Today is the day I start the formatting and upload of the new book into Amazon’s self-publishing portal. It’s not a terribly technical process but it involves a lot of steps so a lot of people will hire someone to do it for them.
First, you have to have the text. Unless it’s only a picture book, which you can produce with KDP, it’ll need some words. It’s just so much easier to use Word for this because KDP gets along with Word and imports it directly. Any other word processing program would need to be saved in Word format which it may do but not have it be to the same exact document specifications as just using Word. When importing text from one word processer to another, some types of formatting can be lost. Since KDP requires very specific formatting for the text to import over to the Kindle Create formatter, losing that kind of data can just make extra work later. And editing in Kindle Create is not the best experience.
Kindle Create is a useful and necessary tool but it’s not as user friendly as Word or Open Office. The primary use for Kindle Create is to upload the text into a format which will immediately port over to the printer Amazon uses to print the books or publish the ebooks. Amazon encourages users to create all formatting and editing tasks in Word prior to importing to Kindle Create. What you see on Kindle Create is what you’ll see when you open the cover of the printed book or open the ebook on your ereader.
The primary goals for me in Kindle Create to ensure there were no editing mistakes made in Word which will push text into an unusual or strange configuration once it’s in Kindle Create. I can always tell those authors who paged through their books prior to publication and those who didn’t. Some part of the book will skip a page or text will suddenly break, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, for no obvious reason. There is a reason, of course. The reason is that there is a hard break or paragraph break symbol which wasn’t discovered until it was published. This makes the reading experience a difficult one. It’s so odd and disturbing
when the text just suddenly does something weird in the middle of a paragraph or sentence.
I personally choose to page through every single page of my book to make sure I spot those. I take that opportunity to also make certain that my page layout is what I want it to be. Create wants to set the book layout to the most paper and space saving format possible. It can be hard at first to see in your mind what a book layout is. It took me a while to learn how to do it best. This will be book five I’ve published so I’m kind of getting it down now.
Another task to complete is chapters. We all love our chapter breaks. It’s a chance to stop the story because we have to do something else which is not usually as much fun as reading. You can insert images into the text, but I personally have not done this yet. There is a huge amount of support offered from Amazon and experience is the best teacher. They continue to keep it updated and add new features. The best thing about is, what you see is what the book will look like when you get it done.
Another thing I’ve come to realize is that point of view shifts, moving the narration from one character to another, needs to be very clear and obvious. I’m sure when I’m done there will still be mistakes. In publishing as in crochet, I can never produce a whole project without a couple of oopsies. The ideal is to make it so the reader can still enjoy the product, whether it’s a crochet throw, a hand-made quilt, or a book, in spite of whatever mistakes I haven’t found or corrected.
Hoping to get the publication finished this week. I’m running out of time. I’ve done home renovations during this summer break, changed the university I’m destined to attend for my Bachelor’s, and tried my best to prepare for the Fall. Being able to hold Dorian 2 in my hands in a few weeks will be the best way to start the coming semester!
W. M. Tag Writes 