Self-publishing a Book on Amazon
was both more accessible and more complicated than I thought it would be.
I recently self-published my first book on Amazon through their Kindle Direct Publishing service. The process looked kind of like this;
Phase One: Creating the Content
Step One: Write the book and create your illustrations. ✅
Step Two: Create a copyright page. ✅
Just writing a book can be a challenge. Initially, I had it in my head I needed to write at least 30,000–50,000 words. (This is about the size of a professionally published novel).
But as I got to the end of the editing process, I realized I had said everything I needed and didn’t want to pad it with unnecessary filler.
I had a lot of doubts it would count as a ‘real’ book without hitting that benchmark. Until I remembered the novella I’d initially taken inspiration from, A Day With Mr. Jules, was only about 80 pages.
After I started looking at Animal Farm, Coraline, and The Little Prince, I realized just how many books I loved fell into that ‘novella’ category of not quite a novel, not quite a short story and were all the better for it.
I think the beauty of self-publishing is that it frees you from the constraints and expectations of what a ‘professional’ book should look like.
I found an excellent tutorial from Scribe Media on How to Create a Book Copyright Page for the copyright page. My copyright page ended up looking like this. 👇
Dear Atlas Copyright © 2022 Selena Houle
Illustrations and cover design by Selena Houle
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or produced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Royal LaKill Publishing, a division of Royal LaKill Inc.
Dear Atlas
978–1–7782795–1–5 (ebook)
978–1–7782795–0–8 (paperback)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Published in Canada
Phase Two: Designing Your Book
Step Three: Choose your printer specs. ✅
Step Four: Design your book cover. ✅
Step Five: Format the book as an EPUB. ✅
Now, every single article I’ve read on self-publishing advises you to hire a professional to have your book formatted. And, from not doing that, I can say it is excellent advice!
While Amazon offers a wide variety of options regarding trim size, all I knew was I wanted my book to be small. The prose for Dear Atlas has far more in common with a poetry collection than a typical fiction novel, so I ended up going with 5.5 x 8.5.
That was the easy part.
The hard part was trying to format my ebook in Google docs. At first. I carefully set up my document size, justified my content, and stylized my headings/body text — basically everything you are supposed to do.
Then I uploaded it into the KDPs preview tester, and…it looked like complete and utter garbage.
After spending too much time trying to reformat everything correctly, I downloaded a manuscript template. It worked much better when I uploaded the file to Google Drive and copypasted all my content into the ‘official’ Amazon .docx template.
Don’t ask me why. I have no idea.
This was also where I included all of my illustrations.
Pro Tip: The upload instructions for the book cover made it very clear the artwork needed to be in CMYK. But, looking at my printed paperback I can tell some of the inside color illustrations would have benefitted from being in CMYK instead of RGB color mode.
Don’t get me wrong, still very happy with my book! But as a graphic designer, I can tell the pink I used throughout the book isn’t quite accurate.
I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted my book cover to look like and used Amazon’s KDP Cover Calculator to get the correct dimensions. Initially, I created the right size for the document in Canva (cause I’m creatively bankrupt) and tried to use the resulting design.
But for some reason, whenever I’d upload the cover, the preview was slightly off and looked horrible.
So, I downloaded the resulting cover template directly from Amazon and used that. Worked perfectly.
Moral of the story. Download the provided templates even if you’re comfortable with formatting graphics and text for print.
Phase Three
Step 6: Register an ISBN.
Step 7: Upload all your files to Amazon.
Step 8: Optimize, price and publish. ✅
Not too bad, right?
After looking at the prices for purchasing ISBNs and wanting to cry, I was relieved to learn that Canadian authors can register ISBNs for FREE.
All you need to do is create an ISBN Canada account. After 7–10 days, you’ll be able to manage your logbook and register ISBNs for your books.
Surprisingly, this was one of the most accessible parts of the process.
Once I had all the pieces properly formatted, uploading everything to my bookshelf was simple. (I didn’t opt into KDP select because I also published my ebook on Google Play).
I’d already done market research and price comparisons for similar books, so I had a pretty good idea of what categories, print requirements, and pricing made the most sense.
I’d also pre-written a synopsis early on in the process of writing the book, which made life a lot easier.
Dear Atlas is the story of one person living in the aftermath — of love, loss and heartbreak. It’s a story about surviving. And most importantly, it’s a story about what it takes to heal. Part prose, part poetry; it walks the line between a love story and a kitchen sink drama while weaving together physics and philosophy.
It’s grief and missing something you can’t get back in an easy-to-read, digestible format.
After waiting a couple of days my book was live and available for on-demand printing. Aside from challenges designing and formatting the book files it was surprisingly easy to get all the components I needed together.
