Self Publishing on Amazon KDP

For far too long I have been putting off getting my act together and self-publishing a book of any sort.

There were great plans and a lot of effort put into to drafting a compilation of travel articles. They were put together, proofed and all fifty thousand words were ready for publication but something put me off The individual pieces were fine but with word counts varying between four hundred and two thousand there was something untidy about how they would look to a reader. The project at that stage was warehoused.

What I started to do was reconfigure the stories so they were all going to be approximately two thousand words long. That meant revisiting old notes, doing new research and pretty much writing each piece in a totally different way. The task ahead of me to achieve this objective looked enormous and I was beginning to wonder at my sanity for taking on such a task.

Procrastination got very close to murdering creativity.

One morning in early June my wife showed me something on Facebook. One of her ex-colleagues had posted that they had written and self-published a book on the Amazon and ordered a copy. When it arrived we both looked through it. It was less than one hundred pages, lacked the usual title pages showing copyright information, ISBN information and a title page. The pages weren’t justified either.

“Come on Alan, you could do better than that” my wife declared.

And so, on the 4th June I started my first book.

I used to belong to a local writing group which met once every two weeks, At each session someone would suggest a prompt and at the following meeting those attending would read out their essays or poems in response to the prompt.

There was my material, a collection of essays of approximately five hundred words and a couple of poems all sitting in one folder on my laptop.

The first stage was to collate them all into one document which was quite tedious. Copy, cut and paste repeatedly until there were about twenty stories on the one document. This was followed by doing my own proof reading before a friend, who is a published author, did a proofread. All the corrections were made. I then used the “Editor” facility on Microsoft Word followed by Word’s read through facility.

I was ready to load the manuscript on to Amazon.

Opening an account was easy. I then checked what type faces the platform preferred and reset the manuscript so it conformed to the protocol. The other protocol at this stage was that the manuscript had to be in PDF format. The file loaded easily and the manuscript looked good.

For the cover I used the cover creator facility on the platform. There was a little frustration as the platform required photos with a DPI of 300. To be honest, I didn’t have a clue what this meant so I sent my photos to a very good friend who is a graphic designer to configure them appropriately.

This whole process took about fifteen hours work over ten days and now there is a book titled “Shorts” sitting on my Amazon self-publishing account ready to be released into the wide world on 21st June 2025.

As the meerkats on the Compare The Market advertisement would say “Schimples”. It wasn’t really but the second book will be “Schimples”.