It will look like this: © 2012 Your Name.
But do note, the one thing that is absolutely required to protect yourself is the year, the copyright symbol or the word "copyright," and your name. You can also Google search for example copyright pages. I picked up the nearest novel to me (which happened to be Freedom, which I found ironic because we all know that Jonathan Franzen hates eBooks, among other things). I realized that I don't really know what goes on a copyright page, which, because you are self-publishing, you are responsible for.
This is a huge aspect of getting the book purchased, but I, like many authors, am basically clueless about design. Now is a good time to butter her/him up with some beers, because you'll want someone with at least a passing knowledge of design to make your book cover for you. Being too constricted of mind makes it difficult to try to entice Amazon shoppers into purchasing your goods.ĭo you have a friend who is a graphic designer? Good. How do you describe your own book? Answer: take a shot and try again. Trying to describe your book in the "description" part of the "bookshelf" is just the worst. There is no good jacket copy in the world. Writing the jacket copy for your own book is awful. I advise reading over Amazon's formatting tips before doing any editing. When you're staring down the barrel of 200 pages of words you've already read a nauseating number of times, the last thing you want to have forgotten to do during the first three read-throughs is to insert page breaks. But I actually took the time to read through it, as best as my non-lawyer self could.įormatting books is a pain in the ass. Man, this is a lot of legal contract crap. My first impressions upon starting the uploading process were these: For the most part, it's pretty easy-you log in using your Amazon user account, give it some personal information (and hope they never get hacked), and go to the "bookshelf" and start uploading. A note: LitReactor's Rob Hart (who has done a really great job writing about his path to actual, on-paper publication, and I suggest everyone read all of those columns, as well, because they are helpful) has written about avoiding scams in the past, and while he didn't specifically touch on editing services, some are scams, and the red flags that apply to other aspects of publishing apply here, too.Īnyway, once the manuscript was all proofed and ready, I actually took a really deep look at the Kindle Direct Publishing platform, which has many, many, many instructions.
But if your parents don't love you, or you'd rather have someone who is a professional look it over, there are editing services available, if you want to spend money. Thankfully, I have parents who will do this for me for the price of "daughterly love" (and also a portion of any royalties I may receive). The first step was to have someone other than myself edit the manuscript. And even if I only make, say, $5, it's still $5 more than I had before- and I can share my experience with all of you.Īnd thus, my Kindle Direct Publishing experiment was brought, slimy and weird, into this world. I'd just be happy if I was made a thousandaire. And while Amazon is by no means the perfect route to publication (they've sort of been a pill, regarding eBooks), it just looks so easy. One is actually, my mom tells me, pretty decent- so decent, in fact, that I tried to get a literary agent to very little avail. It's technically possible, but in reality, it's probably a lot of work for very little return.īut then, I've got a couple of novels in my Google Docs, most of which are the product of feverish nights in November, churning out unintelligible "prose" during NaNoWriMo. My first thought was that it reminded me of all the Okies who migrated to California during the depression, because one person reportedly picked a billion dollars in peaches, bought a rambler, and retired at age 45, while everyone else was standing in the bread line. When the story of the 26-year-old romance writer from Minnesota who became a millionaire by self-publishing on Kindle hit the Internet, suddenly everyone was considering using the platform to upload their torrid boddice-rippers and young adult novels sure to be the next Hunger Games.