You may have noticed the earlier posts about me doing an experiment of taking a 7 Day Challenge to publish a book on amazon in 7 days. I though I’d give it a go as something different to learn and you never know when I might get the urge to actually write a full book and publish it. This project was for a mini book so about 5000 words, I think I ended up with 5600 or something like that.
Anyway, day 1 was very simple. Basically, we had to open a Amazon KDP Account. Amazingly I already had one for some reason, Next up open a Canva account and again I already had one as I user Canva a lot for designing various things. Lastly, we needed to open a Reedsy account. Actually, I know a guy called Reedsy but it was nothing you do with him! I now know that Reedsy is used later when you’re ready to format the book from a word or Googe docs format to a eBook and pdf format. Amazingly all the software is free although Canva does have a pro version with a subscription.
Day 2 and again not too taxing. First thing to think about was the subject for the book. Now I had a couple of things in mind, Positive self-talk, something which I’m interested in and would be writing as a discoverer or learner rather than as an expert my other thought was a small travel guide to The Gambia in West Africa which I finally decided upon. The reasoning behind that is that I live here at least 6 months of the year so I thought that it may be a little easier to come up with 5000 words on restaurant and things to do here than on positive self-talk
Task 2 on day 2 was choosing the title and sub title which is fairly straightforward and you can obviously look on other travel guides on Amazon for inspiration
Next up was creating the book cover. This is done in Canva who have loads of templates which you can edit and add you title and subtitle and your name or pen name as the author.
As I said earlier, I allowed an hour each day for the daily sessions but the first 2 days took me less than an hour, There were videos but I managed to watch them at x2. I guess though that if I’d had to figure out how to find my way around Canva and had no experience of using it then it would have taken me longer.
So onward to day 3 which was writing the outline of the book. Again, we were shown how to use Amazon to look at what sections similar types of books had. With writing a travel guide I had sections like Introduction, How to get There, Pre – trip planning, Where Stay, Top restaurants etc. That all being sorted and collated into the desired order we decided on any resources that we’d use, I basically used Google Maps, local knowledge and Google search for any figures I needed
Days 4 and 5 were writing days and to be honest this is where I lost a day as I went into day 6 with the writing, The advise was to use Google Docs and just let the words flow and not correct as we went along. Editing and grammar can be checked later. Anyway, if I was ever to write a full book of 30000 words or more, I think I would allow 30 hours plus because the writing I think I could produce that amount from the experience on this experiment,
So, to day 6
Which in my case was actual day 7 and it’s completing the book. So, it’s spellchecking and proof-reading for which Google sheets is excellent as good old uncle Google underlines spelling misstates and probable grammar errors. I think it’s also may be good to actually read it yourself too to make sure it makes sense.
You need to write a summary of the book, an accreditations page crediting the sources you’ve used, and then it’s over to Reedsy to format the book as a Kindle eBook and a PDF for the paperback. That was a straightforward and painless enough.
Next up was actually into Kindle Direct Publishing to upload the book and create the covers for the eBook and Paperback and select the specifications for the paperback.
Then publish and wait till Amazon confirm its accepted and live. From memory I think mine took about 36 hours to go active.
Onto Day 7. This is actually MY day 8 and with other things going on, which you can learn about elsewhere in the blog its actually 10 days and Saturday 10 the February, since the book went live.
So today is about a bit of marketing. I’ve posted the book on My Facebook accounts, and I’ll also post on a couple of Gambia tourist groups. I didn’t take this on to make money, if was for the learning and experience of something different at a sale price of $2.99 there’s not a great amount of money anyway but any income from sales will be donated to Gambian charities anyway so if you are curious then why not get a copy and leave a quick review to help with sales. Bear in mind that its my first attempt at book writing, It’s not a masterpiece and not meant to be but I don’t think it’s bad.
Click here to purchase a copy.
I actually enjoyed this project and am reasonably proud of my little book. As I’m in Africa I’ll wait till I go back to the UK before a order a copy of the paperback as a souvenir.
The people who run this course, which was free, I just found it on Facebook, also run a more advanced training where they cover full books and claim to have students making lots of money publishing books on Amazon using ghostwriters. Theire website is www.publishing.com
It’s not a recommendation and I do not have any affiliation with them but I did get value from the training obviously
It’s not for me at the moment as I have other projects which I intend focusing my efforts on
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