Themes Gleaming Darkly Part 8 - Publishing

When I began to collect the stories for Futures Gleaming Darkly and talking about releasing an anthology, many people asked me how it was going to get published. “Self-publishing, probably,” I said, not knowing what that meant as far as commitment or process. Why deal with it if I don’t even finish the book, I thought.

However, let me be the first to tell you: Do not fear self-publishing. There are pros and cons, but I only have real experience with self-publishing through Kindle Direct. I only have good things to say about the process and hopefully this will give you a primer of sorts.
Kindle Direct Publishing is a free to use resource, you just sign in with your Amazon account. In creating your account, you’ll set up how you want to receive your royalties (which may seem premature, but go ahead and get it knocked out).

From there, you can create an ebook or a paperback (or both!). For an ebook: You enter the information about your book such as the title, the author name you’re publishing as, a description and picking categories for it to be listed as. One small caveat, to publish an ebook through Amazon, you have to download their program (it’s free!) and format your manuscript in it. This makes sense, as it saves your document as a kindle file to be read by Kindle (Android) and iOS devices. It has the added benefits of auto-detecting your chapter names, giving you templates to make everything uniform, and autofilling a Table of Contents for you. Then, you upload your manuscript and either upload a cover or use their cover creator program to make one.

The process is the exact same for the paperback, except you have to format the manuscript in Microsoft Word based on the size of the book’s pages. But, good news, they have free templates with or without sample text to make it relatively painless.

In both cases, your final step is determining the price for your book. This is a little tricky, but there are good resources online to help determine your book’s price based on other books of a similar genre and pagecount. The price determines the royalties you get, and we’ll get into that in just a moment.

Overall, it’s a pretty easy process that allowed me to finally realize my dream of having a book published...easy enough in fact that I was able to publish another book a month after the first one from writing I had accrued over the years.

Here is a quick list of useful info that I figured out in my use of KDP, and will hopefully answer some top-level questions you may have:

1. KDP does not require any up-front payment or fees. You risk absolutely $0 in getting your book published. You don’t have to buy a minimum number of copies and you are not penalized if you don’t sell a certain number of copies, etc.

2. The royalties are thus: if your book is priced between $2.99 and $9.99, you get 70% of the proceeds. For paperback, your printing costs are removed from your royalties. Therefore, the price of your paperback must be a minimum of 125% of the price of your ebook and enough to cover the printing costs, of course. So if your ebook is $3.99, your paperback has to be at least $4.99, but the printing costs will eat the majority if not all of the money you make on royalties. You can absolutely have a free ebook, as well, and KDP offers a way to track the number of downloads your book has.

3. You are able to get author copies of your book for just the printing cost and shipping. Of course, you don’t make royalties off of yourself, but it’s nice of them to include that feature.

4. In setting up your book, you will find a setting to elect into Kindle Select, which allows Kindle Unlimited users to read your book for free. It is honestly a really good deal unless you plan on publishing your stories digitally elsewhere. Essentially, you agree that Amazon holds the digital publishing rights to your ebook for 3 months at a time. You earn royalties off of the number of pages read over a month’s time. This is based on all the money set aside for Kindle Select authors divied out by the number of pages read. So this number does change. Most the time it is roughly half a cent per page. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s more than the $0 you’d get for giving your book away.

5. The review process is very simple but nerve-wracking. It can take up to 72 hours from the time you submit an ebook or paperback book and the time it appears on Amazon.com. They do notify you when it is approved or denied, and you can go from there. But that didn’t stop me from endlessly refreshing the page to see if it had gone from “In Review” to “Publishing” to “Live”. Any changes you make to your book are also submitted for approval, but this does not stop your book from being sold in either format while they are being approved.

Overall, I would definitely recommend KDP for self-publishing your work. It puts the burden on you to promote and market your books, as you do not have a publisher to do it for you, but it is a really good way to get your pieces out there and available for purchase quickly.