No More Drawers

Just my luck, today is National Paperback Day and my new book is still in the printing process. It is available on Amazon for just a smidgen of its real value, but of course you’d rather have something you can hold in your hot, sweaty, little hand so looks like I’ve managed to miss another milestone!

This seems to be the one thing I am really very good at.

Since I made the decision, (I didn’t actually, the Long-Sufferin made it and lit a fire under my saggy ass), to publish it has been one mistake after another.

You see I was really very happy to do what I usually do when I finish a book. I toss it in a drawer (Computerly speaking) and forget about it. And while this system has worked well for me in the past, the Long-Sufferin felt more action was needed.

Now first I have to admit I come from a time when self-publishing was strictly a vanity affair. Someone writes a family history and wants a dozen copies for the kin folks, a poet specializing in bad poetry runs off half a hundred copies of poems for the seriously depressed, or a mad zealot insists his manifesto must be shared with the ill-informed public. The writer with delusions of grandeur contracted with a scruple-less press and sunk thousands of dollars into satisfying their ego.

But things have changed and not the least because of the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room, I mean of course Amazon.

Now I am like most folks and not in any hurry to help Jeff Bezos in his quest for total world domination, but--

I did my due diligence. I carefully surveyed all of the publishing options from the loftiest of traditional publishers to the flimsiest of Imprints and after all of that mind-numbing research, I came to two conclusions.

Unless you have written something targeted to a market which will produce ten millions in sales the possibility of attracting a traditional publishing house is virtually nil. And to make matters worse you have to have an agent, also interested in a ten million seller, who will for the honor of flogging your book take at least ten percent of any sales. That’s right, not actual profits but sales. But no publishing house will bother with unsolicited submissions unless you do have agent.

Looking deeper I discovered a whole new world of Indie publishing. Not the old tired vanity press, but actual publishing where new and untested writers can get their work before the public. This was an eye-opener.

I investigated many and kept coming back to the obvious, Amazon’

So if the universe keeps telling you something you’d better listen.

Signing up with KDP publishing is a breeze. If you have an existing Amazon account you are ready in a flash and if not why not are you some kind of hermit or anti-social and refuse to come into the twenty-first century and I’ll be you don’t have cable or watch Netflix or even an electric toothbrush.

After signing up you do have to disclose some personal information, social security number, a bank account all the things that the IRS will need when you start getting those enormous royalties. After a few minutes hesitation I came to the realization that Amazon has so many paws in so many places they probably have access to all that stuff anyway.

Now you can actually begin to set up your books. But first a word of advise.

Download Kindle Create. Yes, you can use other methods to format your book and create a clever cover, but not all in one place. If you are sure you want to multi-market your book then probably this isn’t right for you cause it only works for Amazon.

But if you plan on focusing on Amazon this is the ticket.

There are a few quirks.

Kindle Create works best with Word .docx. Sure it says it will work with .pdfs and for some books this might be a good idea but hidden in some of the extensive text Amazon says for text heavy documents avoid .pdfs. I found this out after formatting my novel as a .pdf, several times.

And for those of you struggling to make ends meet like any good writer, you don’t have to sell your youngest daughter to the white slavers to but Word 25000 or whatever the current version is. No just download Libre Office, which is free and has the ability to save as a .docx.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting. KDP goes into a lot of explanation about what you need in the manuscript and how it should be formatted. And if you do it that way the Xanax will help some and those nice men in the white coats will give you a soothing injection of Thorazine and all will be well.

Don’t do it! Make a clean copy of the body only of your manuscript and load it into Kindle Create. Make sure you have edited it with a gimlet eye and a fine tooth comb cause this is going to be the guts of your book.

Once loaded follow the Kindle prompts to get all of the finishing touches done right. Then go over the copy with a microscope, Kindle Create does some interesting things with formats. If the copy is clean and you are sure it is SAVE and then click on the generate button. Now you have a publishable text for Kindle. Wasn’t that easy?

No but then you can’t expect doing something on your own to be as smooth as when you have a whole team to aid you. Just remember you are doing this because you didn’t want to see all of your sales go to somebody else, you wanted your story told the way you told it, you weren’t solely focus on sales.

Then good pour a drink, turn off the computer and forget it for today. There will be fresh hell tomorrow.