A Very Short Guide to ebook publishing

First things first: this is advice on what to do if you want to get your book out via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing programme.  There are other routes but this is the only one I’ve tried so far and the process for creating a Kindle e-book wasn’t as difficult as I feared it might be – not quite the same with a paperback version.  But more of that later.

In ‘The Olden Days’, as my daughters would call it, self-publishing or ‘vanity publishing’ (for that’s often all it was), was something you paid for and was an expensive matter.  This version still exists.  A parent proudly announced to me recently that a publisher had agreed to print copies of their 11-year-old’s book, adding that it was only going to cost them a couple of thousand pounds.  Fortunately, I managed to dissuade them before any money had changed hands.  These days, asking for money is tantamount to a scam.  These are not proper publishers; they are more like printers with a bit of design thrown in and will just send you the number of copies that you’ve paid for.  There’s no distribution deal and you’ll have to do all the work yourself to get the book into even your own local bookshop.  Don’t pay!  You can reach a much larger audience for free and this is how you do it.

Once you’re happy with your novel (or short story collection, whatever it is) and you’ve got long-suffering friends and relations to proof-read your manuscript (this is essential because it’s often very hard to spot your own mistakes), the next stage is to register with the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) website, which is free.  The ‘Bookshelf’ page will become your publishing office and the means by which you will control everything that happens to your (hopefully) growing list of titles. 

The next thing to do is to convert your manuscript into the Kindle eBook format.  To do this, you will need to download the free Kindle Create software (or is everything just called an app these days?).  This obviously comes in both PC and Mac guises.  It's all very simple – you upload your Word file (it handles PDFs too) and the app does all the conversion for you. 

Now, go back to the KDP site.  On the Bookshelf page there’s a yellow ‘Create’ button.  Click on that and a page opens asking what you want to create.  Click on the Kindle eBook and another page appears asking you for the language, the title, the primary market (I chose Amazon.co.uk), the author and the description of the book that will go on the Amazon website.  It’s worth writing this description beforehand and getting it right (though you can edit it later).  Once you have entered all the required details you just upload that converted file (it will have a .kpf file extension).

On the content page, you will see the Cover Creator.  I’m very lucky that Sophia Pratt, a friend of my middle daughter Tilly, is the very talented designer who produced the cover image for BAGMAN.  All I had to do was upload it.  If you don’t have a handy designer, you can upload an image or photo of your choice to one of the various templates on offer.  It’s really easy.

The next stage is setting the price.  Select the 70% royalty then you’re presented with a price range from £1.77 to £9.99.  The price you select is up to you but you will get 70% of that cover price for every purchased download.  That’s a much higher percentage than you’d get from a mainstream publisher.  Once you’ve chosen the price for the UK (your primary market, if you’re based here), the equivalent price is automatically set in all Amazon’s other global markets.  If you’re published by a mainstream publisher in the UK, you’ll only sell in the US if a publisher over there buys the rights to publish and distribute the book.  This way, your book is instantly available anywhere that Amazon trades.  That’s pretty mind-boggling.

And it really is just one click away.  At the bottom of the pricing page is a button that says ‘Publish Your Kindle eBook’.  And it does exactly what it promises.  Congratulations!  You’re now a published author.

A paperback edition?  That’s a whole different story – and it involves dropping text into a Word template.  If you want anything other than a template-based cover, that’s pretty tricky and I can only advise you to look online for better advice than I can offer.  I chose the simplest way to get the BAGMAN paperback out but I’m not sure I’ll do it next time around.  The eBook version feels a whole lot greener, for a start.  No trees have been cut down to produce it.

So there we are.  I hope that helps.  Happy writing – and now happy publishing too!