Preface: I am not an expert. I've self-published one e-book. But at the repeated urging of PG I am going to give it a shot at starting a thread on this subject. It gets a bit long winded but there you go. If you can do better. Please!!!
But for now, lets start helping both each other and the newbs looking to go into this thing cold.
Note my post is mainly or exclusively for Amazon's e-book self-publishing route. I'm going to give you the ABC's and the 123's. Then you can all point out everything I've missed and why my B is really everyone else's G and I missed everything in between,
.
Regardless and anyway, first things first. I am an author and I've decided my manuscript is ready for self-publishing. I've looked at it until my eyes bled and the tears have streaked nasty crustations all down my cheeks but now its finally time to take the dreaded plunge. Only suddenly I am anxious: Where is Kindle Direct Publishing? What am I doing! Where do I go! Okay just take a deep breath, the KDP website is at.
https://kdp.amazon.com . Note this is not located on the regular URL for amazon. But again I'm confused. Everything takes hours and hours to read through, all those helpful little FAQ's they have are mind numbing to read and worse. What they say is explained plain as day, is in fact clear as mud. My brain is strained and I fear grey matter is about to start pouring out of my ear. Again just calms down and let me start you off with a few things you need to know.
A) First off if I'm selling through amazon, what I want to know is what format my manuscript needs to be in. Now Amazon is quick to say they want your manuscript in HTML format. But if you look closely they also say they can take just about basically any format you want to provide them. Word, Adobe, HTML, etc. They pretty much are able to convert anything. They also warn you that if its not their preferred format there can be format issues (thus sending your blood pressure sky rocketing) but whatever, seriously you can't let that stop you. Not when you can make changes after you self-publish and the Amazon review process lets you make changes and see them reflected in your manuscript every 12 hours after its published online. Then anyone who's already bought your book is asked if they want the latest and greatest upgraded version of your book. But what about my thousands of readers who have bought my book the very first day!!! I don't want to put out anything less than my best! I might miss sales!!! Or so you think. But guys, really get a grip. You are not David Weber, you are not B.V. Larson (the david weber of indie authors), you will instead be lucky to get a handful of sales your very first day, and realistically they'll probably be your friends and relatives, who will forgive you for minor uploading errors. Errors you will be able to correct the first day or first week, depending on how helpless you allow yourself to be. (I mean come on, anyone can run around like with a chicken with their head cut off, but if you are online, surely even a technological dinausour knows someone who can help you on their day off, which is why I throw that week figure)
B) Back on task. First things first, any aspiring author wants all the tools available to him/her. So here's the link to the Kindle Reviewer.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000765261 This is good for windows or mac. Unlike the KDP site, this lets you put in a word or a few other formats and spit back out something you can read. The first look at your masterpiece as it were (at least on someone else's software). Now this tool is more limited than the Publishing Site in what you can put in and what it will spit back out, (its a little frustrating that way but as an author we are born to live with such frustration), anyway after you have an approved format document and you have finished panicking, its time to look at your novel through the previewer. Please note I had some issues with tab indents for my paragraphs on my previewer that weren't a problem when the book was in the Kindle Store. Anyway the previewer lets you look at your document as it'll supposedly appear on Kindle. Note: I also got a mobi-file converter of some kind also, but don't have the link. A free download off the internet so I could look at it on my Kindle for PC in mobi format and see how my book would look (this is in addition to the previewer). That converter would only take a couple of formats, it wanted HTML and it looked different than what I was able to get on amazon, mainly in those paragraph indents. Which was a real bugbear for me. They showed up and then they didn't' show up and then finally I just told myself I'd fix it later and put it up for sale. But then when amazon started actually selling my book, low and behold they must have been able to convert the document I sent properly, because hurray those paragraphs were back in, weren't just solid blocks of text!
My advice? Follow the lines off of Galaxy Quest the Movie, 'Never give up, Never Surrender!' And also don't be a chode. You keep this advice firmly in mind as you are agonizing over/during the process: 'She who hesitates is surely lost and He who isn't willing to put some skin in the game is nothing but a great big woose.' It took me about 8 hours of hesitation and indecision, not to mention buckets of skull sweat as I poured through the FAQ's and tried to make sense of the insensible. Downloading every tool I could get my hands on and agonizing over minor defects and contract terms. All I can say having gone through the process. Having something better than open office and text files, would probably help you on the front end of your hesitation and indecision process. But it in no way stopped me and you shouldn't let it stop you either if that's all you got.
C) Next and this is a pretty simple concept. But for those of us who don't have a kindle, and want to sell our books on amazon anyway. Just be aware, you don't have to own a kindle and pay the 100 or 200 bucks for it. Kindle-for-PC is a completely free program and you can read e-books, particularly 'your own e-book' as well as other mobi-files that have nothing at all to do with amazon on this reader. Now you will need to make an amazon account if you don't already have one and/or link your pre-existing one after you do finish installing the program. But if you link a debit or credit to your account, you too can start buying and downloading completely free e-books, as well as the first 10% of books you are interested in reading (including your book). Here's the download link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311 But guys, really. Its pretty clear and obvious at least to me, that if you are going to sell your book on amazon, you really need to be able to read it. (Please note: Amazon is filled with a bunch of asshats, and you as the author, will actually have to purchase your own e-book after you self-publish it. If you want to look at the whole thing, as the readers will get to. Otherwise you're like the rest of us who haven't paid amazon. Stuck with reviewing the first 10%)
D) Artwork: now this isn't strictly necessary because if you don't have an art. Amazon will put a generic place holder with the name of the book and author as the picture for your book. So just be ready now or you'll have to add it in later. Unless you're okay with losing one of the best marketing tools available to you. A book cover.
E) If you're going to read the FAQ now would really be a good time. Again the link is
https://kdp.amazon.com and they also have community forums for questions and for those of us interested in some feed back. I refused to go that route because the Forum looked ginormous and I wasn't willing to hesitate forever in a haze of indecision. By gosh and by golly my book was going out on monday and that's the day I did it, I refused to be impeded or slowed down or whatever, I figured I could go there later if there were issued. But if you need some help and advice on the front end or you're going to give up, this is probably the place to go.
However now that we are done with all that happy hooplaw we can get started on every aspiring author's greatest fear. I'm going to step by step you, as best I can, through the actual process of uploading your book to KDP for the approval process.
(Note post is chopped into two sections because it exceeded the maximum character lenght)
The Deposed King
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however I'm an author, this is my craft... surely it qualifies 