I started this series to pass on the little I’ve learnt about self publishing. Here and here. This series is the ‘Mind the Gap’ sort between writing the book and trying to market it. The gap, getting it published, is tricky but easily achieved with a bit of patience.

I’ve had some feedback to my first couple of posts and one is around the difficulties of using a Word document to download it successfully into the Kindle software. I use Windows and the correspondent uses a Mac. It appears some code that attaches to the Word document like an electronic herpes occurs in Mac makes the formatting a veritable pain. Sorry if that’s the case. What can I say? It didn’t happen with me.

Back to Kindle, or rather Kindle Direct Publishing. By now you will have uploaded your book title, your blurb, your categories and key words, and your book itself. You may well have uploaded your book cover too. Hope so.

Now you need to decide on distribution. And pricing. You can go free or insert a small charge. Remember, the smaller you go with smaller the royalty you receive. Up to to a price of $2.99 (or the sterling equivalent) you’ll only receive 30% of the proceeds, above that 70%.

Once you’ve decided on the dollar price and assuming you want to make the book available across the globe – there are now outlets in many countries as well as via .com – KDP will convert your price.

Then you need to complete forms about how you want to receive your money. There’s all this stuff about international bank accounts which fazed me for a while but it’s easy enough to get the info from your bank and then you’ll receive your money electronically as and when sales are made. If you insist on a cheque payment then you need a minimum sale amount per country and frankly that could take a long time in some places.

So, all you need to do now is think about when you want to publish and do you want the paperback to be available at the same time. You can announce a  date so people can pre order. Or simply go live. If you do want the paperback alongside the electronic copy you’ll need to wait a little as that side takes a bit longer. And that’s my next post.