The less a self publishing company has to do for you, the more you will save on printing your book. This is one good reason to create PDFs of your book yourself. PDF stands for Portable Document Format, a technology pioneered by Adobe which puts a user friendly face on postscript printing files. The advantage of creating a print-ready PDF is that you can see exactly how your book will look and no-one can change it.
There are several options for creating PDFs, though not all of them produce the high quality PDFs required by printers. Adobe Acrobat is the market leader in PDF creation, but it is quite expensive. However, there are a number of free solutions, which you can find by searching for 'PDF creator' on the Internet. Make sure that the free creators do not include a watermark or other advertisement in your finished PDF file. You will also need to ensure that your PDF creator allows you to include high resolution images (300 dpi) where these are required.
