Over the last several years I have been writing blogs centered around composers, writers, or television series. Blogs are typically used as a kind of "online diary", but in my case I used the "installment" nature of blog posting as a way to upload posts about individual records, books or TV series. Ultimately, a few of these blogs were "completed" - that is, my blog posts about a certain composer or TV series had covered every single record/episode of my subject. With the final addition of a few "appendices" posts, I more or less considered these blog projects to be a kind of online book, with each blog post standing in for a chapter. Obviously this is not an approach I pioneered, but it's one I stumbled on and so far it has worked out pretty well (to find out more of my many blog projects check out my Profile).
Blog Becomes Book
Recently, a small press publisher offered to turn one of my blogs into an actual printed book. The book was very successful (due to the book subject's fanbase on Facebook mostly) and 400 copies went out. After my relationship with that publisher ended, I decided to publish the book myself using Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program. In the end I was able to publish my book as a Kindle ebook and paperback, as well as on various other digital platforms like Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc. There are many paid services which can take an author's manuscript and format it so that it can be sold on Amazon. I decided to try and figure it out myself through Amazon's KDP University and by watching about 12 hours of YouTube How-To videos. It was alot of work but in the end I got exactly what I wanted, saving a thousand dollars in service fees and avoiding lots of arguments with editors. The purpose of this blog project is to record the steps I took to make my own book, mainly so I can do this again in the future, but also perhaps as an aid to people who might want to give this process a go.
The Heavy Lifting
There are many resources on how to write a book, but here are some techniques I used in my particular case which might be of interest to some writers:
- Be passionate about your subject. Be prepared to invest at least half a year to get to a first draft.
- Blog each chapter as they are completed. These constitute first drafts.
- Promote your blog on Facebook using Facebook Groups. Interact on these Groups to establish your presence on the Group.
- Don’t forget to thank the Group for any feedback you get during the process.
Importing into Word.
Hello Ed. I came to your blog from KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). Just read what you had to say about Styles. I think you're headed in the right direction, and am hoping that you come up with a comprehensive and clear set of instructions on how to publish an eBook. (No doubt the same thing needs to be done for hard copy, but that's something I'm absolutely not interested in.)
ReplyDeleteWhen I published back in 2015, I followed Aaron Shepard's "From Word to Kindle". It was well-written, easy to follow, but now somewhat dated and no longer current. He's since moved on to other things.
The main thing to keep in mind is that as software changes, the eBook publishing process also changes. Given that everything in the Word docx has a Style assigned to it, my process is Word > AWP (Atlantis Word Processor) > ePub > Sigil (to edit 3 of my headings) > ePub > Kindle Previewer > eBook. You can see the results with an Amazon search for B00WAF0B8O.
I see the same questions asked over and over again in the KDP chat room. Hopefully, you can come up with the go-to eBook that will answer most of them. Good luck!
Thanks for your message!
DeleteYeah, writing a guide on using 3rd party software to create a digital book is kind of like trying to hit a moving target. The nice thing about a blog though is that I can update my posts at any time, even ones from 10 years ago! Talk about historical revisionism.
So, if I continue on this path I will try to keep this thing updated. Right now this is very much a "work in progress", so I even hesitate to post a public notice about it, but I welcome constructive criticism like yours.
Best wishes!
(and way to go with the subtle plug, Pierre! :) Actually your book looks pretty interesting...)
Yeah, I guess it's a subtle plug, but I like show & tell. Others may look at what I've done and come up with some good suggestions.
ReplyDeleteI use the 3rd party software to convert from Word to ePub. Why reinvent the wheel by trying to manage HTML? That's what the books tell you to do. Not my thing. I'm pleased with the instantaneous results I get with AWP, and they've been very responsive to any questions I've had.
I do all the grunt work with Styles in the Word file, getting the book to look exactly the way I want it to look. Then it's just a matter of loading it into AWP and clicking the Save button. It literally only takes a couple of minutes. As for the edits in Sigil, they amount to deleting text in the HTML (e.g., "Front Matter") after the 'Front Matter' has been created as a chapter heading in the NCX TOC during the AWP conversion. Pretty easy stuff, really.
I like your blog idea. It can address the moving-target aspect, and then be converted into an eBook, which in turn can be updated as the landscape changes. I've gone to doing versions in my own eBook which the reader can download (or not) depending on how interested they are in getting the latest edition. I've included instructions abt how to do this in the first couple of pages of the eBook.
We need a clear & comprehensive guide on how to publish eBooks. There just isn't anything out there now that comes close to showing people how to do this. Maybe you're the guy that can do this. I hope so...
Then again, do we really need the competition? Just kidding, haha.
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