HOW TO SELF-PUBLISH AN EBOOK ON AMAZON (OR PAPERBACK TOO!)

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How to self-publish an ebook on Amazon (or even a paperback too)

Waiting to be chosen by a gatekeeper is painful.
And being chosen by a gatekeeper only lasts as long as the gatekeeper chooses.

At the end of last year, as another experiment, I wrote some comedy routines and self-published them as a book.

Turns out it’s about as easy as publishing a podcast or youtube video.
Which means it’s very not easy in parts and comes with annoying fiddly niggles.
But it can be done without killing you.

Amazon have set up a system to publish anything as an e-book, direct from a formatted Word document.

If you go to
kdp.amazon.com
and login with your regular Amazon password, there’s a dashboard for publishing books.

The hardest part for me was going through the US tax regulation menus for the payment account - but you don’t need to set this up until you’re ready to hit “publish”... and I seemed to survive it.

KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) has Word templates for download, and also a Word plug-in, to create documents from scratch.

I use a little of both of these to create a Word document that looked like the book I would want to read.

Then, it was as easy as pasting in my manuscript, one chapter at a time to not screw-up the formatting.

I completed it with text-only pastes from my draft: sometimes one paragraph at a time to get the page breaks and indentations how I wanted them to be laid out.




On the kdp dashboard, you can create your new book:
Think up a title and subtitle, description, categories and key words.

Once you’ve uploaded the Word document, there’s a built in cover-creator where you can upload pictures. The Cover Creator is clunky, stiff and mostly ugly, but easier than uploading a self-designed PDF cover.

You then set the price of the ebook.
There are different percentages and royalties, but basically you get money for every book sold, and royalties for any pages read on their Kindle unlimited schemes.

The minimum price is based on their cut, printing and postage costs, and you can affect this by number of pages, type of paper and colour options.

It seems if you already have a story, or material on video or audio, it would be “easy” to paste that into as many books as you like.

I did this for an oral history I made with my Dad, who had just retired as a London Taxi Driver. The material already existed as a series of videos I’d shot with him.
YouTube had auto-transcribed them for me. So all the “writing” involved was formatting and cleaning up typos and unclear sections.
The book is here:
https://amzn.to/2PL4c5R

The next clever thing is that you can then convert that e-book into a printed-on-demand physical paperback book, which can be put on sale all over the World.

After publishing my first book - I found it much easier to format the e-book in the way I wanted the paperback to look, so I have only one Word document to amend and correct. But you can keep separate Word documents if you prefer.

This is how I published my book of comedy routines - as a writing sample.
https://amzn.to/2wPJau8

Here’s a PDF so you can see how it looks.
https://tinyurl.com/WATPfreebookPDF

All just created from regular old Word.

There’s one more benefit I love.

The text is completely changeable.

You just upload a new Word document (which I love that they grandly call my “manuscript”).

It doesn’t have to be perfect first time.
I try and make it perfect, but changes always appear and can be easily fixed before the next book is printed or downloaded.

There are some more kicks for me with this:
- My Dad’s story is out there. Forever. It was only for my family, but other Taxi Drivers have bought it and thanked me for it. (Which I'd never set out to do).
- I am now automatically listed on Google as an author.
I never wanted that as a label, but it’s really cool that these pop up with my name now.
- You choose however much money you want, because you set the price of the book.

There are, obviously, loads of other places you can self-publish with different distribution models (I like the look of blurb.com too).

Anyway, putting this out there in case it helps.
Is this something you think you could do? What would you publish?
Leave me a comment if I can help with any answers.


Try my new book!


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How To Be A 1960s London Taxi Driver part 4 - chats with my Dad about The Knowledge and driving a Black Cab

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