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Honestly, as someone with an award winning technical book series as well as some novels, I can state, you are not going to find a publisher to do a physical print run along with marketing. Not a legitimate one. I started my publishing career decades ago, before we had POD (Print on Demand). Luckily I grew up on a farm and was an IT consulting working tons of billable hours, so I built a 36x60 shed with 16 foot nose to tail clearance, bought a used forklift, and sent my own print runs out for quotes. Once the shed was built (and expensed) storage cost me nothing.
Yes, you aren't in that situation. Most likely nobody else is.
Today you have POD, so today you can do it yourself. A publisher isn't going to spend a plug nickle on marketing, they expect you to do 100% of it out of your own pocket. I forget who I used for this book cover.
Someone I found on-like I believe. Gotta admit, that cover rocks! I gave them the picture of the tadpole (laptop) and the rest was stock stuff from their favorite graphics software.
I used Cindy Bauer cindybauer57@gmail.com for this book cover.
I pretty much had what I wanted in my mind and she made it happen. She used to also provide interior formatting and some other on-line publishing services. Don't know if she still does all that. Like us, she's not young.
I used my friend Chris when he was starting out. He now has a full blown thing called jetlaunch.
Avoid LightningSource, LuLu, and many other POD services. Currently I use Barnes & Noble's POD service.
Let me be up front. In 2026 you are NOT going to get a publisher to sink any money or effort into your book unless you are a famous celebrity with millions of followers. With AI there are now 2 million titles "published" each year. Most of them on Amazon. Services cost money, but you can do most of it yourself.
For story editing, both Chicago Manual of Style, and fixing of story, I recommend you find someone on ServiceScape. I have found some astounding editors there.
Formatting the inside of a book is not rocket science. Currently I use TextMaker. I have written books using LibreOffice, but don't recommend it. Just
- set the page size and margins for the print size of the book
- Always start a chapter on a facing page
- Put running page headers with chapter title and page number Yes, you have to create left and right pages for each chapter.
- Generate the Table of Contents when done
- Pull any book off your shelf and look at the copyright page and write one that matches for you. Be sure to create a title page.
If you already have a work without any forced page breaks, but has chapters, when you pull it into TextMaker you can generate the EPUB file from it. I haven't tried generating from one that is fully formatted.
Manuscript is dead.
Always know the print size of your book and edit in final copy mode.
Barnes & Noble POD service has templates for creating book covers. It calculates the spin width for you.
I licensed an SVG on-line and created this book cover using LibreOffice.
I've been an author for something like 30 years now. Until you become famous you aren't finding a publisher. They are a zero effort business model.
Having said that, if you launch your book using B&N POD, it will be listed on bn.com, customers can order it in their stores, AND once you exceed some hidden quantity of sales via their POD, corporate allows individual B&N stores to stock it. That last part is not going to happen for Amazon and other publishing routes.
Spend what you can getting the story line edited making sure things are in some kind of logical order, a full Chicago Manual of Style edit, then do the rest yourself.
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