I would like to share my story here with my fellow community member, the day I announced the book published by my daughter lots of folks approached me from the community and asked me how I did it? In this post I will share with you my process.
Publishing book is not a rocket science, trust me it is super simple, even if this is your first time then don’t be afraid.
The key ingredient is the content, and to have a content you need tons of creativity. Now, the question is how to ignite the creativity in someone, it is challenging if you are a grown-up, however it is not that hard in kids. I will come back on it later.
Now let’s get to the point. From here onward I will assume the content is ready, it doesn’t matter if the content is in a notebook, jotted down with pen.
Here is what happened with my daughter, when she came to me that she wanna publish a book, I bought a notebook from Daiso Japan (any dollar store can do the magic). It cost us $1.5.
My daughter took almost three month to get her content ready along with sketches.
Then she presented me with her notebook, check out some of the pages from book:
I then fire-up a website known as “fiverr.com“, as you are aware of today’s economy, the pundit are calling it “gig economy”, Fiverr is that site. Where you can hire typist to convert handwritten notes into digital version (word doc, rich-text document etc) or you can hire someone to draw the logo for you, you name it and I am certain you will find some interesting gigs to be done. Mostly people are from around the world. How to judge if that person is reputable and will deliver the work. Don’t rely on reviews only, make sure to see for how long that person is active. What’s the response time. If in doubt buzz someone to evaluate that person for you. You can also check the person’s integrity by sending them a message, even though our communication is 70% non-verbal but 30% of the textual communication may going to reveal some bits which can help you evaluate the integrity. That’s the short-fall of gig economy, because the person you are talking to may be living next door, however 90% chances are he or she is living 10,000 miles away from you.
Also, if you have sketches then you will need an artist to digitized the sketches for you, same route you need to take … fiverr.com.
Once all the content is ready, then compile them, either hire someone on fiverr.com or you can do it by yourself. This DIY exercise need bit of a patience. Whatever software you may have Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages. Fire up, and put the content together. Four main thing you need in a document
- Cover Page
- Table of Content
- Preface
- Rest of your content.
Create this template before starting a your book production. Make sure your final output is either in “.doc” format or “epub” format (if you are using Apple Pages).
After you done putting all the pieces together, go ahead to http://kdp.amazon.com. This is the Kindle Digital Publication platform by Amazon Kindle. It allows anyone in the world to publish the book, even aliens from Mars can sign-in and start publishing the book if they want to.
KDP setup is super simple, it does ask you to fill some basic detail for example author name, manuscript (there you need to upload the document that you produced).
Pricing is up to you, you can publish it for free, or you can set a price. I will suggest go for lower price for kids book. This will help you understand the dynamic of the KDP system.
This is it! Super simple way to publish the book.