All about Kindle Publishing

To sum it up: it’s a ball-ache.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that I can publish my own work and submit the many innocent readers out there to my waffling, but God, it takes a long time.

Firstly, it’s easier to write for Kindle than to edit your existing work for Kindle Publishing. Take everything that is pretty and stands out in your book…and delete it. In the perfect world, you should have almost no formatting, except Heading 1s, a ToC (Table of Contents) and indents in all your paragraphs… oh, and page breaks before each chapter.

Then, if you’ve mistakenly pasted all your pictures into your document, instead of inserting them (we all do it at some point), go back and redo everything.

Then, once you’ve jumped through those hoops (they seem small, but they’re not when you have 50+ pages of graphics), you have to navigate through Kindle’s incomprehensible ‘Help’ section or Forums (they’re slightly easier).

Forewarning: Pre-empt yourself for the most boring 2o minutes of your life before watching the ‘how to publish’ video. They take you through everything at the pace of a snail. It’s painful, especially when they’re talking about the formatting in Word. It takes a good 5 seconds to click on the ‘Format’ tab.

Once you manage to figure out how to save it in the right format, bung all your pics and web-page into a zipped folder and finally, actually get it published, you have to figure out how the bloody hell this thing works.

It’s not made for Saffas, nor anyone outside of the US. I made my second book $2.70 and on Amazon.com, it came up at $3.70 after tax and delivery, so I decided to lower the price to $2.00…now it’s bloody $4.00 on Amazon.com! I gave up at that point, which is why it’s slightly overpriced (although, it’s currently on a free promotion). The promotions section, surprisingly isn’t on the pricing page, but rather in the section where you can delete your book accidentally. It all, in general, is mind-boggling.

However, that said, many other blogs helped me find my way and once all the hoops have successfully been jumped through, there’ll be a silly, self-satisfying triumph grin on your face.

So, without further adieu, because you’ve already been smothered with posts and tweets about it and definitely need one more reminder, here are my two books.