The Mechanics of Publishing This Book

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When I decided to write a book, I had only the vaguest of ideas about the details of how to get to the final published book. Being an engineer and scientist, I researched my options and then experimented. Below are the experiments and results of those decisions. Hopefully this will either aid others in their quest, or at least warn them of what not to do.

I wrote my book on Microsoft (MS) WORD from the suite of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019. I’m currently using “Version 2207” and that upgrade occurred during my writing of this book. I wrote my first four chapters in December 2021 during Christmas break. I had the basic plot for these worked out in my head for months and the writing went quickly. I found that it worked well to review what I wrote the day before and then write new material. I have WORD proofing running continuously. But I was surprised that when you go into the “Review” tab and select “Spelling & Grammar”, it will find more things than the continuous checking.

SEE THE PAGE ON FUHAMMER REEDITED for how I improved my grammar and readability!

Steve Lowden was my content editor.  I think everyone needs at least one content editor and this person(people) needs to be plot detail and logic oriented.  I passed three to four chapters to Steve at a time and then allowed him time to get them back to me before I continued on. I’ve had a lot of years of storytelling in one form or another, so this process was usually a matter of minimal tweaking or adding in material so that everyone would be in line with what I intended. Also, I purposely leave threads that beg to be addressed for future plot. Steve’s questions back to me let me know if my intended threads were visible to the reader. If he didn’t catch an intended thread, I added enough content to make it show up as a question or problem. Often, Steve’s questions would lead me down new lines of thought. This was the most organic part of the process.

I knew I was a nobody in a large ocean. Who would pay an unknown an advance?  Who would commit money to promote an unknown? Knowing this, I had planned to self-publish from the start.  I was surprised to find that “print on demand” is not only readily available, it seems to be the standard. My guess is that nearly every book you don’t find displayed boldly at the front of the biggest bookstore chains is printed by “print on demand”.

I looked at various independent publishers, contacted a number of them, and even got some contracts after submitting my manuscript. I largely found them a mess of vague, but expensive, descriptions. The contracts are confusing and offer little. None guaranteed even one sale and none adjusted for poor sales. They do however have lots of provisions to their benefit if your book takes off. I found lots of “We will do ‘this, that, or the other thing’ up to x number of times.” Legally, zero is “up to” x. In fact, legally the contract limits the number of good things they will do, while not binding them to do anything at all.  I also found that I couldn’t get details. They would promise to contact hundreds of media contacts (typically between 300 and 700), but not explain who, or how this would sell books.  It seemed like a lot of huff and puff for between $3000 and over $10,000. Typical reviews of these publishers revealed only 5-star reviews of the author delighted to be holding the physical copy of their book that “looked beautiful” and 1-star reviews of authors unhappy with no/low sales and/or trouble getting paid royalties (or even an accounting of sales). Plus, they seemed to take forever to publish a book, many months. 

In contrast, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) seemed to require little additional work and is basically free. It seemed to me to be an obvious alternative. Their lack of a promise that you will sell books seemed no worse than the promises from much more expensive alternatives. And, if it doesn’t work out for you, you can always bale out and try something different (after 90 days if you select to go with Kindle Unlimited, which I did).

I imported my MS WORD document into Kindle Creator after downloading the program. The hardest part of this was that I had to type out the file tree with the file name since I couldn’t get the Kindle Creator “file browse” to work.  After this, it was actually quite easy. A few hours later, I had a generated document. I didn’t realize that all the text on the “Copyright” section is just placeholder. More on that later. I couldn’t get a paperback page count at this point either. More on that later as well.

At this point, I needed a cover. It was my original plan to go with both electronic and paperback versions. I knew I needed a page count to figure out the dimensions of the paperback art, so I decided to start with the electronic cover. Based on the advice of a friend, I search Fiverr for an artist. Standing out based on the cover was my objective.  I wanted a cover that was unique, colorful, bright, and largely scenery. This was pretty much the opposite of everything I found in my review of current books in my genre. 

I decided to contact mdbarkayuf77 through Fiverr since one of his pieces of sample art had the elements I wanted.  I found it pretty simple and straight forward to contact him and then contract with him for an electronic book cover. I’m a horrible artist and my sketch was barely anything for him to start with. Considering what I initially gave him, the final product is a minor miracle. We went through about a dozen cycles of review and modifications. When I was happy, I then contracted with him a second time to do a paperback cover. This basically expanded the top, right, and bottom art 0.125” for what they call “bleed” (the amount of manufacturing slop in the mechanical printing assembly process). The left art was expanded by the spine width, back cover and the 0.0125” left “bleed”. 

I had mdbarkayuf77 put all the front cover (aka, the electronic cover) text on as artwork. This allowed a lot of artistic freedom and placement tweaks for that text (which could even be a fully custom font). I then then used Amazon’s Cover Creator to put text on the spine and back. This also worked well. It was especially effective when I wanted to change the back text a little late in the game. And it meant that I didn’t have to worry about centering everything if the spine width estimate was off a little.

In retrospect, it would have been easier (and perhaps cheaper) to overestimate the spine slightly and have mdbarkayuf77 produce a paperback cover that could be cropped to make an electronic cover. To get a good spine estimate, MS WORD will custom create a 9”X6” page. I used default “narrow” margins, “Ariel 10” font, 1.5 line spacing, and a 2-line header (no footer). The resulting page count is only off two pages from the final book. Note: I think the Kindle Creator uses a slightly larger left margin and slightly smaller right margin to arrive at about the same line length.  By placing the spine and back text later with Cover Creator a good deal of uncertainty can exist in the spine estimate. One just needs to be sure that the leftmost art is there for a slightly wider spine, but just as easily can be sacrificed for a slightly narrower spine.

mdbarkayuf77 can be reached via mdbarkayuf77@aesthesis.incas   as well directly through Fiverr.

Amazon offers free ISBN Numbers for books published by them. Knowing no better, I accepted this option.  It can be changed in the future if the need arises.  The trick, hinted at earlier, is that this free ISBN is assigned as you work through the Kindle Direct Publishing Bookshelf setup for your book, NOT in Kindle Creator. Despite looking valid, the ISBN in Kindle Creator is worthless for anything more than text holder (they should have used all 9s, or some similar technique, to make it look as fake as it is). You have to go back to your document in Kindle Creator and edit the “Copyright” section with the assigned ISBN you get assigned in Kindle Direct Publishing Bookshelf. Then you have to regenerate it and reload it into Kindle Direct Publishing Bookshelf. This was the first repeat loop I found. I don’t see any good way around it. 

The second repeat loop is that until you download the cover you can’t generate the book’s preview in Kindle Direct Publishing Bookshelf. That preview is the first place that I found the final page count which is used to calculate the spine width (that is needed for the cover size calculation in the first place). I ultimately estimated the spine width as described above. Since my estimate was so close to the real answer, I avoided actually performing this second loop. 

The rest is history. I wanted to make my book readily accessible and, at least initially, that is linked to cheap for an unknown author. So, I minimized my royalties to ideally maximize my sales. And I went with Kindle Unlimited. Kindle Unlimited readers can read my book for free.  Hopefully the cover will catch their eye.  Time will tell if this strategy yields lots of readers.