Self publishing this bad boy but have never done this before.

Is there a useful website for generating citations? I don't want to get that part wrong.

Who do I use for the self publish?

If I have it formatted how I like it in word, is there a way to keep that formatting when I transfer to the publisher's format?

How much of a pain is it to add in a drawing amongst the words?

I believe I'm somewhere around the 55-60k word mark if that matters.

Thanks in advance!

I am considering self-publishing some books in both printed and e-book formats, but I am only in the investigation phase.

Some of the approaches that I am considering include:

Leanpub (as both a platform for writing as well as for publishing and marketing): https://leanpub.com/ - they have an editing tool based on Markdown syntax. While I haven’t tried it, I’m guessing that you may be able to convert from MS Word format to Markdown (but be aware that there may be different ‘flavors’ of Markdown which could require some tweaking of any converted work).

Amazon has offerings such as KDP for e-book publishing and for print-on-demand paper publishing.

There are a number of others to consider, however.

Thank you! I'm leaning toward Amazon at the moment.

Who do you use for the cover art?

And how will you market your book?

I have not yet planned my cover art.

As for marketing - that is still a work in progress, and it will differ for each book.

The books that I am working on are technical ones: one group of them is oriented toward a particular microcontroller, while the other group of books is oriented toward a particular hobby.

In both cases my plans include first developing web sites and collateral material (including videos and perhaps even online courses via Udemy and occasional e-newsletters) with the goal of building an audience that will be tuned in to the same subject area as the books - if I am successful in rolling out that strategy then I ought to have ready-made audiences to market the books to. In one case I'm also developing an electronic product that is complementary to one of the groups of books, and so there will be opportunities for cross-promotion. I am also open to finding partnership opportunities with vendors and influencers in those fields (who do not compete with my products but rather may be complementary to them), with the goal of getting access to their existing audiences.

While I haven't done this before by myself, I have been involved in doing such things for others, and I know how to do all of it by myself, from creating the web sites to handling publicity and everything else surrounding it.

Amazon. Super easy. Not a huge royalty cut. Can make the cover design with their editor or upload pdf of your own. Made my self published book covers with Adobe Photoshop. Citation generators are out there easy to find. Think I used the Grammarly add on to MS Word? Could also create on iBooks if you're an apple user.