Self publishing ain’t as easy as it looks

Self publishing on Amazon is easy, my friend Pete said. You just need to upload the text and it will produce the book for you. I have to say that my experience so far has belied his optimism. The process to get from a word document to Amazon Kindle Create was reasonably straightforward. But there was quite a steep learning curve after that before Piscium reached the bookshelves in e book format. Still, I thought, that’s the hard part done. Now all I need to do is upload the e book into the paperback format. Sounds simple. Yet, wow, anything but.

There is a lot of conflicting advice on Kindle Create, Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), and any number of articles on the web. Basically the dichotomy is, can I create a paperback using the same file I set up for the e book or do I need to go back to the source copy? The obvious route is to go from the e book copy which has been painstakingly formatted and edited for publishing. What an author really wants at this point is a two button solution. Press A to publish as an e book. Press B to publish as a Paperback. Instead there is a lot of confusing advice as to how to load onto the Paperback option. After many hours of trying and the assistance of my wife Stella, we did manage to successfully upload a file. Great, but I cant open it to see what it looks like, or even if its the right file! I continued following the set up stages until I reached a box which said “Book preview.” Great, and opportunity to see what I have. But no, you have first to upload the cover. Now the cover I have for the e book is a single page image, but for a paperback you need an image which includes the front cover, spine and back cover. Need to get back to my cover designer.

The designer says he will do it asap. I send him suggestions for the back cover and spine wording and appearance. He says OK, but he will need to know an exact page count for the book before he can finalise the cover for printing. This is because the spine width is dependent on the number of pages in the book. David says, “I need the exact page count for the artwork. 250 pages will be 14mm, 300 pages will be 17mm and 350 will be 20mm so needs to be accurate.” Can quite see that, but here comes Catch 22 again. I can’t preview the book to see how many pages it is until I have uploaded the cover. I cant get the final cover designed ready to upload until I know how many pages. Duh! Now there are various formulas offered for calculating book pagination based on the manuscript word count. But yo be really accurate you need to know the Book size (I am going for the Amazon preferred standard of 5 inches by 8 inches), the type face, point sized and line spacing. So far I have been unable to find out what these will be if left to Amazon to set up. Unsurprisingly given the amount of variables it is difficult to come up with a figure, but looking at some current physical paperback copies, Lee Child’s Better off Dead, Penguin edition, looks to run out at sub 250 words per page, with quite generous gutters, line spacing and I am guessing a 11 point serif type face.Mick Herron’s Joe Country John Murray publishing, paperback edition) is set in Bembo 11 point, but with tighter spacing and comes out around 370 words per page. After extensive research I came across a note saying Amazon KDP reckons an average of 312 words per page. I have decided to go with this figure. My word count for Piscium totals 98,195. Divide that by 312, 315. Add 3 pages for Front and back information that makes 318 pages, which is the number I have quoted to my cover designer. I hope I have got the is right.

Going back to the original dichotomy, it appears there is another and possibly more straightforward alternative, which is to go back to the source copy. I wrote the original manuscript using Microsoft Word, and did most of the editing in this format. Once I had completed I uploaded to Kindle Create. but once I could see the book in the form it would be published (its easy to preview your e book), I made a number of structural changes. These included chapter headings, dropped caps at the beginning of each chapter, and indentations, which I had not included in the Word document. I then commenced a final edit,adding missing commas, stops, speech marks, grammatical and spelling errors and some minor re-writes. Thus my final published text has overall, significant improvement and changes.

The advice for producing a paperback on KDP is to go back to the original text document and save as a pdf file, then upload to kdp. Wait a minute though, my original document in its present form is obsolete, and trying to change it inline with the published version would be a massive undertaking. Surely the easiest thing would be to change my kindle document back into Word. Unfortunately, it appears this is not possible.

I am going to continue working around the options and seeking advice, and I am sure I will get there soon. My self imposed deadline is to produce a paperback by September 1st, so I have two weeks to sort out the problems. But next time I speak to Peter I’ll ask him to read this blog. Whatever else it is, getting self published on Amazon is not as simple as you might think!