In the previous post I talked about getting aligned with a publishing company to take advantages of the services they provide. You may find that their ability to get your book in front of the right audience exceeds what you can accomplish self publishing. Self publishing services such as Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)I used will take their cut, just like a publishing company so it’s not a true independent no-cost effort.

Admittedly I did not research other self publishing platforms that are available before I dove into Kindle. Draft2Digital and Smashwords are just a couple of other options for you to explore. The reason I went with Amazon KDP is I use it for most of my reading and name recognition. You may find that one of the other services are a better fit for you. Regardless of service I expect that the steps I went through would be similar on other platforms.

I wrote most of my manuscript in Word. When I started to move it over into the KDP platform I ran into some formatting issues. Nothing drastic, more annoying and time consuming to correct. I still had about 10 chapters to go when I discovered that KDP was offering a beta version of a Word add-in which gave me the option to format my text more closely to the final KDP format. This saved a lot of time however I noticed that when I finally imported the text there were still some weird format misses. The time saving was still useful and I’ll be using it exclusively for the next novel in my Earth, Fire, Wind trilogy, Slash and Burn.

My non-fiction works include photos (must be yours or permission to use obtained). My self published novel, Thunderbird and Whale only included cover art custom developed for me by good friend Karen Boykin. Getting the cover on the digital book was easy, the paperback was another story. I can’t say I know the secret formula yet but through multiple trial and errors I finally got the size right for wrapping the book which still let the text be properly located.

I can’t offer any advice on adding photos, drawings or graphs but I have no doubt it doable via self publishing platforms. It’s also possible to edit your work at anytime even after publishing to make additions or correct errors. This makes it a pretty forgiving platform I thought.

Once you have your text all entered and ready to move down the publish trail you’ll be prompted to enter book details, pricing information, royalty options, promotions and proof copies. Before the book actually publishes it does an analysis again for spelling and formatting errors. Gives you a little piece of mind. The KDP platform gives you a decent report on book sales so you can track and refine your promotional efforts.

I hope this post gives readers a little better idea of what to expect if you elect to self publish. As always, feel free to reach out to me with questions at abetteremergency@gmail.com