace on there if the file is just text with minimal formatting. So, if you assume manufacturing and mailing costs are thus about $2, you can charge $3 for your E-book and still make money. Who wouldn't take the risk for $3, postage included? And to read the file, all they need is fucking Wordpad in Windows or SimpleText in Mac OS, at a minimum. Plus, everyone but those poor, sad idiots in the Mac OS world can use a floppy disk. We can't help the Mac people - they're lost, and have to use a 650 MB CD-R to store a 50k text file. Suckers.

It ain't sexy. Once your reader has the file, they can either read the book on their PC, or they can print it out and read it that way. Once again, not sexy, but I've done it, and it works, and for three lousy bucks maybe others will. You can make labels for the disks if you want, you could even create little custom disk sleeves if you wanted - increasing your costs, but making it look more inviting. The point is, without spending much or any money you're E-publishing, and you don't need some fancy Reader or a licensing deal with Microsoft to do it.

Having Internet access makes it a little easier. You can set up a free web site on the web at one of any number of places like Yahoo! Geocities, where you get a certain amount of space and even free web-building tools to create a quick welcome page. Then, upload samples of your book either as HTML if you want to and know how - which will allow you to keep the basic formatting of your RTF file (there are even freeware translator programs which will take RTF files and turn them into HTML files), or as the plain-text version. Any web browser can read a plain-text file. People can surf to your samples, and if they want to buy a copy they can mail you $1 and you can email them the whole E-book as an attachment. Cheaper and easier, and you have a nonstop advertisement for your book on the web at all times - sure, it isn't exactly a billboard in Times Square, but people looking for something akin to your subject matter might find your site, and might decide a friggin buck is worth the risk, eh?

And if you don't give a crap about making money, but just want to get it out there, than put the whole thing up for free download, right? No one needs a special program or device to read your book, and they can still print it out if they want to. You can see what I've done on my own modest E-Book web page, if you want: http://www.innerswine.com/ebooks.html.

The point is, with the willingness to keyboard your manuscript, you can self-publish your book cheaply and easily. You could also just photocopy the manuscript and sell that, but the obvious downside is the continuing photocopy costs and the increased postage costs. Once you get beyond $3 a copy, people start wanting more than a home-brewed photocopy, natch. The electronic file will be crisp and perfect each time, and can be altered as you wish in case additional editing is required.

Is this perfect? No. Very few people want to get a diskette in the mail and go through the trouble of loading it onto their PC, and many publishers don't want to eschew all the fun of complex layouts and eye-pleasing graphics and fonts. You're never going to storm the New York Times Bestseller List with a book-on-floppy. But it is a way to publish cheaply, and at least get your work out there - and who knows? Maybe there are more people willing to read a diskette than I think. There are a few actual publishers out there who put out E-books on diskette (Hard Shell Word Factory [www.hardshell.com], DiskUs Publishing [www.diskuspublishing.com]), and you can even find them on Amazon.com. There are also at least two initiatives to put books on the Internet in various electronic formats (PDF, HTML, TXT) for free reading or downloading (check out http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ or the fabulous Project Gutenberg at http://promo.net/pg/). So someone thinks it's a good idea.

What the hell, if you don't have any other options, why not give it a shot? The other choice is to sit around bitching that no one wants to publish your stuff. You might as well do something.