Madrigal wrote: ↑Sun Aug 13, 2023 11:10 pm
starjots wrote: ↑Fri May 12, 2023 10:26 pm
Available on Amazon in ebook and paperback format. Free with Kindle unlimited.
I have a dream of Madrigal doing a Spanish translation.
This is awesome!!! Congratulations. I'm actually getting certified after... 18 years translating? But it'll take a while. I will keep this in mind.
Meanwhile, I'd love to buy it next month.
I actually am curious about how to get published. I have a book that isn't mine that I was thinking about getting published, but the whole process seems kind of daunting.
I never tried the traditional publishing route where you find an agent (the hard part) and the agent tries to sell the book to a publisher. Finding an agent did seem very daunting to me, akin to playing the lottery. There are entire mini-industries of people who feed off the dream of publishing a book.
Self-publishing was not that bad. Some steps I did in no particular order:
1. Find an image online for my cover and commission it's owner to make some changes and give me rights to use it. This turned out to be a jewelry designer in Ukraine and cost me $50 or so.
2. Buy a subscription to Canva and design a cover using said art. Spent several days fiddling with this. You can hire someone to design a cover, but I was interested in doing it myself.
3. Copy edit and proof reading. Another thing which you can hire people, and usually recommended to spend money. Instead I did one more copy edit and three proof reads, one after another. I still missed a few things.
4. Formatting/layout. I used a website called Reedsy. Originally I worked in Google Docs, so I uploaded it for the last 3 or 4 edits. The site as a very simple tool for layout with few options. It looks pretty good, but you get some orphaned paragraphs and stranded sentences. I fixed those as best I could, but it could definitely be better. This is another thing you can pay for.
5. ISBN number. To publish a paperback on Amazon you need an ISBN number, which is handled differently country by country. In the US it's controlled by "Bowker Identifier Services". This was the most expensive part, $350 for 10 ISBNs, which I used 2 so far (ebook and paperback). Their website is a complete anachronism, but Youtube had some walk throughs.
6. Write the extra material - back cover, acknowledgements and so forth.
7. Find a decent picture of myself or get one taken. I just fished through some existing recent photos.
8. Pick a platform for self-publishing. Amazon in this case, or rather 'Amazon Kindle Direct'. Sign up for an account (free). Figure out how to navigate their website (not too hard, plenty of tutorials out there). Upload the book and cover. Set the price - they have a tool for this. I chose the lowest price possible where I would make $2 per copy.
9. Marketing. I bought a program called KDPRocket which gives you insights into keywords, categories and such things on Amazon. It's a good product. You still have the nearly insurmountable problem of getting your book on the first or second page of someone who is keyword searching for books or browsing categories on Amazon.
Your placement in searches depends on books sold, your books sold depends on placement. Catch-22!
I might carefully pay for some advertising. Mostly I'm trying to think of the next book.
I'll let you know when I get it.