That's right about self-publishing on Amazon. There are various deals you can do with them. You would do well to go check it out and/or there are relatively cheap tutorials out there on how to use Amazon's services. However I have not used them yet. So if you do, you need to explore what they're offering.
My one caution and it's a big caution, is that if you go with some of these other outfits that are designed for people who want to self publish a printed book where you pay a fee and they give you a book on the other end, be very careful especially if you know little to nothing about the process. They are usually mere middle men taking their cut in charging you. And my experience has shown that the middle men themselves know little to nothing about the actual process other than how to transfer it to the people doing the work. They will not ever let you talk to the printer because you would see how little they actually do for you. At best they will only advise you on how to go through their rather automated process with little attention paid to customizing to your vision. You would have to merely use their pre-fab, rather cheap looking templates.
The long and short of that is that they will dance around giving you extremely little information. I was a designer helping someone design their book with an eye to giving them the book they actually wanted rather than their template. As a book designer who came onto a project where the author had already bought into their service, the company's agent literally would not talk to me but only to the writer who didn't know anything, and since their agent also didn't know anything that meant there was a seemingly endless repetition of the questions about specs because all they did was blindly relay my question third hand to the actual printer who may not have heard the actual question because the middle man didn't understand a word of it.
They say they will help you sell, which they don't in my experience. These "self publishing" outfits may give you a list for you to then do the leg work on. In other words, they're vanity publishing mostly to people who know nothing, and they are only people making money on you paying them to get it printed in mostly an offhand manner.
I don't know how much this means to you being that you're completely new to this, apparently, so I advise you learn a bit about book design so you have some control over the process and you aren't just representative of a one time cash cow to these self publishing rackets.
Good luck. Start with what Amazon has to offer and do a little research on the mechanics of book design. What the book looks like and how it's printed impacts sales when people can actually look at the book in person. And you can put all the hard work into the book, pay your money, do all the steps and be sorely disappointed and may even have a closet full of unsold books for your trouble. Just do your homework because in the end you are the only one shepherding this through start to finish.
The above is for book publishing. If you are looking to do prints or gicleés, that's a whole other kettle of fish.
Last edited by D Akey; 10-03-2018 at 05:26 AM.
"Not a bit is wasted and the best is yet to come. . ." -- remembered from a dream