Desktop Publishing

Desktop publishing has been around probably as long as personal computing has been in vogue. I do not know of any people making a living doing desktop publishing for a living but I believe there probably are if one searches the Internet. "How to" books in desktop publishing have also been around a couple of decades now. There is little real mystery and even less romance about it. If one is prepared to go neuro on one's key-board, to pull one's hair out fixing typos and grammatical misconstructions, then Desktop publishing might be a good place to start.

What is needed to get started in desktop publishing? I would recommend a good windows or Mac computer with extra storage space, and Microsoft Word as a primary word processing program. If one is intending to do one's own printing, then I would consider investing in a good production laser-printer with a device that allows printing on both sides of the page. If one is associated with a university or college campus, there may be a campus printing service who will copy or even print one's manuscript for a reasonable fee and can offer basic forms of binding like spiral binding. I would recommend staying away from large copy companies like Kinko's as the costs in large volume copying is likely to escalate rapidly, and the final quality to diminish in reverse proportion.

Independent critters like myself who seem especially reticent and shy in public, and who are hesitant to get one's feet wet in publishing their own work, might get a good start with desktop publishing, and though this will remain an essential function in the publishing process connected to editing and preliminary publishing, one never wants to end up in the same place one started. That's sort of like ringing Hell's door bell.