(MONEY Magazine) – A newcomer to Atlanta last year, clinical psychologist David Adams, 41, needed an effective yet discreet way to hang out his shingle. ''I'd wanted to put out a newsletter for some time, and this seemed an ideal way to get my name around in a conservative and very competitive city.'' The result: the Psychosomatic Letter, a neatly printed four-page summary of news about psychologically influenced illnesses, which Adams sends free to 4,000 readers in the Atlanta area. Adams pulled off his one-man publishing venture with only an IBM personal computer, a $550 Epson FX-286 dot-matrix printer and ClickArt Personal Publisher ($185), a software program that lets the computer equipment serve as a desktop publishing house. In Charlotte, N.C., a similar setup allowed former lumberworker George Barrett, 50, and his two sons Rick, 25, and Michael, 23, to give up floorboards for keyboards two years ago. Using three Apple Macintosh computers, the Barretts now work full time on the Weekly Hardwood Review, a 3,000-circulation trade publication for wholesalers, lumberworkers and furniture companies. These are both examples of the phenomenon called desktop publishing, the computer-assisted process developed over the past four years that greatly cuts the costs and streamlines the task of turning out publications such as newsletters, brochures, magazines and even full-length books. Today the publishing power of a small typesetting house is within reach of anyone with the will and the money -- and something to say. Word processing with personal computers has been around for a long time, but two recent developments have made page design and printing possible for a modestly capitalized entrepreneur. Several specialized computer programs selling for less than $900 allow an amateur to arrange text, illustrations and headlines in newspaperlike columns on a computer screen. Then with a new breed of printer that uses laser light to reproduce the image of the on-screen page, anyone can print with near-professional quality. And instead of typewriter- style letters, laser printers provide a variety of type designs used in newspapers, magazines and books, including the font you are reading right now, Times Roman. Last year, manufacturers shipped some 63,000 desktop publishing systems; most went to corporations, but a third were purchased by small businesses and individuals. This year sales are expected to reach 145,000, generating revenues of nearly $546 million, according to Dataquest, a marketing research firm in San Jose, Calif. The basic desktop publishing system consists of a personal computer with word-processing and graphics software programs, a layout program to put it all in pleasing order on a page, and a printer, usually a laser-driven model for high-quality reproduction. The total cost: about $9,000. If you do not need slick-looking pages, however, you can get by for less than $3,000 with an inexpensive computer, a simple page-layout program and an ordinary dot-matrix printer. There are essentially two types of personal publishing systems: those made for Apple computers and those designed for PCs (jargon for the IBM personal computer or any of its many imitators). Both Apple and PC systems work best when the centerpiece is a fairly powerful computer. With Apple equipment, optimum results are achieved with a Macintosh. For an IBM setup, the AT model is considered best. Like feuding families, the two systems are fundamentally incompatible, although lately a few add-on devices have arrived allowing Apples and PCs -- even IBM's latest line of machines -- to swap information. These new IBM models will soon have their own desktop package, called the SolutionPac Personal Publishing System. With a list price of $8,553, this all- in-one setup includes a laser printer and a page-layout program. There are printers and programs aplenty for publishing with Apples or PCs, and both types of systems are able to produce an admirable finished product. But whether or not you are already familiar with computers, it pays to learn as much as you can about the various options available before you begin visiting dealers. Among the new books are The Art of Desktop Publishing (Bantam Computer Books, $18.95), Desktop Publishing (Dow Jones-Irwin, $25) and Desktop Publishing from A to Z (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, $19.95). Magazines concerned solely with the subject include Publish (PCW Communications) and PC Publishing (Hunter Publishing Co.), both of San Francisco. Of course, equipment alone will not make you the next Citizen Kane, as the three entrepreneurs in this story are learning. For them, the key to a solid start is finding a manageable but profitable niche in this new industry.

Stephen Manousos DIAL-A-TYPEWRITER FOR SMALL PUBLISHERS

''I created a neighborhood newspaper when I was 10, edited my grammar school, high school and college newspapers and worked on daily newspapers for 10 years. But last month we finally paid the debts from my last paper -- four years after we folded it,'' says Stephen Manousos, 36, former editor and publisher of the now defunct Aptos Post in Aptos, Calif. By the time the Post succumbed, however, profits from using the paper's typesetting equipment for odd jobs such as printing stationery and newsletters had risen enough to keep the typesetting operation alive on its own. Then in 1984 Manousos bought an Apple Lisa computer and began a printing service for Lisa owners around the country. They sent him jobs encoded on their computer disks or in digital shorthand over the phone with a modem. When Apple's more versatile Macintosh was introduced the following year, Manousos bought one and began using it with a page-layout program called PageMaker. With this combination, he established a solid link to some 200 Apple-owning customers. Late last year, Manousos added an IBM AT computer and the newly released Ventura publishing software to tap into the much larger IBM-user market. Says Stephen: ''Now the door is really open for us to work easily with all those IBM-compatible computers out there.From what I've seen so far, the PC system will probably double our volume this year.'' Even if a customer is a continent away, the savings for him can be substantial. Instead of paying $50 to $75 a page to have a local typesetter design and print the document, the client can do all the page-layout work on his own screen and pay as little as $5 a page for the typesetting. In all, Manousos currently has about 250 desktop publisher clients, including some in Alaska, Hawaii and Montana. Recently, in just one week, Manousos produced a 100-page instruction manual, complete with an index, for a company in Rochester, N.Y. He explains: ''They wrote the text for the manual there on their PC and I did the layout here on my IBM AT. Then I sent it back over the phone, they read it on their screen and okayed it for printing.'' He reckons that his client was able to save two weeks in production time and at least $1,000 in costs by using the computer hookup. Says he: ''It's really a very competitive business because now a typesetter is only a phone call away.''

Stephen Manousos' Toolbox -- Apple Macintosh Plus computer ($2,200), PageMaker layout software ($495), IBM AT computer ($4,595) with Amdek 1280 monitor ($1,000), Xerox Ventura Publisher software ($895)

Robert Goodman A PRINT-IT-YOURSELF BOOK PUBLISHER

Two years ago, Robert Goodman's new firm, Beyond Words Publishing Co. in Honolulu, spent $1.4 million employing printers, layout artists and calligraphers to produce two lavish books: Within a Rainbowed Sea and Moloka'i, An Island in Time. Both are colorful, award-winning volumes suitable at $75 each for the finest coffee tables in the land; deluxe limited editions cost $2,200. The profits from these costly beauties have not yet proved as lavish, so last year a spartan approach was in order. Working at home near Honolulu, Goodman, 54, produced his next book, WhaleSong, a full-color chronicle of Hawaii's whaling days, commissioned by the Lahaina Whaling Museum on the island of Maui. He did it largely on his own with an Apple desktop publishing system. Says Goodman: ''I probably saved between $40,000 and $60,000 in production costs. Without the computer, there was no way I could have done this book.'' A photographer who worked with Jacques Cousteau and who for the past decade has been a publisher and editor in Hawaii, Goodman says: ''In a way, I boxed myself into buying the computer. If I didn't do the hands-on work myself, I'd never have made my budget.'' With some trepidation, Goodman set out to master an entirely new system that had set him back some $13,000. His setup: Apple's Macintosh Plus, the Apple LaserWriter and PageMaker page-composition software. His fears proved unfounded: ''I won't say that I never had to look at the manual, but I have an attention span of about 35 seconds when it comes to computer instructions. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to set up.'' Over the next five months, Goodman and author MacKinnon Simpson used the computer to edit, design and lay out every page of the book. To see how the result looked on paper, Goodman printed it with the LaserWriter. Says he: ''If you want to see what a different layout or design looks like, you can change it on the screen and in a minute print out a copy for about 3 cents a shot.'' As yet, laser printers designed for desktop publishers cannot duplicate color photographs or color illustrations. Nor do they provide type that is as crisp as letters set by professional-grade equipment. For this reason, many home publishers leave the final typesetting to a print shop. Not Goodman. He ; took a closer look at the type provided daily by the printer at hand. ''I just looked at it and said, 'Hey, that is beautiful type. I really don't need anything else.' '' Goodman hired a local firm to do the color work and then sent the book to Portland, Ore. to be printed and bound. Of course, creating a high-quality book is one thing; selling it is something else. And herein, says Goodman, lies an entrepreneurial advantage. ''With lower costs and much greater quality control, I hope to be able soon to put at least as much energy into marketing as I do into the creation of the book itself.''

Robert Goodman's Toolbox -- Apple Macintosh Plus computer ($2,200), PageMaker layout software ($495), Lodown 20 Meg Hard Disk Drive ($995), LaserWriter ($5,000)

Linda Cardone STARTING OVER IN PUBLIC RELATIONS WITH TWO MACS

For Concord, N.H. public relations specialist Linda Cardone, 36, an Apple desktop publishing setup has provided a way to redesign her life. Says she: ''For 11 years, I commuted by subway to a $27,000-a-year public relations job in New York City. Now I'm my ownboss, I work at home, and I earn twice as much.'' Cardone moved to New Hampshire in 1986 and set up her own p.r. firm. Since the work requires a great deal of writing, she began investigating word- processing computers, including the Apple Macintosh. But it was the printer that won her heart. At the time, the Apple setup was the only complete system available, but Cardone says she has no regrets. ''I'm no computer whiz, but I had the system running in about half an hour.'' On the strength of her experience in public relations -- and her sister's co-signature on the note -- a local bank provided a $9,000 startup loan. That plus the last of her cash bought her a basic Apple publishing package (then $11,000) consisting of the Macintosh computer with an extra disk drive, PageMaker software and the LaserWriter, plus options. When Cardone needed more illustrations in her publications, she added a Thunderscan digital scanner, a device that translates any image fed to it on paper -- a page of text, a black-and-white photograph or a drawing -- into a series of computer-digestible numbers. As yet, most scanners selling for less than $1,000 cannot reproduce an image as clearly as, say, a good copying machine can. But once the image is digitized, you can put it on your computer and modify it to taste. Says Cardone: ''If I see artwork I like, I just roll a copy of it into the machine, clean it on the screen and add it to my page.'' One of her first jobs was a commission write and publish a procedures manual for a local insurance company. ''They wanted it very simple, so it was an unusually straightforward job. I just created one master page design on the Mac, printed 1,000 copies, then loaded them into the LaserWriter to print the text onto them.'' Before long, she had a variety of projects under way, including menus for restaurants, brochures, business cards and direct-mail packages. Business cards, for example, also proved a snap with her new system. Linda explains: ''You design the card on the screen, duplicate it 10 times on one page and print it on the Laserprinter. Then you take that page to a professional shop to be printed on cardboard and cut to size.'' As the work increased, Linda decided that she needed a second computer, a Macintosh Plus, so she could have two projects running at once. She also upgraded her LaserWriter, which had four different typefaces, to a LaserWriter Plus, which is faster, has more memory and has an additional seven typefaces to choose from. Says she: ''With the new equipment I can produce more elaborate materials faster and change them quickly.'' Last year's gross billings of $95,000 netted her about $46,000, but $25,000 of that went back into the business. This year, Cardone expects to earn about $150,000, leaving her with an income of more than $70,000. Now, with more than 30 clients, she usually has between three and seven projects going at any one time. ''When I worked in New York I wasted countless hours waiting for the subway, a bus, always waiting for something. Now all those hours are mine.'' Those plus the wee hours of the morning. ''For a while there I got only about four hours' sleep a night, but I really don't mind turning on the Macs at 3 a.m., putting on a pot of coffee and doing a few hours of work.''

Linda Cardone's Toolbox -- Two Apple Macintosh Plus computers ($2,200 each), PageMaker layout software ($495), Jasmine Direct-Drive 80 ($1,380), LaserWriter Plus ($5,800), Apple ImageWriter II ($595), Thunderscan scanner ($250)