Self Publishing on Amazon

I've been reluctant to try self-publishing, but have finally taken the plunge. I am happy with the results,

Every writer I know struggles with the self-doubt pendulum – can I write, or can't I? I wanted the validation of a publisher saying my work is good enough, so have held back. However, the publication of Sakhira  by Golden Story Line Books made me feel confident enough to give it a go. The result is a collection of short stories now available on Amazon: Island of Mystery and other Love Stories.

If you want to publish your book, you will need to have ready:

• The completed manuscript (Ideally edited and read by others to ensure it's free of errors). You can use .doc .docx (i.e. Microsoft Word) and .pdf formats
• An image for the front cover.  Pixabay is a great source of images, but you have to adapt the image if you plan on using it commercially.
• Your author bio if you wish to include it.
• The blurb for the back cover. (see tip below)

The rest is really a matter of filling in forms and checking the resulting book.

The process on Amazon is very simple:

• You'll need to have a Kindle Direct Publishing account which is free to set up. It is also good to have your own Amazon Author Profile, to link to your books, and help people discover what you have written: (If you are self-publishing, you will also have to do your own marketing, so use every avenue available to you to promote your work)
• Kindle Direct provides the software for laying out your book and formatting it both as paperback and e-book. They have different software options, and this guide shows which is likely to best suit your needs:  I used Kindle Create, which allows you to generate all the sections you need for the book – title, cover, blurb etc. There is a lot of help in the guides too, but I found it very intuitive. 
• Once the book is formatted correctly, go to Kindle Direct publishing and click on Create. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/bookshelf (If you want both an e-book and a paperback, you will need to go through the process twice)
• The process gives you forms to fill, where you set the price, publishing regions etc, and then you get to preview the results.
• You can then change anything you are not happy with, but if you are happy, you select publish, and in a few days your book is live.

Tip: if you struggle with the blurb, you can ask ChatGPT to write it, and then check and adapt it as needed.  It's really easy to do:

• Create an account
• upload your manuscript
• ask it to write the blurb for your manuscript. (write the blurb for the back of this book)

It's funny that it can be easy to write the story, but really hard to write the blurb!

Once your book is live, which takes a few days, then you need to promote it to earn any money from it, as you earn a portion of the sales. If you sign up for Amazon Associates, you can earn an extra amount if anyone buys through the links you send out. 

Having done this once, I am now monitoring sales, and will probably self-publish again, but I am also going to keep on with traditional publishing.