Using Your Vocal Stories To Self Publish A Book Using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing

Introduction

This story is assuming you have set yourself up on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform on Amazon, if not check here. It is important that you set up your bank details to be paid

In December last year, I accidentally published a book and it has sold a few copies and got some great reviews from real writers, plus a one-star review on Amazon from someone who was disturbed by the content (that was the point) but it only gave a very high-level take on how to actually produce the book. You can read about that experience below.

Note I am still at the very beginning of self-publishing and this is more about my experiences producing the books rather than how to do it, though there are links to software documentation and tips on how to do things and things that have found out.

Observations On Using The Kindle Direct Publishing Software

When I created my first book, the process was fairly simple, I downloaded the software and followed the guidelines which can be seen here.

Kindle Publishing Guidelines (amazon.com)

The book was just nine stories from Vocal, which I put into a word document, then imported into the software, where you can apply Chapters and formats. There is not much option to change the typeface but there are several options for the layout. You can bold, italicise and underline and there are three type faces.

Although Word allows you to create a Table of Contents that the software recognises, it is simpler to let the KDP software generate the Table of Contents.

If you are publishing a straight novel or technical article you can allow text to flow over pages and insert new pages and chapters fairly simply.

It took me an age to work out how to insert an image as some of the menus are very limited, but if you right click with your mouse on a page you are editing it allows you to upload an image from your computer. Very easy to do but not if you don’t know how. You can then resize the image for options from small to original size and then actually credit the source.

There are elements you can place on a page by selecting the text then assigning the element by selecting it with your mouse.

This all worked out more than adequately for my first book, but that was just straight prose.

Also I did not have to do much with the content so it was a very simple process.

Poetry, however, for me was a whole new and almost traumatic ball game.

A Poetry Anthology In Kindle Direct Publishing Software

The normal process for creating a Kindle (and hardback and paperback) is to create your masterpiece in a Word Processor or PDF creator then import into the KDP software, tidy it up and publish your book.

With Poetry I wanted my poems to fit on a page. In Vocal I use Emojis and videos to support my writing. The videos are not an option for a paper book, and also the emojis do not transfer to the KDP software, so I needed to find alternatives, which were in the character set.

The thing with poetry is that I wanted to fit it onto a page,but you do not know what your printed book is going to look like until it is printed. You can reduce font sizes, justify it or centre it and there are various elements one of which is “Poetry” which I have not yet found out what it does.

After a lot of messing about, I decided to just let the poem flow across pages as for an ebook different devices have different page sizes and can be read in portrait or landscape.

I tried copying my text from the Vocal web page to the KDP but often it would take an age trying to convert, often fail, and sometimes give the option of pasting it as plain text.

That put me on to a two-step plan, copy the page text then paste it into notepad.

• That converts it to plain text.
• Then copy from Notepad into KDP

For poetry, I selected the “Amour” KDP layout (you can select this at any time you are creating the document). I also select the Print Stile with no Title headings because I feel it is better for my book.

The Vocal Story title is selected and the KDP Chapter title is applied, then similarly for the sub-title.

The lines of the poem I italicised to make it look a little more beautiful.

Doing this for fifty poems took a few days, and then you can check a preview of the book before generating the publication file. Now it’s light the blue touch paper time.

Time To Publish Your Story

Once you generate your KDP file you can now publish your book. You can use an image of your own for the cover or use one of Amazon’s standard ones (I used this for my first two anthologies, and a photograph of my own for my latest one).

Then you can set your prices and become a published author.

I hope this helps you to get your book published.