Hi there fellow authors. Here is my self-publishing experience in as fewer words as possible and what it entails via Amazon.

It's not something anyone should dive into with a first book for sale to paying customers unless you have carried out extensive research. That first book you publish can either establish, or destroy your career, or at the best, hold you back until you can publish more having learned lessons. Not so on Wattpad, as this is a site designed for all in terms of experience, from beginners to those with experience trying out their work for free and to get feedback. More recently, Wattpad have delved into publishing authors for paid content, but it is by invite only. I have applied for my latest completed work The Property Virgin to be included in their paid content, but either impatience in waiting, or being turned down, I have the option to publish elsewhere without a gatekeeper and to get paid for my efforts.

I say that as someone who has been self-publishing for many years from the wild west days when there was little information on the net as to what was required. What information there was, was like the blind leading the blind. Nowadays there is an abundance of information and I could have avoided the many mistakes I made.

The aim that should be foremost in your mind is to produce a product as near to what a trad-publisher puts out, both in quality and in appearance on the sales page, so that your self-published work is as near indistinguishable from trad-published works as possible, given the constraints of budget available to produce the product. Readers on the whole as paying customers give no quarter for inferior quality just because a book is priced less than a trad-published book. Nor will they massage your ego as many do on Wattpad do in reviews to be polite and not to offend, so you'll need a hard skin.

Forgetting the writing for a moment, the most important thing is to consider the cover. It is the first thing that a reader sees to spark interest. Here research helps. Whatever genre you choose, it pays to go to the Amazon charts for your genre and to look at what covers those at the top of the chart are putting out. A cover might look good full size on the computer screen, but all a reader sees initially is a thumbnail. Of importance is that the cover is genre specific. In other words, without the title would you know, or have a good stab at the genre from the imagery? Only then move onto the title and make sure it is legible when viewed as a thumbnail. Always view a thumbnail in black and white. The reason for this is for those readers who are colorblind, some colors meld into one another. Red is a particular culprit. You can research this.

Always upload e-book covers as JPGs at a resolution of 300 dpi. All that is, is the number of dots per inch that forms the image. The more the dots, the better the image when displayed on a device. Upload it at say 72 dpi, and the image on Amazon will look blurred. For the dimensions and proportion aspect of the e-book cover, look up what Amazon recommends on their site.

Print book covers are different. These have to be uploaded as a PDF, unlike the internal text which can be uploaded as a formatted Word document or as a PDF.

Amazon have templates for book covers that you can download to your design software. There are two different templates. One for the paperback, and more recently for the hardbacks that you can now publish. Here you will need to have determined what size of book you wish to sell in terms of dimensions. I go for the 9x6 inches, but there are other choices. Note that the hardback template might mean you have to alter the size of your title or author name due to the method of production. Again, there are full explanations on the Amazon KDP site. The same text file you have submitted for the paperback can be uploaded for the hardback without any alterations.

Before designing the print cover, it is best to have formatted your internal text with the same dimensions as you have chosen for your cover. Once formatted correctly, this will give you the page count that will enable you to download the correct template for the spine size.

There are templates that you can download for the internal text pages for a print book.

One thing to bear in mind for cover images is that you are not offering a product for free, and images are subject to copyright. I buy, or should I say license my images from depositphotos which have commercial usage rights, but there are other stock photo sites.

One thing to consider is a publisher name. Mine is Scorpion with a logo of a scorpion and under that the tag line -Thrillers with a sting in the tale.

You would need to check if there is a need to register a publisher name if you are from the US which differs from state to state. The only reason for a publisher name is to give your book a professional look as the e-book will be listed on the sales page as – published by xxxxxxxxxxx. You can also add images to e-books and print books, so you can include the logo and publisher name on the title page.

While not all e-book devices display in color, including the cover, you can upload color images to the e-book in the internal text. That is another reason to view your cover image in black and white, or grayscale. Don't overdo it with images though as the file size will be to big and cause to have to pay higher deliver charges to devices.

The print book is different. It is too costly to upload images in color for the print book that are inserted the internal text (not the cover) Any images will have to be converted not to black and white, but grayscale. (remember what I said about colorblind readers.)

One thing about e-book files is that they are formatted different to how they are on here. I do all mine in Word to produce a docx for upload. The first sentence of a chapter not indented, then all other paragraphs indented in my case at 0.5cm or 0.2 inches. All text single spaced. Amazon have templates to download. All chapter headings should be typed in a Word heading style to create an automatic table of contents. I'll be giving a full explanation of this in later chapters as I build this book. 

Okay, that's the packaging out of the way, but we're not at the content stage yet. No one will buy your book without visibility, and here are some of the things you can do before you publish in your author name if you haven't already done so.

Set up a web site

Twitter

Facebook

You tube

Goodreads (subsidiary of Amazon for readers)

TicToc and any other social media accounts that are popular that you can think of.

Using your skills at designing, give consideration to producing videos. If you take a look at Denverines first chapter, you will see a 33 second video of one I have produced and uploaded to social media for Wattpad using free software. I have more videos for books that are published on amazon which are around minute long loaded in the headings of my book The Property Virgin on Wattpad. I think they are from chapter 6 or so onward. They would give you an idea of the videos I've done and maybe not what to do. You can maybe get ideas from those. If you upload to TicToc, then you need to tag them with BookToc.

Finally, you need to open an account with a site to build followers with such as Mailchimp for you to produce and send out newsletters. Grow these lists and you will grow sales when you put out new work for sale. There are quite a few so do your research on the internet for which one suits you. Links to your newsletter site can be placed at the back of your e-book for readers to click and to sign up to your newsletters.

Okay, that's it for product packaging and content. Now let's move onto the story and genre.

I have my doubts about fanfiction as a money earner on Amazon in view of copyright and trademark minefields for paid content, unless you know different. I'd recommend looking at what genre would interest you. Whatever, it is it has to be something you have a real interest in, or you'll lose motivation. I would recommend sticking to one genre if you want to build a fan base for readers to keep coming back for new works.  Also writing a mixture of short stories and full length works for publication will dilute your brand and from my experience put people off buying your books.  As a general rule, short stories do not sell. 

Another thing is to consider writing a series rather than a standalone, and I say this as someone who until last year only wrote standalones. My experience and researching others tell me that series of book make more income for a longer timescale.

Having decided on genre, all genres have their own reader expectations as to how stories are crafted, so if authoring these stories is new to you, do the research. As an example if you decided on the cozy crime genre and included expletives or steamy sex scenes, your readers would be shocked  and likely not finish reading as expletives and steamy sex scenes in cozy are not expectations and this is why crime readers of this genre stick to reading those types of stories in the genre. 

I would recommend watching all the videos of Abbie Emmons on YouTube. The majority of her videos apply to all genres regarding crafting stories and character arcs to reader expectations based on the three-act structure. But again, research expectations for your chosen genre for the specifics.

Also, research expected word counts for the chosen genre that publishers would expect. It would be no good publishing a 60,000 word book, or a 125,000 word book for a genre where the expected range was 80,000 to 90,000. Go outside of norms and you'll get kickbacks to length mentioned in reviews and lower star ratings. While there are always exceptions, this is largely the case.

Okay, you have everything organized, and you have authored your book ready for publishing. I would hope that you had used an editor, or at the very minimum a proofreader before publishing. Bear in mind the rest of your career could be judged by that first book and if readers would be prepared to go on to a second book, assuming they could get to the end, so it has to be the best it can possibly be, given the constraints of a budget at your disposal. Whatever you do, don't trust friends and family to do this task. Not saying they can't do it, but independents who are professional or amateur do a better impartial job. For paid edits, always check out the editor's credentials and make sure they have experience of your genre.

No one can guarantee success, and it might not come with a first second or even a third book, its perseverance that pays off.

I don't have a clue what benefit there would be in going paid with a completed book on Wattpad. All that I know is that Wattpad like publishers are gatekeepers and it is by invite to go on their scheme. Publishing through Amazon KDP has no such gatekeeping. At the moment I am exclusive to Amazon for my paid works and here's how it works. If you price your e-book at anywhere between 99c and $2.98, you get 35% royalty of the list price with no file delivery charge. If you price between $2,99 and $9.99. then you get 70% of the list price less any file delivery charge which is only in the cents.

If you are exclusive, then your book is available to readers of kindle unlimited. The members pay a monthly conscription and in turn they can download e-books without any further charge. Amazon set a fund every month for distribution to authors depending on the number of pages that have been read of your book. It averages out at 0.0045 per page read. Amazon use some unknown algorithm to calculate your page count which is above that shown on your sales page for the e-book. On average for any of my 90,000-word e-books, I earn around $2 per book. Page reads make up 70% of my income. This is somewhat of a disappointment to me as regards I earn more from a direct sale. Still, the income is good.

The reason why I always publish both a print book and an e-book is for two reasons. Firstly, if you only publish an e-book of say 90,000 words, Amazon will say calculate that and show it on the sales page as say 180 pages. (e-books have locations, not a set number of pages and pages viewed on the screen depend on how they are viewed as the text is flowable and fonts can be increased in size) If however you have a print book then the pages are fixed and will come in at around 325-350 pages for a similar word count. Amazon will replace the lower calculated e-book page count with this fixed amount for the print book on the sales page, making what you have on offer better value for money.

Secondly, Amazon will show the saving between the print book and the e-book which is a good marketing tool to sell more e-books. AS for profit on print books, you get to decide with a calculator they provide. I price mine at $13.99 for a $3 royalty. If you go for extended distribution outside Amazon, that could drop to 60c through say Barnes and Noble. However, print book sales are few and far between, but it is better to have them than not. I can't comment on hardcover as it is a new product and I haven't produced any a yet, but I will be doing if only to get them for my own shelf at home.

I hope this is of some use. If you have any questions, write them in a comment below and I'll answer them, maybe in a separate chapter. Regardless, if you follow me, I'll be adding more parts in more depth and sending out notifications when they are published.

I have many ideas of what to publish, from in-depth formatting file instructions for upload, including adding images, to editing tips and a whole host of subjects on self-publishing. 

Kind regards, Declan