Over on Todays Vision I’ve just posted an article about a new move on Kindle Direct Publishing, please go here to read 🙂
Over on Todays Vision I’ve just posted an article about a new move on Kindle Direct Publishing, please go here to read 🙂
A friend recently asked me how one went about self publishing a book on Amazon, and I thought it might be of interest to others too, so here is my overview.
First of all, lets look at publishing a print book:
Amazon owns an on-line publisher called Create Space, who do the actual publishing. They are an on-demand publisher, meaning that they will only print a book when it is ordered, which keep costs to a minimum.
Once you have a manuscript to publish the process is fairly straightforward, and you can find on-line help at each step of the way, and/or join a user’s forum to get other advice/help. The process looks something like this:
1. Open a Create Space Account at https://www.createspace.com
2. Create a new “project” – this will be your book when it is published.
3. You get to select the sort of book, size paper, what the price is, and so on. You can also choose where to publish – e.g. Amazon.com (mainly used by US people) Amazon.co.uk (the British site) and all the other countries that Amazon publish in. Personally, I publish on as many sites as possible!
4. Upload your book. The site recognizes different file formats, but I have found that Word or PDF work best for me, and my preferred format is a PDF.
5. After you upload, the system does a format check and lets you know if it finds any obvious issues. This process will pick up things like the words being bigger than the page and basic stuff like that, but not more complex formatting. At this stage you can look at it online to see if it basically “works” in a technical sense.
6. If the system or you spot any formatting issues, go back and correct them in the original, and go through 4 & 5 again.
7. Add in your book cover, and any book cover notes.
8. Once you are happy with the basic formatting, submit the file. Create Space then says it will check the file to make sure it’s ready for publication, and let you know when it’s ready for review. In my experience it takes a day or so for this stage to be completed.
9. You will get an email saying the book is ready, and you can either download or order a proof copy (being old-fashioned, I like to get a paper copy to be reviewed, but you can also download it for screen reading if that works for you/your editor).
10. Review, make changes and repeat from step 4 until you are sure that this is as good as it gets, and then confirm on the system that you are happy with the book, and make the file available for publishing.
11. It is then automatically published in Amazon, which takes a day or two to populate across all the different sites
12. At that time (or later) you can also get Create Space to create a file for the book to be published as an e-book, and it links you to Kindle Direct to publish there – see instructions below.
But what about e-books?
If you want to publish JUST an e-book on Amazon, then you can go straight to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). If you are publishing from Create space, the formatting for KDP is done for you in the steps above.
Either way, here is how to publish an e-book on Amazon.
1. Go you KDP https://kdp.amazon.com/, and complete the information that it requires (you can link this account to your normal Amazon account which makes it a lot easier), and upload your book file and cover.
2. You are then able to review what the book will look like in different e-readers.
3. The system does not make you review the book at all (not even the formatting), but to publish without any review is asking for problems, so check it for formatting, style, content and errors. As a practical matter, when I’ve uploaded from Create Space I’m fairly sure the formatting will be OK, and as I’ve already had it edited that should not need doing, but even so I still check it, even if the check is quite quick
4. When happy, you publish and it’s out on the Amazon sites almost instantly.
Of course, publishing the book is the easy part, getting your book seen is something else!
I wonder what the future of Twitter is.
I’m a long-term Twitter user, along with other Social Media, and at an individual level it’s fun to use, and informative. For business it can be a great media for getting your message across and interacting with existing and potential customers. And we have all seen how it can be used by “we the people” to organize and keep connected.
And I understand that it’s a numbers game; when my number of followers went over 1,000 I was really pleased, and generally I will follow back people who follow me. But I am noticing more and more of the sort of thing that appeared in my Twitter account yesterday.
I was followed by an account which had the following stats:
Tweets 92
Following 501
Followers 672
Now let’s just stop and think about those stats. This “person” has tweeted less than 100 times – fair enough, we all have to start somewhere, but already they are following five hundred people, and have nearly 600 followers, how is that possible?
A quick look at the feed shows how, every day there is a report from an automated follow back service “Todays stats: 505 followers, no unfollowers, and following 2002 people”. As I suspected, this is an automated account, being followed by people who also have automated accounts. No human intervention, just a system optimized to get the maximum number of followers.
And at least this account seemed to be for a real person or organization; the profile referred to an actual name and a website that looked like it was a real one (I didn’t follow the link). Most of the follows I get of this sort tell me how many thousands of followers I can get, by simply clicking onto this website. The only purpose of these twitter accounts is to get twitter accounts, just numbers and nothing more.
And this raises a bizarre thing, if I spent less time looking at my Twitter account and just bought a piece of software, I could probably double the number of followers I have, and if numbers are all that matter, what is wrong with that? Of course, most of these followers would be spam bots, automated accounts and generally not people who will read my tweets, and it is this that I see as the problem.
Twitter is full of accounts that don’t represent a voice, just a collection of automated processes that generate numbers and noise. The more obvious spammy ones get suspended after they have spammed all over the tweetaverse, but others are set up by actual people who fall for the numbers game, without realizing that content is more important than numbers alone.
Size is important, but more important is what you do.
I was working in the kitchen earlier, and had my laptop out there with the recipe that I was following, and I thought it’d be nice to have some music playing while I cooked. I’d just recently rediscovered my iPod, and had loaded iTunes, so I opened that up.
This is a new set up on the laptop, so I don’t have any pay lists, but I do see the “Genius” setting, and I think OK cool, rather than spend time making a list, I’ll let the Apple corporation do it for me.
Well, you have to create a userID first, but that’s OK I can do that, so I go about creating a new account, and it asks for my email and a password. then it starts with security questions. Now these always make me uneasy, but I put them in. And now finally it asks for my Credit Card details. Of course, it’s totally secure, they say, and we will not use this information unless you purchase something from the store.
A while ago I wrote about my experience with QVC, and why I don’t save card information anywhere anymore. And now I am being asked to give my credit card details just to create a playlist of songs I already own? I don’t for a moment believe that Apple intend to use my details incorrectly. It’s not that I think that they will deliberately start charging my card with things for the heck of it.
But what about things Apple haven;t planned for? What about the hacker that gets into their system? what about the person who guesses my password, and starts buying all this music for their own use, on my card? And don’t tell me these things don’t happen, or that Apple have great security and it wouldn’t happen there.
No, it should not be a requirement that I give you my Credit Card details even to enter your store, which is effectively what this set up says. And it should not be a requirement that a company has on their system all my details, just to make their marketing effort easier.
I finished my cooking without music, and Apple lost a potential customer for their store, so we are both losers, but at least my Credit Card are on one less system.
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