How To Self-Publish Your Own Book

So you finally want to publish your own best-selling novel, a blockbuster series of short stories, or maybe a heart-melting collection of memorable poetry. The only thing keeping you from lifelong fame and fortune is the lack of opportunity to have your legendary scribblings introduced to a wider public audience. 

Imagine the throbbing masses of deeply appreciative readers just salivating at the mouth at the prospect of your awesome creativity being unleashed. If only you knew how to get at them. Despair not, help is at hand right here and now. 

Simply follow my lead and you too will, at last, get to see your transformative literary thoughts and ideas gathered up into a book that can nestle on the bookshelf, alongside all the big names normally to be found at an international book publishing, marketing and sales outfit. But first, a little bit about how I came to the point of publishing my own writings, which may well prove helpful to you in learning how to get started right from the very beginning.

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As a lifelong writer, it has always been my firm belief that the ultimate ambition of the vast majority of writers is to see their work published. How to go about it was another matter altogether.

As a long-term writer on Vocal, I have no shortage of what I consider to be highly publishable material. To date, I have written over 800 articles, stories, and poems, mostly on the Illumination suite of publications. Most of those stories got read and then ended up buried in the vaults gathering virtual dust and cobwebs, never to see the light of day again. 

One day I had the idea to see if I could string a series of those stories or poems into a cohesive collection with a particular theme that could then be sent out into the big wide world in the form of a book. 

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So, your first move has to be to trawl through your seldom visited Medium basement full of previous writings to find suitable material that you feel, that with not too much effort, you can link together into a book. Now is the time to get down and dirty, brushing off those virtual creepy crawlies, down on your hands and knees, flicking your whitlow infected fingertips over the crusty paper edges of long-forgotten literary masterpieces. Next?

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If you are reading this article then you already know you have an amazingly simple editor right here in front of your very eyes. So copying and pasting stories together into consecutive chapters is no big deal. 

Illustrations and photographs are no problem either since you have Unsplash on tap. Alternatively, you can freely use Canva to create your very own unique book cover. You can also download and freely use Grammarly to take care of grammar and spelling errors. And fellow writers might be more than happy to be proof or beta readers for you. If not you can always ask family or friends.

Now all you need is an array of typesetters, color separation artists, and all manner of other Print Johnnies, the mind truly boggles. Thankfully you are a few simple clicks away from having access to techie types who have replaced all of those types of people, all available at a very economical price. Welcome to Fiverr.

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One of the many things I love about modern technology, the internet, in particular, is the democratization of just about everything. In my case, my book was ready and waiting on Vocal in drafts where I constructed it. All I needed was somebody to format the book. It was always my intention to publish my book on Amazon KDP, but KDP needs you to have your text formatted into an ePub or Docx format in order to upload it. The problem was, I had no desire nor intention to learn anything about that technical stuff, I'm a creative writer, not a computer technician.

On Fiverr, I found a great guy who for 30 dollars (for 38 pages) would format my Medium text into a Docx format and send it back to me as a KDP uploadable file. 

A word of advice, you need to put your writing into MS Word or AppleMac Pages for the guy to work from. If you send him anything else he will have to charge you extra to cover the cost of 'cleaning up' the file. 

The same guy would have also created a book cover for me, but I was happy this time to go with a default design KDP has on their system.

Now all you have to do is get onto KDP, fill out all the necessary fields, and upload a cover if you are going to use your own, or choose a KDP cover and upload your formatted file.

I have to say the entire process is very intuitive and easy to follow. What's more, it really is great fun, even if you stumble a little at the beginning. And best of all is the fact that it is very cost-effective. 

All that was involved was a certain amount of going back over old stories, a good deal of copying and pasting, a smidgin of editing and proofreading, a little uploading, and thirty dollars to do the icky techie stuff. There you go, wasn't that difficult after all was it?