Litopia

I encourage you to dive in! The 20BooksTo50K group is daunting, even for me, with seven self-published titles under my belt. But you can take it one step at a time and don't need to understand everything all at the beginning. When it comes down to it, I've found the only really difficult part is marketing. And I'm slowly learning...

Oh, and ALLI is a great place for info, too--the Alliance of Independent Authors. You don't need to pay the membership fees to get lots of great info from them.

Am I right in thinking the 20BooksTo50K group is more for marketing advice and less about how to actually publish in the first place? I think I need Self-Publishing for Dummies, by the appropriately named Jason R Rich (hee hee). Any views on that?

If in doubt, ask here, someone's bound to help

Yes, 20Booksto50K is mostly about marketing. Smashwords has a good guide to e-book publishing. There are plenty of folks out there who have created simple guides to self-publishing. Choose whatever looks right for you (and don't spend much on whatever you choose--save your money for an editor and a cover designer).

Amazon has a guide you can download as well, but the Smashwords one is very comprehensive. Basically, you need a cover, you need to format the manuscript for the platform (Amazon, Smashwords, etc.) and you need to have it finished with a title page, copyright page, etc.

There are software programs out there that will do all the formatting for you, but they aren't free. Or they're free up front but then they take a percentage of your royalties. So if you don't want to pay for formatting, you'll need to learn how to do it on your own. it's time-consuming and tedious but not impossible to do.