---
source_url: "https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/how-to-publish-your-book-in-2026"
title: How to Publish your Book in 2026 - by Ugo Bardi
mirrored_at: 2026-08-19T01:06:41.089Z
host: senecaeffect.substack.com
cited_in_42a: true
mirror_canonical: "https://index.42a.ai/senecaeffect.substack.com/p/how-to-publish-your-book-in-2026"
---

> **Original source:** https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/how-to-publish-your-book-in-2026

Once, the Goddess Gaia used to format her books on her holy linotype machine. Today, publishing a book doesn’t need divine powers any more.

My new book, “_[The End of Population Growth,](https://www.amazon.com/End-Population-Growth-Humankinds-Planetary/dp/3033118887/)_” is available online on Amazon, and soon will also appear on Ingram Spark. I have to say that I am satisfied with this result, but publishing a good-quality book is a lot of work. So, I thought I’d report on what it’s like to publish a book in 2026.

**The Traditional way: Publishers**. First things first, last year I took a momentous decision: never, ever use commercial publishers again. You give them all the rights, and they will normally treat you like one of the rowers of the galley (that must be the origin of the term “galley proofs”). It is not that they are evil people; it is just that they are in a situation in which there are lots of books being published and not many readers. Profits have collapsed, and publishers are acting as they should, cutting costs. No more professional proof-reading, covers are done in series, scant advertising or none, and your margins are minimal. They are using the strategy that biologists call the “r-strategy,” pushing a lot of books at low cost and hoping that at least a few of them will be successful. Sometimes, it works. But it usually works for them, not for you. Nowadays, publishers will often ask you (or your institution) to pay upfront for publishing your book. Once, it was called “vanity press.” Today, it is becoming more and more the rule.

**Do it yourself** 100%. It is the choice I made for my previous book, “_[Exterminations](https://www.amazon.com/Exterminations-Ugo-Bardi/dp/B0DK18GP68/)_.” I have to say that it worked well, and so far it has been one of my most successful books. I used only free or low-priced tools to create it, using them personally. I wrote it and formatted the text using MS Word, but Libre Office would have worked just as well. I arranged the bibliographic references using Zotero. I checked grammar and syntax using Grammarly and made the front cover using Canva. I turned it into a printable PDF using Word’s export facilities and into an ebook using Amazon KDP tools. For the ebook, I also used Sigil. The result looks reasonably professional to me.

How difficult is it to use this method? Think of riding a bicycle: it is easy once you know how to do it, but the first time it is a rough ride. Starting from zero in self-publishing risks to have the same effect, although not in terms of actual scratches and bruises. To be sure, there are tools on the Web that promise to do the whole work in a single package — Atticus or Bookbaby, for instance. I tried them, and my impression is a resounding “meh.” These tools may be acceptable for simple texts, say, a novel without illustrations. But they are not good for more complex and structured ones with illustrations, graphs, references, etc. So, if you want to do it all by yourself, be prepared for a certain initial effort. Then, if publishing a paperback is the equivalent of learning how to ride a bicycle, publishing a “flowable” e-book is like learning to ride a unicycle. But learning how to do both is worth doing because it will give you a kind of control over your book that you can’t even dream of with a conventional publisher.

My latest book, “_[The End of Population Growth](https://www.amazon.com/End-Population-Growth-Humankinds-Planetary/dp/3033118887/)_” was a different case. It is a report to the Club of Rome, so I wanted to be sure that it was professionally done. Hence, I wanted to play it safe and, together with the Club’s secretariat, decided to get help. First, I used the same tools I used for “_Exterminations_” to create a polished manuscript, then we submitted it to freelance professionals: one to proofread the text, one to create the cover, and a third one to format the book for publication (book design). It worked, but it wasn’t as straightforward as with a conventional publisher. Let me tell you the story in steps.

_— The Cover_ is the least problematic part. A good professional gives you several possibilities; you choose one, and it is done. The result is not necessarily better than doing it yourself, but it doesn’t cost you hours of work. In this case, the person doing the cover turned out to be competent and available to make changes. The result was satisfactory, I think.

_— The proofreading_ is a much more complicated story. It can be done at various levels, from just grammar and style checking to deeper and more radical interventions, in which case the editor is sometimes referred to as “book doctor.” In my case, the main idea was to make sure that the text was reviewed by a native English speaker. He did a good job of finding awkward and unnatural sentences. Yet he couldn’t find all the small glitches in a text of more than 80,000 words. Even if you trust your editor, editing a text requires your time, your attention, and your patience. The beauty of on-demand publishing, as you can do on Amazon or Ingram Spark, is that you can correct minor mistakes even if you discover them after publication.

_— Book Design_. Here, it was, frankly, a failure. Not that the lady we hired wasn’t competent at her job. The problem was that she was used to the linear “pipeline” model of the publishing industry. That is, when a book has gone through the editing department, the text is carved in stone: no more changes are supposed to be made. She was supposed to turn my manuscript into an uploadable text for Amazon, and that was it. But if you are a finicky author (and you are, if you write books), you will keep discovering small mistakes, convoluted sentences, things that could be said in a better way, and additions that you hadn’t thought of. So, you want to change this and that, but the lady was not paid to do that, and, of course, she was not happy about my requests for changes. Besides, she refused to share the master file she had prepared using Adobe InDesign. That meant I had no way to change anything by myself. In the end, it was a misunderstanding from the beginning, and I had to redo almost everything myself. Never mind — we live to learn. If you use a book design service, you have to be absolutely, positively certain that your text is definitive. But texts never are. At the very least, make sure that the contract you sign explicitly mentions that you will be provided with an editable version of the formatted text.

**Conclusion**.

Today, it is possible to publish a good book without going through the gauntlet of professional publishers. But if you think your book is something important and you want to do the job well (you do if you went through the trouble of writing it), you have to be prepared to spend money and/or time on the task. If you use professional help, you may spend up to $5,000 and even more. Combining your skill, AIs, and human professionals, you can contain your costs to much less than that.

I am sure that, in the near future, AIs will grow to the point that they will take upon themselves the drudgery and leave you the creative part. We are not there yet, but we are moving fast in that direction.

_Thanks to the Club of Rome for their support. Both Grok and Claude AIs were at work reviewing and formatting the “[End of Population Growth,](https://www.amazon.com/End-Population-Growth-Humankinds-Planetary/dp/3033118887/)” but Claude turned out to be both more flexible and more powerful._