So You’ve Written a Book?

Your illustrated guide to getting it published

By John Chapman

Hexham 2011

John Chapman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 2011 John Chapman

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

Copyright Conventions.

Paper version ISBN 13: 978-1468087666 & ISBN-10: 1468087665

So you’ve written a book?

Now you have to decide just what you are going to do with it.

Forget any idea you have of sending the complete manuscript off to a publisher. That’s no longer the way it works.

You now have two choices:

You can approach a literary agent with an initial submission (no - not the complete book).

You can take the independent publishing route.

Using a literary agent

If you choose the conventional route, you’ll need to find an agent and discover what they require in the way of submissions. There are lots of them. Most have websites (I for one would avoid those that are so far behind the times that they don’t have a website). 

Why use an agent? After all they take 15% of your earnings. The answer is simple. They are liked by publishers since they filter out much of the poor quality writing publishers would rather not see. They are liked by authors because they negotiate a better deal with publishers than the author could get. That effectively pays their fees and often more. An agent can be expected to know the publishing industry and which publisher will be best for your book.

Proofreading and preparing your book

Do your very best to proofread your book and eliminate all errors – at least in the first 30 pages/three chapters. Once your book gets accepted by a publisher they will ask a professional proof-reader to check it. However, you won’t create a good impression with an agent or publisher if your first chapters are full of mistakes. You can’t spend enough time checking and fine tuning these first few pages. Certainly read the section ‘Editing your book’ and use that as a guide. I also suggest you read Les Edgerton’s excellent book ‘Hooked’ and make sure you have a snappy start.

Finding an Agent

If you live in the UK, a good place to start would be to get hold of a copy of the Writers and Artists Yearbook. If you live elsewhere, I still recommend this book since it lists agents and publishers worldwide and is full of useful writing tips.

Visit their website at http://www.writersandartists.co.uk/ and buy the book – it’s published each year and is invaluable. It’s a book your local library is very likely to have.

If you live in the US or Canada then invest $20.00 in joining the Publisher's Marketplace. Their online database is full of valuable information.

Agent enquiry letter

Agents prefer that you contact just one agent at a time. Experienced authors say it’s a good idea to start by sending ten agents an enquiry letter rather than sending them a full synopsis and sample chapters. That may not be what agents prefer but it cuts down the time needed to get an agent response by months. It’s possible you may get enthusiastic responses from several agents at once, but highly unlikely.

 Your initial letter needs to be short but provide the agent with enough detail to catch their interest. Here’s what it should include:

·      The reason you are querying this particular agent.

·      A hook to catch the agent’s attention. It’s a very short synopsis. Think in terms of the text which appears on the back page of a novel and try starting with ‘When….’

·      The length of the book and its genre.

·      Your writing experience.

Try to keep the letter to a single page and include a stamped self-addressed envelope for a response.

Need examples? Try doing a Google search for ‘agent enquiry letters’ or read author Mike Wells’ agent enquiry letter for ‘Wild Child’ at
http:/mikewellsblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/5-steps-to-landing-good-literary-agent.html

Twenty ways to get an instant agent rejection

Send a three or more page query letter.

Start your book with a flashback.

Start with a prologue (Yes - some experienced authors getting away with it).

Get someone to write the query letter on your behalf.

Confuse some common words - of/off, to/too, there/their/they're, past/passed, allay/ally, cash/cache, accept/except, bate/bait, sight/cite/site.

Make lots of spelling mistakes and typos.

Handwrite your query.

Use lots of redundant expressions like. 'dark black', 'fiction novel', 'loud shriek' (quiet shriek anyone?)

Send your query as an email attachment.

Beg an agent to accept your work.

Mention how many times you’ve been rejected by agents.

Tell the agent how much your grandmother/aunt loves your book.

Start by moaning about the quality of other books being written.

Submit work which isn't finished.

Lie to an agent. E.g. "Enclosed is the work you requested...."

Don't include a stamped, self-addressed envelope for the reply.

Use another author's well known character or plot.

Include lots of profanity on the first pages.

Submit work less than 60,000 words long.

Submit a first novel of more than 120,000 words.

Writing a synopsis

How do you shoehorn a 120,000 word book into a one/two/three page synopsis? How about a one paragraph synopsis?

The answer is to follow this formula:

[Protagonist] who finds himself/herself in [situation] from which he/she tries to free himself/herself by [goal]. However, the [antagonist] wants to stop [protagonist] from this, and if successful, will cause the [protagonist] to experience [disastrous result].

Here’s an example of its use:

When a young girl moves to live with her father in a small town in Washington, she meets the boy of her dreams. He has a dark secret which she discovers. In doing so she finds herself at risk of death from people like him. She is rescued by her new boyfriend, but is still at risk from others like him who want to kill her. She knows that all will be solved if she shares her boyfriend’s secret, but he is reluctant to allow this since he fears it will turn her into a monster.

Recognise the story? Twilight?

What next?

If an agent responds to your query letter he/she will probably ask for a more detailed synopsis and sample chapters from your book. At that point you send them the longer synopsis which shouldn’t be a problem now and your fine-tuned first 30 – 50 pages (three chapters). It’s far more likely to be studied after your successful query letter and you won’t be wasting a fortune on printing and postage. Include also a stamped self-addressed envelope so that these can be returned to you for re-use if the agent decides not to proceed further.

Rejected?

One thing you should be prepared for though; agents are absolutely inundated with submissions.

They probably will take a while to look at what you wrote and may very well return your submission. Few are accepted. If that happens – don’t give up, try a different agent. I’ve seen reports that an average agent accepts 2% of authors who approach.

Sooner or later you’ll probably get discouraged by rejections. At that point you should do three things:

Take a serious look at what you’ve submitted.

Does it have a hook to catch interest? In other words does it catch your interest in the very beginning? Think of how you browse for books in a bookstore. Would you buy your book based on the content of the first three pages? Take a look at Les Edgerton’s excellent book ‘Hooked’ for ideas.

Does it have a prologue? If so get rid of it.

Is the story the right length? It should be 60,000 -120,000 words. Any shorter and publishers will be reluctant to publish it because setting it up will be too expensive. Any longer and they’ll be reluctant to invest so much in an untried author.

Is your accompanying letter good enough?

Get someone else to read the synopsis you include. Do they find it interesting?

Consider making multiple submissions to agents at the same time rather than one at a time. Agents don’t really like you doing this but often it’s the only way to cut submission times from years to months.

Consider going down the self-publishing route.

The one thing you shouldn’t do is to allow yourself to be discouraged. Repeated rejections are quite normal. Few authors ever find success immediately. I know of one successful author who bound all her rejection letters into a long roll and when she’s asked to speak about the process dramatically allows it to unroll across the room.

Got the Agent? What you can expect.

Your agent may advise you on fine tuning your book.

Your agent will know which are the best publishers to approach.

Your agent will negotiate the best deal on your behalf. If they receive positive feedback from several publishers they may hold an auction to get the best deal. This will be a combination of an advance and royalties.

Your agent will, if needed, check that royalties due are being paid.

Taking the Independent Publishing Route

Once you decide to become an ‘Indie’ author, you’ll need to make a decision:

Do you want to sell printed copies of your book?

Do you want to sell e-books?

Do you want to do both?

To me the obvious step is to do both. So now we’ll see what is involved. First, however, don’t let anyone tell you that an independently published author is not a proper author.

Stephen King publishes independently
John Locke publishes independently

Both have sold over a million books.

I’m going to show you how I published this book you are reading both as a printed book and as an e-book using Amazon’s services. The illustrations are from the software I used and actual web pages I came across at ‘Create Space’ and at ‘Kindle Direct Publishing’.

A word of warning though - over the last year I’ve seen both sites change – they are now easier to use. It’s possible that things might change again.

Let’s start with the paper books first

Using a Print-On-Demand Service

You could go to a publisher/printer and ask them to print five hundred or a thousand copies of your book. It would be expensive. A much better option is to use ‘print-on-demand’ publishing, where books are printed as required.

If you want a hardback copy of your book, I suggest you take a look at Lulu.com. If you are content with a paperback copy, then look at both Lulu and Amazon’s ‘Create Space’. Both offer a ‘You send us the manuscript and we’ll do it for you’ service. You can also do the work of editing, cover design and formatting yourself. There are other ‘print on demand’ publishers which you can find by searching on Internet.

I’m going to assume you want to do it yourself. Your first step will be to thoroughly proofread and edit your book. This step would normally be done for you if you had taken the conventional agent/publisher route. It’s also one of the most difficult parts of producing a book.

Editing your book

I’m going to assume your book has been produced using Microsoft Word. Of course you will already have used the spellcheck and grammar check available in Word so you might think this step is pretty well covered. Right?

Wrong! It’s probably still full of mistakes. Here are the steps my wife and I go through before we send a file to a publisher.

Read the book through. Either print it out and read that copy or send the file to an e-book reader or tablet computer and read it on that. (More on that later) Reading it on your word processor isn’t the best solution.

Make any corrections you need on a copy of the original document. Make sure you save it with a different filename.

Put the text through a grammar checking program. We use Grammarly (www.grammarly.com). It’s a subscription service.

Get a text to speech program to read the book aloud while you follow along. We use Text Aloud which has a plugin for Microsoft Word, but there are lots of other programs including some free options. This step is essential, since when reading it yourself, you read what you expect the document to say rather than what’s actually there.

Get a proof reader to read the document. You can use a professional proof reader or a friend or do a swap with another indie author. Consider using a proof reader on the other side of the ocean at this stage to find those words and expressions which don’t quite have the same meaning:

Midgie – midget or small candy in the US

Midgie – small biting fly, especially in Scotland.

Even after going through this process you are still likely to have made errors. Professionally printed books contain them. Take consolation in the fact that errors can be corrected in a print-on-demand book far easier than in a conventionally published book.

You are also unlikely to suffer the fate of the printer who accidentally missed out a crucial ‘not’, producing the ‘wicked bible’. He was heavily fined and lost his licence to print as a result.

Once you’re happy your document is as good as you can get, save it again as your master copy then use ‘Save as…’ to save it as a .pdf file which you’ll upload to the publishing service.

Make sure you select ‘Standard (publishing online and printing)’ and from the Options make sure ISO 19005-1 compliant is checked.

Now it’s time to take the next step in creating a print on demand book. I’m going to assume you’ll be using Amazon’s Create Space system.

Setting up a Create Space Account

Go to https://www.createspace.com/ and start an account using the link ‘Sign Up’ at the top right. This step is free. Create Space will guide you through the stages of creating your book. At each stage they will offer help in the form of guidance or offer to do that stage for you at a cost.

Basically the first stages are as follows:

On the member dashboard page click the button to add a new title.

Enter the title and tell it you are creating a paperback.

Once you’ve done that, choose the Guided, step-by-step process since this is the first time you’ve used the service

Create Space’s step-by-step guided process is very easy to use. If at any stage you are not sure about something it offers lots of help and explanations. You can also save your progress at any stage and come back to it later.

You’ll notice at the top ‘Free Publishing Resources’, ‘Member Spotlight’, ‘My Account’ and ‘Community’. All these are links worth exploring.

The next screen asks for title, author and a description amongst other, optional items. If you’re not sure, use the ‘What’s this?’ links to get an explanation of each.

I added a subtitle. There were no other authors and it wasn’t part of a series so I left the other options blank.

There’s a mistake shown here. Can you spot it? (Answer at the back here)

On the next screen enter an ISBN number (which you’ll have to buy) or ask Create Space to allocate you one (free). I chose the free option. Before making your decision read the ‘Compare ISBN options’ link since this is one step you can’t undo.  

If you are wondering – No you can’t use the ones shown above since they only apply to this book.

Now you have to choose the size, paper color and print color options. This book contains colored pictures so I had to select ‘full color’. That means I could only choose white paper. Most fiction books don’t need color and you can choose cream paper if you wish. Cream paper is slightly thicker and also easier on the eyes.

I used the ‘Choose a Different Size’ button to select 5.25 x 8 inch as the book size. I strongly recommend that you measure a few books before you decide which size to use.

Save your progress at this point – you don’t need to upload the book yet. Download the template document offered. If this is your first book, use the formatted template with example content and replace its content with your own text. At this point you are going to have to re-check your book now that it’s in the correct format. Feel free to alter things in the template but don’t delete or add single pages at the beginning, before Chapter 1. If you don’t want the contents page then delete it and the blank page after it. If you need extra pages for contents then add two pages. This is essential so that your Chapter 1 starts on an ‘odd’ page facing the left. Look at the first page of a few books and you’ll see what I mean.

Checking the formatted document

What you are looking for are the following errors:

Does your book have the title page and Chapter 1 on an odd page number? It should have. Unfortunately MS Word does not display pages on the correct side in Print Layout view. There is a way round this problem which you can find at http://jaydax.blogspot.com/2011/07/odd-page-on-right-creating-book-in-word.html

Do you have ‘widows’ and ‘orphans’? A widow is a single line of a paragraph which appears on a page on its own at the end of a chapter. An orphan is a single line of a paragraph at the bottom of a page.  Often you can fix this by adding or deleting words in an earlier paragraph or by using Word’s ‘keep together’ feature.

Do you have straight quotes where you should be using the 66 and 99 quotes? (“and then”)

  Turn on the Show/Hide. Are you using two return characters at the end of paragraphs? If so change the style to use space before and space after settings instead.

Is your text fully justified? If so is the last line of each chapter displayed properly? If there is a problem add an extra return character at the end of the chapter.

Do you need to hyphenate a word to get the line looking right? If so, in Word, use Ctrl hyphen at the location you wish it to appear at. This inserts a soft hyphen which will be removed if the text is reformatted.

At this stage you should also be able to insert a copyright statement and ISBN numbers now that you have them.

Having formatted your book correctly, re-save a copy as a .pdf file and you can now return to Create Space to upload it.

Upload the .pdf file you have created.

You’ll now have to tell Create Space your ‘Bleed’ choice.

In my case there is a white border to every page. If your book has images which go to the very edge of the page you would have to choose the other option.

Create Space will now run a check on your file.

In my case the check found one issue with the file:

Click the ‘Launch Interior Reviewer’ to find the problem.
You’ll see a message something like this:

My ‘issue’ was a problem with the graphic resolution. It was set too low.

To fix that I needed to go to the Word advanced options and set the graphic resolution to the highest value possible. (220dpi) In the past I’ve encountered problems with the page gutter[1] and borders where italic words at the edge of the page went slightly into the border. Once you’ve fixed any problems you’ll need to re-upload the interior of your book.

Now you’ll need to produce the cover for your book.

Producing the book cover

Let’s face it – A book is judged by its cover. You have several options at this point. You can:

Use a Create Space template – quick and easy when you use the Cover Creator software provided by Amazon. You may think that they offer a limited range of options but many things can be customised to produce a unique cover without needing a great deal of artistic skill. Here’s my effort, produced using this software. It took me 15 minutes, most of which was spent browsing through options.

Work with a Create Space designer to produce an individualised cover.

Work with an external designer to produce an individual cover. I have to say here that the work I’ve seen at http://probookcovers.com/ seems to offer exceptional value.

Produce a cover yourself. Do this only if you have the artistic and computer skills needed. Use the templates available from Create Space which you’ll find when you click the upload link. The cover needs to be produced as a .pdf file and has to match quite exacting standards. When I produced the covers for the ‘A Vested Interest’ books, which I co-authored with my wife Shelia, I produced our own covers. You can find out about  them at http://avestedinterest.blogspot.com/2011/11/cover-to-cover.html

Got the cover file? Then it’s time for the next steps

Finalising your book

Choose a BISAC category of your book. This would be something like ‘Fiction / Romance / Paranormal’ if you had written the Twilight novel of Stephanie Meyers.

Enter any additional information such as an author biography, Book language, Country of publication, keywords to help people find it etc. This section is optional.

Work out how much you wish to sell the book for. Create Space will give you  guidance here based on how much the book will cost to print. At this point you’ll need to choose whether or not to join the Pro Plan or not ($39 cost). Personally I think it’s worth it if you expect to sell lots of copies.

Save your work so far and then submit your book for review.

A worker at Create Space will examine your book and within a day or so you’ll get a response listing any changes you need to make for your interior or cover.

Assuming everything is OK you can now order proof copies. You’ll need to pay for these.

This is when you get to see a book format copy for the first time. It will be exactly like the final version apart from having the word PROOF in large letters inside the back cover. At this point you’ll start to feel like an author!

Read your proof copy, examine the cover and make any corrections you need to make to the interior and cover files. (I bet you thought you had corrected everything already.) Then re-submit the files. Again they’ll be checked.

You can now either order an additional proof copy or if the corrections were only minor, go on to start selling the book.

Congratulations – you have a book in print. Buy lots of copies for all your relatives and friends and start thinking about how you are going to promote your book.

Creating an e-book

Of all the options this is the quickest method to make your work available to an audience. It’s also very easy to get it wrong by not taking care.

E-books usually use one of two formats:

·         epub files used by Apple ‘i’ devices, Sony readers, Kobo readers and many others

·         mobi files used by Amazon on their Kindle e-book readers

Both formats are actually special .html formats – similar to web pages. To make them, the best method is to use html as an intermediate format.

Why many e-books are full of errors

Before I go into how to create an e-book from a word processed file let me first explain why so many e-books available contain errors.

Some e-books have been produced by scanning old books and then creating a text version using optical character recognition software. The result should then be proofread so that any errors can be corrected. If it’s a book in the public domain this expensive step is often omitted and you get errors such as ‘Giinthur clear’ where the text should be ‘Günthur dear’.

Some e-books have been produced by a book publisher who already has a print version of the book published. Usually the author provides a word processed file and the publisher then uses a program such as InDesign or Quark to produce a print layout. It is this version which is corrected at the proofreading stage. Until recently this version has not been suitable for converting to e-book format so the publisher produces that from the author’s uncorrected Word document. Since they are reluctant to go through the proofreading process again, the errors get left.

Some e-books contain errors because the author simply hasn’t taken enough care at the proofreading stage.

If you are an indie author you’ll have no-one to blame but yourself, if errors are found in your text, so the careful proofreading stage is essential! Errors, once pointed out though, can quickly be corrected and the corrected e-book will be available in as little as two days.

So what is involved in producing an e-book from your original Word document? I’m going to assume you will produce an e-book for the Amazon Kindle platform. (.mobi filetype) If you want to produce files for Lulu.com or Smashwords.com (.epub filetype) the steps are similar.

You don’t really need to know how to write html code. If you do, then it may give you a slight advantage. You’ll be able to use some of the advanced features - most of which, you probably will never use.

What you will find useful are two pieces of open source (free) software

Calibre, available from http://calibre-ebook.com/. You’ll need this do the file conversion to .mobi/.epub formats. You can also use it to organise your e-book files.

OpenOffice, available from http://www.openoffice.org/ This last item is useful if you don’t use MS Word 2010.

Assuming you are starting with a MS Word file, you need to convert it to Amazon Kindle (and possibly epub) format. According to Kindle Direct Publishing the book file formats you can submit for conversion are:

Word (.doc or .docx)

ePub (.epub)

Plain Text (.txt)

Mobipocket (.mobi or .prc)

HTML (.zip, .htm, or .html)

Adobe PDF (.pdf)

Rich Text Format (.rtf)

Now I’ve tried them all, and the only one I would recommend is the .mobi format so that’s why I said to use Calibre as a go-between. In the next section I’ll show you just how easy it is.

Creating an e-book - MS Word to Kindle conversion

Here’s the method I use. I’ll assume you have produced your book in MS Word. If you’re using a different word processor, that’s not a problem. The aim of this first step is to produce an intermediate .html file. Most word processors can do this.

Step 1.

What you’ll need to do is to save the file as a ‘Web page, filtered’.(1 & 2) Early versions of MS Word created HTML files full of non-standard code. This non-standard code causes total confusion if you attempt to convert it to .mobi or .epub formats. If your version of Word doesn’t offer you this ‘filtered’ option, then save the file as a standard .doc file and load it into Open Office Write. That will save it as a .html file of the correct format but you can also save it as an epub file and skip the next step. While you are at the ‘Save as’ window, take the opportunity to give your web page a title. (3)

Step  2.
You’ll need to examine the .html file produced and make a few changes to the first pages. To explain what’s needed I’ll show you side by side my original Word document (.docx) and the HTML version:

As you can see the six pages from the print version have been condensed down to three pages in the web version. Notice the table of contents has been taken out since Calibre will generate a new one.

The rest of the document should be pretty much the same but you should check graphics and the last line of each chapter. If the last line has huge spaces in it add a Return at the end of it to fix it. Re-save your .html file.

Step 3.
Open Calibre (Get it free at http://calibre-ebook.com/) and use the 'Add Books' icon to find the saved .html file and add it:

Step  4.
Select the added book and click the Edit metadata icon:

Step  5.
Correct the Title, Title sort, Author(s), Author sort, Series and Number fields as necessary:

If you hover your pointer over a text box, you’ll get a description of what is required in that field. In this case a ‘Series’ was not necessary.

Step  6.
Browse for your book cover file. If you don’t have one Calibre can create one for you, but you would get a better cover from those designed by the Create Space cover templates. I used the right hand side of the cover image produced using Create Space’s Cover Creator software. It’s a simple matter to capture the image, crop it to the right hand side and resize it to 600 wide by 800 tall.

Step  7.
In the comments section add the text which would normally appear on the back cover of a book.

Step  8.
Click OK (Gosh that was hard!)

Step  9.
Re-select the book and click the ‘Convert books’ icon.

Since we are making a book to be published on Amazon you’ll also need to set the output format to MOBI from the dropdown. Check that everything is correct so far. There’s a mistake in mine – I missed out the question mark in the title. It’s easy to correct it in this screen though.

You might also like to add keyword tags which help readers locate your book. I entered ‘Non-fiction, Publishing, Self-publishing, Creating an e-book’. Separate each tag with a comma.

Leave the book as 1.00. If you later make modifications increase it to 1.01, 1.02 and so on.

Step  10.
At the left select the 'Table of Contents' icon.

Make sure you place a checkmark next to ‘Force use of auto-generated Table of Contents’. If you want just chapter headings in your contents that's all you need to complete. If you want to use multi level contents pages then enter //h:h1 in 'Level 1 TOC'; //h:h2 in 'Level 2 TOC'; //h:h3 in 'Level 3 TOC'

Step  11.
Select the ‘MOBI Output’ button.

Usually you won’t need to alter anything here but I wanted a table of contents to appear at the beginning of the book, so I placed a check next to that area.

In a book where the chapter headings are simply Chapter 1, Chapter 2 e.t.c. you would normally have the contents at the end and the reader would not see the contents unless they use the menu to go to it. This seems a little pointless at first, but it means you can quickly step from chapter to chapter on a Kindle by pressing the left and right sides of the five way navigation button. (swipe up/down on a Kindle Touch)

Step 13.
You won’t need to change any of the other options. (Although you might like to see what is available). Click 'OK' and wait until the 'Jobs' icon bottom right indicates the conversion is finished. This can take a while if your book is large – Go make yourself a drink while you wait. When it’s finished ‘Jobs’ at the bottom right will go back to ‘0’ and the cog animation will stop.

If you plan on publishing at Lulu, Smashwords or iBooks you’ll need to generate a file in EPUB format. Repeat from step 9 with the output format set to EPUB if you want this.

The finished file will contain the correct table of contents you need, cover & meta-data description ready to be uploaded to Kindle or sent to Amazon Digital Text Platform. You can find the file by clicking the ‘Path: Click to open’ link at the right of Calibre

Step 14.
Assuming you possess a Kindle, or a Kindle reader on your computer, phone or a different e-book reader, it’s an excellent idea at this stage to load the file onto it and scan through it for errors in the text or formatting. The easiest way to do this is to connect your e-book reader to your computer using a USB cable. (the one which comes with a Kindle works just fine). Calibre will detect it and you can then click the ‘Send to device’ button which appears.

Once a checkmark appears in the ‘On Device’ column you can then eject the Kindle (use the dropdown on the ‘Device’ button) and start a final check for errors.

 If you find errors – fix them in your Word .doc/docx file and start again at step 1. Most of the errors you spot will be those typos, missing or extra words you missed at the proofreading stage. You shouldn’t find too many formatting errors since Calibre does a pretty good job of converting the file to Kindle format. What you see on screen in your .html version of the document will be pretty much what you see on the Kindle screen. It’s important, however, that corrections are made to your original .doc/.docx file rather than the .html version because if you don’t you will end up with two incompatible files and problems later – See Why many e-books are full of errors.

Pay particular attention to any graphics and tables you have included. Are you able to read them? Are you happy with their position?

What about the style of font? It is possible to change this but in general it’s better to stick to the standard fonts offered on Kindle.

At the end of this book you’ll find a section on Special Kindle Formatting.

Making Your E-book Available at Amazon

You’ll need to create an account at https://kdp.amazon.com

Once you’ve logged into the site you’ll find yourself at a page where you can click the button ‘Add a new title’.

Enter your book details in the ‘Enter Your book Details’ section

In my case I left blank the series and edition number sections.

4.   Click the ‘Add contributors’ button.

The <Select title> area is where you declare that you are the author or editor. Save what you’ve entered so far as a draft.

5.        Select the appropriate publishing right. Normally this will be the ‘This is not a public domain…’ option unless you are re-producing an out of copyright work. `

Next, you’ll need to tell Amazon what categories you would like to put the book under. Click the ‘Add categories’ button and select up to two:

6.        Add some suitable keywords to help your book be found too.

Even though my book contains the cover, I use the ‘Browse for image…’ button to locate the front cover I used at the Create Space website. Once you have uploaded it you’ll see the image displayed rather than ‘No image available’ At this point you’ll see if the image you created is clear enough to be displayed as a thumbnail. If it isn’t, go back and re-do it.

7.        Time to upload the book file and to set DRM. DRM stands for digital rights management. What this means is Amazon will protect your book to prevent it from being passed from one user to another. Only the purchaser will be able to use the file (on up to five readers). There are disadvantages though:

• DRM prevents a purchaser putting your book on a different reader they own e.g. Nook

• DRM won’t prevent an experienced computer user from sharing the book, only the ‘average’ user.

Once you’ve set DRM and uploaded the book you should see this:

Clicking the ‘Preview book’ button will launch  Amazon’s idea of what the book will look like. You should quickly be able to spot any errors you’ve made but there is no real substitute for examining the book on your own Kindle reader. Fortunately we’ve already seen what it looks like when you converted the file on Calibre so you shouldn’t get any surprises.

Everything OK? If so then click the ‘Save and continue’ button. If there are errors then save your work as a draft and go back and fix the problems.

8.        Publishing territories  - If you are the sole author of your book you have Worldwide rights to it. If you are a co-author or just distributing the book you may not have full publishing rights and should select the countries you have the rights in.

9.        The royalties and book price – Amazon offer two different royalties 35% and 70% Easy choice – yes? Wrong. To get the 70% royalty you have to meet Amazon’s conditions

• The e-book must sell for between $2.99 and $9.99

• The book must be on sale in at least one of these countries: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, San Marino, Switzerland, Spain, United Kingdom (including Guernsey, Jersey and Isle of Man), United States, Vatican City

• In the past Amazon has required that the book be available at a higher price elsewhere (e.g. a paper copy) This no longer seems to apply

On the face of it, it seems obvious that you should sell your books for between $2.99 and $9.99 and get the 70% royalty after all at $2.99 you would get:
($2.99 - $0.15 upload fee) x 70% = $1.99 per e-book sold and at $0.99 you would get:
$0.99 x 35% = $0.35 per e-book (no delivery fee on the 35% royalty rate).

You make 5.7 times as much on the 70% rate.  John Locke, who has sold over a million e-books, has a different view. His idea is that if you have a big enough target audience you should ask yourself ‘Can I sell seven times as many e-books at $0.99 as I can at $2.99?’ John felt he could and became the first independently published author to join the Amazon million sellers group – long before Stephanie Meyers (Twilight books) or J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter books).

If you can sell seven times as many at $0.99 then you’ll make more money but many writers have found their sales actually dropped when they reduced the price. Presumably people thought ‘At 99 cents it can’t be much good.’

So what am I selling this e-book at? $0.99. Not because I expect to sell millions but because I wrote it and published it in less than a week, it’s small and I don’t expect (or need) to make a vast profit on it. I’m even giving it away free on my website (http://www.avestedinterest.info) for the first two months. Amazon, however, won’t let you set a price of less than $0.99 but if they find it on sale somewhere else for less, then they will match that price.

If you wonder if you have set the price correctly, don’t worry – you can return to your bookshelf at any time and make changes.

10.  Just one step left. Click the ‘Save and Publish’ button. You’ll get a warning message:

You will be returned to your bookshelf and will see your book marked as ‘In Review’ Within 12 hours it will appear in the Amazon catalogue as available to be purchased. Congratulations author!

Special Kindle Formatting

If your Kindle file doesn’t look right then you’ll need to edit the .html file you created in Word. Sometimes it’s possible to do this in Word. Other times you’ll need to use a HTML editor. I use Dreamweaver for this, but that is a very expensive program. An excellent free alternative is Komposer (http://kompozer.net/).

Things you can change in Word

Turn graphics through 90° - Useful if you have a graphic which is displayed too small on the Kindle screen. The Kindle screen is 600 pixels wide and 800 tall. To rotate the graphic just click it in Word and drag the rotation grab handle (green circle).

Create footnotes – Use Word’s normal footnote insertion tool. When Calibre finds a footnote in a file it will be moved to the end of the document. When a reader sees a footnote number link it can be selected and they’ll be taken to that footnote. Pressing the back button (or back menu item on a Kindle Touch) returns the reader to their previous location.

Create hyperlink to a different part of the book – Use Word’s normal hyperlink system. To do that select the text, right click it and choose ‘Hyperlink’. Then choose ‘Place in this document’

Insert a table – Tables are not supported in e-books so you’ll need to convert them to a graphic.

·         Create your table as normal

·         Take a screen capture of the table (if you have OneNote press the Windows key and S)

·         Paste the screen capture into the document

·         Delete the original table

Insert a page break – Use Word’s normal page break

Things to do in an HTML editor

In general, you’ll need to have a reasonable understanding of how HTML is used to make Web pages to use these effects.

Lists - Word will sometimes not use the correct html for lists but will instead use character 0149 (•) and spacing. This can sometimes indent the list too much. It can be fixed in an html editor.

Left or right aligned images – Word will convert all images to be centered on the screen. If you don’t want this then align the images left or right in an HTML editor after Word has produced the .html file. There is a limitation, however, You can’t wrap more than one line of text.

Graphic Quality – Word will try to reduce the quality of graphics to save filesize. The Kindle can only display 16 shades of grey. Together these limitations work against you to produce blurred images. This may be acceptable in a photograph, but if the graphic contains text it becomes unreadable. Here’s how to fix it.

Where you saved the .html file look for a folder with the same name followed by ‘_files’. Open it.

You should see all the images you used named image001.jpg, image002.jpg e.t.c.

For each image, find the original image added to Word and use a graphic editor to: resize it to 800 pixels wide (if it’s bigger than than 800 pixels); increase its contrast using histogram adjustment (see below); save the adjusted file so that it replaces the image001.jpg e.t.c.

In your html editor, set the size of pictures to be 580 pixels wide and a height proportional to this.

Here’s the Histogram adjustment I use in my graphics editor:

Styles – You can embed styles in the HTML header but sometimes these do not give the expected results. Try it and if it doesn’t work then use an inline style within the tag you want to change.

Drop Capitals – In a Web page editor this can be done using CSS Try this method
<span style="float: left; font-family: serif; font-weight:bold; font-size: 430%; line-height:0.9em; margin-right:0.05em; padding-top:0; padding-bottom:0.02em;">D</span><strong>rop Capitals</strong> Unfortunately the Kindle does not support negative positioning so your letter will just be bigger and will not 'drop'.

Text Indents - The first line of every paragraph is automatically indented by the Kindle. This can be changed by editing the HTML code to set a style on the <p> tag. For example:

<p style= "text-indent:0"> - no indentation of the first line

<p style="text-indent:10%">  +ve indent, 10% of the width of the page

<p style="text-indent:5em"> +ve indent, 5 em

<p style="text-indent:-10pt"> -ve indent, 10 pt

<p style="text-indent:-10"> -ve indent, 10 pixels

Amazon’s Kindle Publishing Guidelines – A technical document giving information to those with a good grasp of HTML http://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf

Promoting your book

Once you are published you’ll need to start work on promoting your book. Without a doubt this is the hardest part of being an author and makes the difference between earning money or not, especially if you are self-published.

You could go hawking your printed books around booksellers but you are unlikely to make much that way. The vast majority of books today are sold on websites such as Amazon. Printed books are rapidly being overtaken in sales by e-books too.

No matter how good your book is, just having it available on Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Lulu or Smashwords isn’t going to get you many sales. Your book will simply be lost amongst the millions of other books available.

So what do you do to promote it? There is no easy answer to this question but there are things you can do to help.

Research on Internet book promotion. There are many good ideas you can try.

John Locke has even written a book on book promotion. It’s obviously successful since so many people have read it and now write blogs and post on Twitter. His method works if you follow it carefully. Unfortunately many authors don’t seem able to do that. John suggests you write blog posts which contain subtle references to your book. Following his advice I wrote http://avestedinterest.blogspot.com/2011/10/bio-terrorism-and-cure-for-common-cold.html

Create a Website

Every author should have a website. I’ve got one – it’s at http://www.avestedinterest.info

Your website should have at the minimum:

Details about your book/s

Links to your sales points, blog, Twitter page, Facebook page, e.t.c.

A contact page

Add Google Analytics to your website so that you can track visitors and find out what works.

Writing a blog

Start a blog page. Write about anything you find interesting. Try to write posts which people will forward to their friends. Forget the idea of writing adverts for your books. People will never forward those. Place adverts on your interesting posts. People will notice them and hopefully buy your book if they like your blog posts.

Add Google Analytics to your blog also.

A vital part of blogging is to respond to comments made on the blog.

Check my blog at http://avestedinterest.blogspot.com to see what I mean.

Twitter

Build a Twitter following. Again make meaningful comments, not just endless quotations. Use Twitter to point people to your blog and website. If you must place advertisements for your book in posts then do so very rarely. Never make ‘Buy my book’ posts. Instead post ‘I came across this while I was researching my book…’ or ‘I wrote about this in…’ type posts. Try to gather followers interested in what your book is about. Find people who read and especially people who review the books they have read.

By all means follow me - @JChapmanAuthor

If you follow John Locke’s promotion system beware of acquiring a following consisting purely of authors. Try to get a varied audience. Authors do buy books though and they will help you by re-tweeting your posts and coming up with good ideas. Help them back!

Helpful websites for Twitter are:

http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/

http://www.copyblogger.com/twitter-for-marketing/

Facebook and MySpace

Create Facebook, MySpace and Google+ accounts for your book. Again, like your blog try to make these the sort of pages which will get passed around. Avoid heavy handed ‘Buy my book’ adverts.

Website Example:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Vested-Interest/223248904358150

Get your book reviewed

Getting a positive book review is a great way of boosting your book sales. A good way of getting noticed so that people do review your book is to review books you read yourself. Ask people to review your books in exchange. Find top reviewers and offer them a free copy for them to review.

Talking of reviews – you’ve almost reached the end of this book. Would you consider reviewing it at Amazon?

The Create Space Community

This is a site designed for printed books but many of the ideas can be applied to e-books also. It’s a great place to pick up ideas for promoting your book. Find it at https://www.createspace.com/en/community There are sections on formatting, marketing and showcases of work.

Look for similar communities at Smashwords, Lulu and Kindle Direct Publishing

Bibliography

I’ve referred to several books and useful websites. To help you find them, here they are in detail.

Books

Writers and Artists Yearbook – Published each year and available at Amazon  - 2012 copy
                 ISBN-10: 1408135809
                 ISBN-13: 978-1408135808

Website - http://www.writersandartists.co.uk/

Hooked – Les Edgerton – available at Amazon in both paper and e-book formats           ISBN: 1582974578

How I sold 1 million e-books in five months – John Locke – available at Amazon in both paper and e-book formats
ISBN13: 978-1935670919

Smashwords Book marketing guide - http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/305

Agent Query – agents list- http://www.agentquery.com/

Publishing Websites

Amazon Create Space  – Publish your book by ‘print on demand’. Paperback only.
Website - https://www.createspace.com/

Lulu  – Publish your book by ‘print on demand’ Paperback and hardback available
Website -  http://www.lulu.com/

Smashwords – Publish e-books
Website - http://www.smashwords.com/

Software

Calibre – Open source (free) software to manage  and convert your collection of e-books
Website - http://calibre-ebook.com/

Komposer – An excellent open source (free) Web page editor. Use it if you need to do some advanced formatting of your  e-books
Website - http://kompozer.net/

Publicity

Twitter – https://twitter.com/

Facebook – http://www.facebook.com

Blogspot - http://www.blogger.com

Smashwords Book marketing guide- http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/305

Wordpress - http://wordpress.com/

How to build a Twitter Following - http://worthbecoming.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/0-4000-in-a-snap-how-to-build-a-quality-twitter-following-fast/

Good Publishing Blogsites

http://www.epublishabook.com/ - the blog of a site dedicated to publishing e-books

http://sirragirl.blogspot.com/ - a professional proofreader’s blog

http://www.thegreenwater.com/ - the blog of author Mike Wells. Check especially his posts for April 2011.

---------------

Did you spot the mistake? The title of my book is inconsistent. It should be ‘So You’ve Written a Book?’ At various places the title is shown without a question mark or with ‘the’ instead of ‘a’.

See how easy it is to overlook a mistake now?

From the Author

If you’ve enjoyed reading ‘So you have written a book?’ would you consider helping me by spreading the word?

You could post a review on Amazon; tell your friends on Facebook, MySpace, Google+, Twitter or simply mention the book to your friends.

Thanks – any (or all?) of these would really help.

John Chapman

See also the techno-thriller fiction series I co-author:

The Complete ‘A Vested Interest’ Saga So Far:

Book One   -      A Vested Interest

Book Two -      Dark Secrets

Book Three        -    No Secrets

Book Four -      Stones, Stars, and Solutions

Book Five -      Leap of Faith

Book Six    -      Regret and Retribution

Also           -      Blood of the Rainbow (Shelia Chapman)

Find out more about the saga at http://www.avestedinterest.info

[1] Where the centre fold of a book is a small amount of extra border space is added to make it easier to read. This is known as a ‘gutter’.