Self-Publishing through Amazon KDP

Just this week I released my third large piece - a novella - LIFE OF MAGGOT through Amazon KDP.

Now you'd think, with three large pieces and three short pieces published this way, I'd be a dab hand at this by now. I'm not. You see it's been a couple of years since I published NIGHTJAR and 76 AND THE ODD 93 in quick order, and so to my horror I saw CreateSpace was no more. New software and processes had to be learned. I might have cried a little at this point, enough to fill a bucket, but my fear and pain were needless.

For the paperback process nothing had really changed. It was much the same as last time. Sure, the 'WYSIWYG' (What You See Is What You Get) is never quite like that. It's more What You See Is What You Sort of Get and now you have to mess around a lot with margins, paragraph spacing, headers and footers, images and trim lines in your original document. Then you have to see if it translates by uploading. Then you have to repeat the process ad infinitum until you achieve (with a bit of luck) exactly what you wanted.

Took a day or two.

I was expecting that.

Then I went to what used to be the easy part through CreateSpace - the Kindle version - only to be welcomed by new software. It used to work so well. I cried. Downloaded Kindle Create. Uploaded my manuscript to the software and realised I now needed to work on format and images, adjust margins, move image locations to within text rather than at the end of text, and so on and so forth.

In truth it took another day I wasn't expecting, but - and this is the important bit - it worked really well. Once you have everything positioned right in your word document, you process it through Kindle Create to provide a .KCB file before generating (from that) a .KBF file from which the Kindle book is created. It means/needs a couple more folder locations, file types, and getting your head around the processing order, but once you have a formatted .KCB file, it becomes very easy to make changes to your Kindle Version.

Phew.

So I guess what I'm actually saying is, in truth and in retrospect, that everything runs just as smooth through KDP. It's free (your cost being in royalties) which is great for authors like me with limited (read 'no') means, and you end up with excellent quality in your product. Happy days! Thanks Amazon.