Self-publishing gotchas

So I finally got around to fulfilling my childhood dream of becoming an author. I plugged away in the evenings after my day job and spent a good amount of my weekends focused on: world building, character development and getting in touch with the emotions and motivations of Nani Flores and Jacques Larouche my two main characters (and lets not forget dreaming up steamy love scenes). Around seven months later I had a finished product. Not perfect, but something I was happy with.

I’ve read about the rejections that new authors have faced in trying to get a deal with a publisher and though that wasn’t exactly daunting I got an overwhelming amount of suggestions to self-publish. So, I decided for my first book to swing it myself and it was both easier and harder than I imagined. I’m going to share some of the pitfalls I fell in that will hopefully help another noob author trying to self-publish their first book.

1. Get someone to read your book that is a teacher, editor, or anyone in the business of correcting grammar because even if you have a degree in writing or are confident in your ability to self-edit, think again. YOU WILL MISS SOMETHING. And sometimes that something is important.

2. Amazon Kindle formatting will sometimes not be compatible with your word processing software formatting. So, double check all your chapter formatting, table of contents, etc and make sure it looks good in the Kindle preview and works as expected.

3. If you published and found a mistake note that if you contact Kindle help in the self-publishing department in order to ask them to contact the customers who already bought your book they will review your book and if they find something else (like ill-formatted table of contents for example) then they will pull your title down until you fix it to their satisfaction, regardless of what you originally asked them to do.

4. Don’t use preformatted book formatting in Word - I can’t say this for sure but it might be why I had an issue with properly formatting my table of contents. I’ve had so much trouble with getting my table of contents to work on Kindle, for now I’ve given up and removed it. Yes, I followed the directions on how to accomplish this for both Windows and Mac versions of Word, but while it works fine in the Word doc once I upload it the table of contents redirects to the wrong page. If you have run into this issue and figured out the problem please let me know what it was.

5. Ask people to review your book! I haven’t done this yet and I plan to make it my next step, but I’ve seen authors have sign ups for reading a pre-released version of their book in exchange for a Goodreads or Kindle review and I will definitely be doing this for the De Novo Chronicles, book two: Atomizer!

Hope these tips help someone else on their journey to self-publishing!