Features

POD websites
CaféPress (www.cafepress.com) lets you design a wide range of merchandise as well as books, charging a small fee from the price of the works you sell. Lulu.com (www.lulu.com) also lets you publish your own music CDs. Like CaféPress, it takes a small cut of the price you charge from each product you sell. Book Surge (www.booksurge.com), owned by Amazon.com, charges authors from $99 (around £50) for its publishing services, but also provides you with access to leading retail and wholesale channels.

POD websites
Adobe's online PDF generation service (http://createpdf.adobe.com) costs $9.99 (around £5) per month, but also allows a free trial to generate up to five files.

OpenOffice (http://download.openoffice.org), the free suite of office programs, lets you export your manuscript directly into PDF.

Image manipulation
GNU Image Manipulation Program (commonly known as GIMP) makes a fine free substitute for Adobe's industry-standard Photoshop (http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net). Download both GIMP for Windows and the GTK+ 2 runtime environment package. Install GTK+ first. This is a port of the GIMP graphics library.