Step into any big business office and you’ll find lots of software with big names attached: Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Intuit QuickBooks, Adobe InDesign, and many more. These software packages have a long history behind them and a huge installed user base. Many people learned to use them in college and have continued using them throughout their professional lives.
For a do-it-yourselfer trying to get started in self-publishing, however, they have a big disadvantage: they’re all expensive as hell. Even if you have access to them through your primary employer, you’ll probably be violating some terms of service if you use them for your own for-profit work. Getting yourself into murky legal waters is the last thing you want when you’re trying to get to market as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Fortunately, there are a number of excellent tools available that can do everything the big-name software titles can do, but which are completely free or very inexpensive. Here are a few that I couldn’t do without.