Is this for real?
A month ago, if I had come across an article telling me how to self-publish a book so quickly, I’d probably have rolled my eyes and scrolled on. Even more so if the author said they had not only published it but written it from scratch too. What utter nonsense, I’d have thought. The book must be a pile of shite if it was written that fast. And self-published? The formatting is probably a complete mess. How much is it? OMG. This is insanity. Run.
Except, I am now writing that article.
Fast doesn’t mean easy
I do not want to make it sound like writing and self-publishing a book is a piece of cake. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s a lot of bloody hard work. Formatting your own manuscript is a truly hair-pulling exercise. You need an eye for detail and the patience of a saint! Let me be clear, I would absolutely have paid someone else to do it if I could have afforded it. The problem is that as an author starting out, it’s a lot of money to spend that you don’t have when the reality is you probably won’t make enough from sales to cover your costs.
So here’s what happened.
For the last few months, in some of my kids` classes, I’ve been writing little conversations up on the whiteboard. I would get my students to copy them down into their notebooks and then practice them for homework. Then one day, on the 9th March to be exact, I suddenly thought, you know what, why don’t I write a book of short conversations that I can use in class and save time? The idea was born.
Writing flow
I started writing that same day. The conversations just flew out of me. I’ve been teaching kids for over twenty years here in Japan. I know the kinds of things I say, what they say, what I’d like to teach them to say and the sorts of topics that come up in conversations in English classes. I’m quite a fast writer generally. I have a tendency to act on intuition and go with the flow rather than overthink things when I’m in writing mode. The truth is, coming up with 50 conversations wasn’t hard at all.
Editing
I was so excited about my new project that I posted about it on my Facebook profile. A Facebook friend who saw it reached out to me and offered to edit for me. I gladly took her up on the offer and emailed her my manuscript. She got back to me within a day or two of me sending her the file and did a wonderful job. In the meantime, while I had been waiting, I started setting things up on KDP. I wanted to find out how much it would cost to print the book and think about pricing.
Formatting
It so happened I had a week off from teaching at the end of March. I used most of that time formatting I think. Formatting is hard. I researched and learned a lot when I published my first novel Allie and Nia: Shattered Pieces, so I wasn’t starting from scratch this time. I set up my file from the start – sizing it, adding my own margins and mirroring the pages so they look balanced with a spine. For that, you can make a template for a book cover on KDP by putting in your book size and the number of pages, etc to get the measurements for your spine width. Then you can use it to work out what margins you want on your pages. I used the same template to make the book cover on Canva.
I also set up all my headings and paragraphs in my word document. It’s really important not to use tabs or superfluous enters or spaces. You can set everything up so you have automatic spacing between headers and text, indents on the first line of a paragraph, etc, basically anything you want. I learned some new things that I hadn’t needed for my novel. For example, I made a couple of charts for some extra information on the UK at the beginning of the book.
Problem-solving
I learned lots of little tricks for formatting with my novel that came in useful this time too. There are some helpful shortcuts a general Word user might not know about. One of the most annoying things that happened this time was when I obliviously opened up my file on google drive on my phone and it messed everything up. For example, all of the apostrophes were switched into a weird style I didn’t want. Instead of having to go through and switch each one back individually, there is a find-and-replace function that does it in seconds. These little things can literally save hours. I also learned my lesson about making sure I back things up to my computer too.
There is another problem that pops up uniquely when you are using a Japanese script. If you make a space while using that script accidentally in the wrong section, although you see nothing on the screen when it prints you get a little box showing up. So you have to be really careful to go through the formatting and check everything. This kind of detailed level of scrutiny is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea.
Publishing
I published my book secretly on the 27th of March. Since I’m still an unknown author I was able to do this so I could order a copy for myself to check it out before announcing it to my Facebook world. I guess in the future if I do one day gain a larger following, it won’t be possible. In other countries, such as the USA, you can order author copies before you publish, but unfortunately, they don’t offer that in Japan at this time. I didn’t have the patience to wait two weeks to order it from America and get a friend to send it to me. I wanted this book done fast, so I could buy copies to use with my students at the beginning of the new school year.
Holding your own book
I cannot tell you how exciting it is when you hold your book in your hand for the first time. It’s truly an amazing thing. After I got my first copy, I went through it with a fine-toothed comb and made some minor alterations. I was actually pretty pleased with how it looked. Most of the changes were just things like me deciding to put hiragana in place of a kanji character that I wondered might be a little too difficult for younger students. I only found three really major errors: two incidences of missing punctuation and a mistake on the map of the UK. I needed to put a border in on Ireland to separate it from Northern Ireland and I had probably deleted the punctuation by accident while messing around with the formatting. After I made all the alterations I republished it with the updated file.
Unexpected challenges
Interestingly one of the challenges I wasn’t expecting was writing the book description for the Amazon sales page. For some reason, the formatting for that is quite tricky. Text doesn’t copy and paste very well from MS Word. I had to research it a little and learn the codes for spacing. In the end, though, I used Kindlepreneur which allows you to paste in text and format it and then it gives you the code that works on Amazon. I think it’s good to know a little about the coding because you can check with more confidence that everything looks OK before you go live.
Reflecting on how to self-publish a book
I actually think it’s really important to take your time to learn the process when you self-publish a book. I was at an advantage this time because I had only published my novel six months ago, so things were still somewhat fresh in my memory. I don’t actually recommend giving yourself a three-week deadline to self-publish a book. To be honest I wasn’t really focusing on the timeline. I just had this idea and forged ahead with it. I’m so glad I did though. I can’t wait to use this book with my students.
And… I’ve already started on the next one!
