Self-publishing your own novel – the Kpopalypse way

Observant readers may have noticed that Kpopalypse has been publishing books. How have I been doing this? Also, how can you do it? A while ago I wrote a post about how to write and edit a story, but what about the next step – getting that story into the marketplace so people can buy it? This post has all the trufax about book self-publishing, where I will share all my self-publishing techniques and secrets!

Please note: this is a big subject, so this is a long post, practically an e-book in its own right. So if you’re interested in this subject, get ready to read a lot of things!

QUICK LINKS FOR BOOK PUBLISHING AT THE TOP OF THIS POST FOR EASY QUICK REFERENCE

Amazon KDP – print book and eBook publisher
Amazon KDP print cover calculator – make a template for your print book cover
Kindle Previewer – Amazon’s free desktop e-book reader
Kobo Writing Life – eBook publisher
Kobo Desktop – Kobo’s free desktop e-book reader
Barnes & Noble Press – print book and eBook publisher
Kindlepreneur – free barcode generator
Thorpe-Bowker – ISBN vendor (Australian link, use the link for your country)
US Copyright Office – register copyright in the USA (if you want to)
Form W9 – US citizens wishing to be paid for book sales must fill this out
Form W-8BEN – non-US citizens wishing to be paid for book sales must fill this out
Ninite – if you need free software like Gimp, OpenOffice etc, a good way to get it

PROGRAMS YOU WILL NEED

Microsoft Word or similar – I use Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2021, which has Microsoft Word 2021 as part of the package. So my guide will show you what to do on that program. Most recent versions of MS Word are similar to this one. Free alternatives like OpenOffice and LibreOffice also exist, but I don’t know if they can do everything that this guide will show you, as I haven’t tried. Good luck I guess.

Adobe Photoshop or similar – I use Adobe Photoshop 7.0 which is as old as the hills. So my guide will show you what to do on that program. I’m not an artist, so this crusty program does enough for what I need it to do, so I’ve never felt a need to upgrade it. Newer versions will obviously be able to do things much better. If you don’t have Photoshop, Gimp is a free alternative which is quite good, but whether it can do everything in this guide or not, I don’t know, mind you I would be surprised if it can’t outperform my 25 year old version of Photoshop. It’s probably just a matter of figuring out how to do the more technical things.

Kindle Previewer or Kobo Desktop or similar – you can download these for free at the links. Other free e-reader programs will also do the job, probably.

Notepad or similar – no, really. You’re going to need it.

If you’ve got all of the above, the computer to run it on, and some money, you can publish a book! Yes, you need money! But how much, and for what exactly?

ESSENTIAL PURCHASES

• Between $0 and $USD 295 for ISBNs depending on where you live (Americans seem to pay the most, in other countries it’s less, in some countries I’m told it’s free)
• About $30 USD approx to send yourself a couple proof copies of your book for checking over

OPTIONAL EXTRA PURCHASES

• Between $0 and $500 USD for book artwork (zero if you do your own art or use an auto cover generator, personally I hate generated template art and I’m no good at art myself either so I hire an artist, the amazing Caius Augustus, he does commissions, you could hire him also if you wanted, tell him I sent you if you do)
• Between $0 and $6000 USD for an editor (zero if you self-edit, personally I am an experienced developmental editor so I completely self-edit, I’m also happy to edit anything you send me, if you want something edited by me email me to discuss rates)
• $USD 45 for copyrighting (not required, but arguably a good idea, more on this below)

WHAT YOU SHOULD NOT PAY FOR, EVER

• A barcode (this post will show you how to get free barcodes)
• Book advertising on Amazon or elsewhere (if someone is literate enough to buy a book online they’re literate enough to use an adblocker)
• Being featured in book advertising social media pages on Instagram etc (have YOU ever bought a book because it was featured on one of these pages? I rest my case. Also many of them are scams.)

WHERE DO I PUBLISH AND WHY?

So I publish my book in three places.

Amazon KDP – the biggest online book marketplace in the world, I’d be frankly silly not to publish here. It has lots of customers, it’s fairly easy to use, everyone knows it, and the royalty rate is as decent as you’ll get anywhere. Amazon KDP gets lots of criticism but their book publishing system is honestly really very good. I don’t get many ‘float-in’ customers who haven’t heard of me before buying my books, but the very few that I do get, I’m pretty sure that they all come from here and not anywhere else.

Kobo Writing Life – a great eBook marketplace, even easier to use than KDP, but with less customers which is a real shame because Kobo is better than KDP in almost every way from a publisher’s perspective. I register here to give my readers who have either borked their Amazon account or just don’t like giving Jeff Bezos money another way to purchase the e-book.

Barnes & Noble Press – but Kobo only does e-books – what if a reader wants a physical book but can’t use Amazon? That’s where Barnes & Noble Press comes in. I do not like dealing with Barnes & Noble because their website while pretty is a headfuck to use in practice and I actually lose money on them because I spend more money sending out proofs than I get back in sales. Also their customer service, while friendly, isn’t efficient – they take a long time to respond to simple queries. About 0.1% of my readers buy from there, but I don’t want to leave caonimas who want physical books without any options at all so that’s why I put up with them.

Places that I have looked into and decided NOT to use:

Lulu – print quality is apparently excellent but as an author you pay through the nose for it, I would have to charge a lot more for my books just to not lose money every time someone bought one and I don’t want to fleece caonimas like that. I think Lulu is probably good as a vanity press, if you want to make a nice book just for yourself and some friends, and I think they’d also be great for expensive art books, if I was an artist looking to put colour works into print at top quality and charge top dollar for it, then I’d consider Lulu for sure. However when selling a no-frills plain text novel to hundreds of people, I feel they are not the best choice.

Ingram Spark – fuck these guys, seriously. The have great reach and can get you into bookstores (this is known in self-publishing as ‘wide distribution’) but their publishing technical requirements are IMPOSSIBLE to figure out. Apparently even veteran self-publishers struggle with them, and while I’ve never dealt with them personally I’m told their customer support is known to be quite shit. Search online and you’ll find tons of horror stories about them, avoid.

Draft2Digital – apparently an easier to use version of Ingram Spark and I found their help staff to be very responsible and good. However I didn’t end up going with them because their version of wide distribution actually conflicts with KDP a bit, and their royalty rate was lower, so it made more sense to just stick with KDP.

There’s other self-publishers too but I haven’t tried them. None seem to offer any clear benefits over the ones that I actually use. Also I can’t find a good publisher for audiobooks which is why I haven’t bothered going down this path, audiobook publishing is very restrictive in Australia (no, Amazon won’t publish audiobooks for Australian authors).

A FEW QUICK DOT POINT LEGALITIES FOR SELF PUBLISHERS

• I do not recommend writing a fictional book about real people. Fine for a blog, or AsianFanfics or something, but murky legal territory for a published book. Keep it fictional, or at least ‘fictional’, by not naming names. If you’re writing non-fiction on the other hand, consult a lawyer if unsure what lines you can cross.
• Stay away from mentioning other real intellectual property in fiction, as it can cause issues. For instance, if you mention real brand names it can cause your book to be pulled from sale. Make up as much stuff as possible, it’s more fun that way anyway.
• Don’t use other people’s text. Don’t throw a big chunk of a quote from someone else’s novel, or a popular song, etc. in your novel. Not even if it’s public domain like Shakespeare or something. It puts your book into a weird kind of “original but not” space and can affect things like copyrights.
• Don’t use any images or any other content that you don’t own the rights for or have permission to use. Once again nobody gives a crap for a dumb website like this one, but publishing a book is a different situation.
• For fuck’s sake do NOT use AI. Don’t even think about it. The staff at all self-publishing companies HATE AI WITH THE BURNING PASSION OF A THOUSAND SUNS because there are so many grifters out there spamming their crap low-quality AI-generated books because they paid $200 for some Andrew Tate course where he told them to “take control of their lives and get a side-hustle, then you can drive sports cars like me, man”, and they have to sift through all that crap. All these books are garbage and they just waste everyone’s time. Then there’s the potentially sketch legal aspect of using sort-of-plagiarised-but-not-really-but-kind-of text. The only thing AI is arguably good for is brainstorming ideas, but even then it comes up with shitty, generic, boring ideas that other people have already had a million times. If you’re creative enough to write a book you should also be creative enough to… you know, write a book.

GETTING YOUR BOOK MANUSCRIPT READY

So, you can’t just upload a fucking word document as-is and say “there’s my book”. Well, you can, but the book publisher will tell you to fuck off and probably reject your book, either when you upload it, or later when their automated system catches on that you suck at making books. There’s certain very important conventions that both print books and e-books need to follow, so we’re going to format our document in Microsoft Word so it follows these conventions. It needs to “look like a book”, basically. The following steps assume that you’ve already done proofreading and that your book’s “body text” is perfect.

In this case I’ll use my speed-fanfiction “Notice Me Moonbyul” for this. The first thing I’m going to do is configure Microsoft Word so it doesn’t botch our text up with fancy stuff that e-readers and publishing companies don’t like as soon as I import my text into MS Word. I’m talking about MS Word’s “smart quotes” and “smart apostrophes”.

REMOVING SMART QUOTES

Smart quotes are a curly style of quote where the starting and ending quotes are different in orientation.

By default, MS Word has smart quotes enabled, and the curly quote style does look pretty, but smart quotes aren’t compatible with anything other than MS Word so when you export to an e-book, you’ll face problems. Get rid of smart quotes by turning off the feature, by going to the file menu in the top left corner:

Then options in the bottom left corner:

Then “proofing” and then “autocorrect options”:

Then in the new window, click the “autoformat as you type” tab, and uncheck the box “Replace as you type: ‘straight quotes’ with ‘smart quotes'”.

This will prevent MS Word from adding smart quotes everywhere when you make edits. Now click the “autoformat” tab in the same window and uncheck the box “Replace: ‘straight quotes’ with ‘smart quotes'”.

This will prevent smart quotes being added when you mass-import text.

If any smart quotes sneak in anyway, do a “find and replace” on your document (CTRL+A to select all, then CTRL+H), put the smart quote in “find” and the straight quote in “replace”. You’ll need to do this twice, once for the smart quote that appears at the start of quoted text and a second time for the smart quote that appears at the end, as with smart quotes they’re two different characters (but in straight quotes there’s only one type of quote). Then repeat the process for single quotes/apostrophes, remembering once again to search for both types, the type that appears at the start of a quote, and the type that appears at the end (which is also the apostrophe character), as once again they are two different characters in ‘smart quotes’ style but only one character in ‘straight quotes’ style.

EMBEDDING FONTS

The next thing we want to do is make sure that we are embedding our fonts. This is important because if you don’t do this, you won’t preserve your fonts when exporting as a .pdf or uploading your book. You can do this by going to the same “file” and “options” settings as before, clicking the “save” menu and making it look like this:

IMPORTING TEXT

Now we’re finally ready to import our text! So just copy it and paste it into Word, right? Well, no, not such a good idea. If I were to just copy the entire fanfiction straight from WordPress into MS Word with no changes, here’s what I get:

However we don’t want to just copy it straight in like that. It’s easier to make changes to our text if it’s all just one big uniform bunch of paragraphs with no formatting, so the very first thing I want to do is strip away any existing HTML formatting in this text. You don’t need to know how to code HTML to do this. Just click your text that’s already in WordPress or whatever other program you originally wrote it in, CTRL+A to select all of it, copy it all with CTRL+C, open a blank notepad in Windows, paste your text in there with CTRL+V, then click your notepad. Now you can copy it again this time from the notepad, and paste into Word using the same keystrokes – CTRL+A, CTRL+C, click MS Word, CTRL+V. Here’s our result now.

Much better, just pure text in paragraphs. Now let’s make some decisions.

SELECTING A FONT

First, what font do we want? E-book readers can pick their own font in their reader so it doesn’t matter what font you use, but for a print book you’ll need to choose one. There’s no rule on what font you have to have, but you do want your font choice to not suck because you want people to actually want to read it, so it needs to look pro. How do you know what works? You can look at other books in your genre and see what they use, or you can choose from fonts that self-publishing sites recommend. Generally speaking serif fonts are used for print books, because they are easier on the eye for novel reading. Here’s a collection of some popular serif fonts for your consideration, these are recommended by most book publishing sites but there are plenty of others.

Because I stan Rachel Kim, I’m going to go with EB Garamond. As for font size, book body text is typically between 10 point and 12 point. I like to go for 12 point because I don’t see any value in making readers with poor eyesight squint, I want people to have an easy reading experience. Now our text looks like this (note that font size not shown to scale):

LINE SPACING

Now we want to change line spacing, as we’re currently at the default one and a half line spacing, which is just a little bit too spaced for book standard. Press CTRL+A to select your entire story, then click where indicated on the “home” tab:

Now make the spacing look like the below. This will get rid of the default spaces between paragraphs, and also correct our line spacing to book style. 16pt is about one and a quarter spacing between lines. If you’re using a smaller font size you might want to try 15pt and see if you like it more.

Press OK. You can also “set as default” if you like. If you do set as default, be sure to do it “for this document only”.

Here is where we’re at so far, and we’ve now saved a lot of trees by removing all that unnecessary space.

INDENTATION

However it does look like a mess, so we now have to indent properly. Novels separate paragraphs by adding indents at the start of each paragraph. However you don’t want to sit there and manually add indents individually like an idiot because it will take forever, so instead, select your entire book with CTRL+A again, go to the same paragraph control panel as before, and this time we’ll adjust indent settings to the following:

Note these are metric measurements. The default for MS Word is 1.27cm or 0.5 inches but that’s way too big. 0.5 cm is about 0.2 inches to change it to that. Now the text looks like this:

But we need to do one more thing here with indentation, which is remove the intent on the first paragraph of every chapter, as novels never indent the first paragraph of a chapter, only each one that follows. You have to do this manually for each chapter, just do it by placing the cursor to the left of the first letter of each paragraph and hitting backspace.

TRIM SIZE

The next step is we’re going to size our book. The default page size of Microsoft Word is actually too big for most books. To size our book we first need to know how big we want our book to be, which is called the “trim size”. There’s no right answer to the question of how big a book should be, but we can have a look at some common sizes on Amazon. The following panel is from their ‘book content’ creator wizard, which I’ll step you through later in this post, for now we’ll just look at it to pick a size.

You can see the most popular sizes at the top. I’m going to go with the smallest popular size which is 5 x 8 inches or 12.7 x 20.32cm, this is a standard size for a lot of young adult fiction paperbacks and all the Shin Hana books are this size. You can pick a different size if you want, or even define your own, but be aware non-standard sizes that are not listed here can cause issues with distribution. Since I’m a k-pop fan I like being conformist so I’m not going to do anything different here.

Now we’re going to make our MS Word document conform to this sizing. We’ll go to the layout tab, and to “size”. As you can see, it’s defaulted to A4 (the standard printer paper size in Australia). We want to print a book, not computer printer pages, so since our size isn’t listed we will head on down to “more paper sizes…” at the bottom of the menu.

Now we can make a custom size by manually editing the “width” and “height” ourselves. I’m going to make my book 12.7 x 20.32 cm here (the other options here should default to the below once you do this) and then click “OK”.

Once we’ve done that, here’s what our book looks like.

MARGINS

This is now a good page size, but there’s an obvious problem – our margins are ridiculous, because they’re still the size of an A4 computer paper printout, which is far too big for a book, so we need to fix that next. We do this by going to layout, margins and “custom margins”.

How do we know what size to make our margins? Well, it depends on how many pages the book has. All the various book publishing places give directives on this, so just use their style guides, then send yourself a proof copy and see if it looks any good. If you like, you can steal my settings which will definitely work for a 12.7 x 20.32 cm that’s around 400 pages long, but you’ll need to make adjustments potentially if you’re using a different trim size or page count. However you MUST select “mirror margins” and “whole document” before adjusting the other settings, as some of the fields are context-dependent.

Mirroring the margins is crucial, because books have pages on the left, and the right, and the margins are different, because there needs to be space for the “gutter” which is where the pages meet in the middle, and the gutter margin alternates between being on the left or the right depending on which side the page is on. You’ll see above that 0.5cm extra margin is added to the gutter so text doesn’t creep in there and become difficult to read.

Here’s the first two pages after I’ve adjusted the margins. It’s starting to look a bit like an actual book now! Notice how the margin for page one is larger on the left, and the margin for page two is larger on the right, this is because those larger margins are where the gutter lives. Page one of a book is always a right-side page, so the gutter lives on the left.

CHAPTER HEADINGS AND SECTION BREAKS

Next step is chapter headings, because we don’t have any proper ones yet. We deleted the WordPress headings when we imported our text, and we’re now going to do our own in MS Word. We’re just going to turn each chapter number into a heading. You can name your chapters if you want, but it’s not mandatory. I personally like to name chapters because I think chapter names are fun to play with reader’s expectations and it also helps me remember where things are. However most authors actually don’t name their chapters and will just stick with a single digit as the chapter heading, or “chapter one” “chapter two” etc.

Now, before we get started we’re going to turn on formatting markings as our next steps will be almost impossible without these turned on. Turn on formatting markings by clicking the home tab, and then this symbol here:

Now, you’re probably thinking “just insert a page break for each chapter, right”? No, instead you want “section breaks”. Why section breaks and not page breaks? Well, if you treat each chapter as a ‘section’, e-books recognise this and will put in appropriate navigation cues. Also you can attach rules to different sections if you want to, a section is very versatile whereas a page break is just a page break.

We’re going to insert our first section break after the book title but before chapter one, and each chapter will be its own section. We do this by going to layout, breaks, and section break – next page:

The result will be this:

On the left we have our title page (we’ll make it look good later, as well as add some other pages) and on our right is page one of the book body text.

Now an important next step. A carriage return marking must always exist immediately BEFORE each and every section break in your novel. This is an odd rule, but if you don’t do this it will make e-book conversions of your book on some platforms problematic because the conversion will occasionally space out the last line of your previous page in a weird way k   i  n   d      o  f      l  i  k  e      t  h  i  s  . So we now insert a carriage return by putting our cursor just before the section break:

…and hitting “enter”.

Now we’re going to go through and do this for every chapter in the book, we can save time here by copying and pasting the same carriage return and section break. Paste it in just after the fullstop of the last sentence in every chapter.

Now we can move onto headings. As I don’t use the heading feature in MS Word for anything at all besides novel writing, I always just go with the default “Heading 1” and then customise it to taste. There’s no strict rule for what a heading looks like, but here’s how to make them.

I’ll start by changing the digit to “CHAPTER [number]” just because I think it looks better for a tutorial:

To make this new chapter label a heading, just highlight it, then go to “home” and click the “heading 1” box.

This will automatically apply the Heading 1 style to your text.

That’s great, there’s only one problem; our heading looks like total dogshit. It doesn’t fit at all with the style of the rest of the book, so now we’re going to customise it. Do this by right-clicking the “Heading 1” box and selecting “modify”.

There’s no strict rules on how to make a header, you can make it however you want. Here’s how I do my headings:

Note where circled, firstly important to centre, but the second group of two buttons circled automatically adds space above and below your heading. Very useful. Once we’re done, this is what it looks like (note that I’ve turned formatting markings back off now for clarity):

JUSTIFYING TEXT

Looking good… but still not perfect! Look at the right side of the page. Books are fully justified, so we’re going to now modify the justification. That’s as simple as pressing CTRL+A to select our entire book, and then clicking here on the “home” tab:

Done.

Oh but it’s left-justified our heading for some stupid reason. (I probably should have done this step before I started making headings but…. oh well!) The way to fix this is to select your heading, then right click and select “Update heading 1 to match selection”.

Once done, select your heading again, right-click, “modify” and then center it in the “modify style” panel just like you did before (five images above).

PAGE NUMBERS

Now – let’s add page numbers. Start by double-clicking in the green rectangle where indicated.

This will put MS Word in a “header and footer mode”. The top menu will change slightly, the text of your book will be dimmed, and you’ll be in the “header and footer” tab, which was previously invisible. Now go to “page number”, “bottom of page” and pick “plain number 2”.

This will add page numbers to the bottom middle of every page.

Now that’s very classy but it’s not quite classy-sexy just yet. It’s not the same font as everything else for a start, and it also seems a little bit too high, like it might get in the way of the text a bit if I have a page with text that runs right to the bottom row. This has also made me notice that my footer margins aren’t great. So let’s fix all that up. Fixing the font is as easy as highlighting any page number with the cursor, this will bring up the font box. I’m going to change it to the same font as the rest of my book, and make it size 10 so it’s a little smaller than the 12 point body text as I don’t want the page number to dominate the page. This will change the font type and size of every page number in the entire book.

To get the vertical spacing right for footer margins, I’m going to go to the “footer from bottom” setting, and adjust it to 0.3 cm, which I think should be enough space. You’ll need to do this for each section of your book that has page numbers.

To get out of “header and footer mode” the quickest way is to just double click anywhere in your body text.

Now there’s a lot more you can do here. You can add your author name and the book title to the top pages, and click “different odd and even pages” so it alternates based on page, there’s a ton of stuff. Personally I don’t bother with that though, I find those sort of details to be a bit of a wank, so I’m just going to skip it.

TITLE PAGES

Now let’s do some title pages. It really doesn’t matter all that much what you do here, you can make your own rules up. But this is the format that I used for my own books, and in this case I’ll show you “Love Carousel”:

1. Title page. Use a page break after the title.

2. A blank page with just a page break on it.

3. Another title page. Page break used.

4. Another blank page with just a page break on it.

5. Credits page, with a page break. I modelled this on the credits pages in Jessica’s books, because I figure that she definitely knows what she’s doing in this k-pop book writing game so why not learn from the master. A few changes as appropriate of course, to make things more “Kpopalypse-ish”, so if you have Jessica’s books and want a bit of fun look at her credits pages and then mine. Subtle hinting going on here that the reader is in for a wild ride that won’t play out like your typical k-pop themed fiction, and also that there’s going to be plenty of cunty humour.

6. Another blank page with just a page break on it.

7. A dedication page.

8. Another blank page but this time with just a section break on it.

9. The first page of the first chapter.

There’s a couple things you might have noticed here. Firstly, this probably isn’t the most gentle easing-in to the story that you’ve ever seen in a book. But secondly, and more importantly, the page numbering starts on page nine. Actually, commercial novel convention is also that the first page of each chapter doesn’t have a number, but I don’t really care about that too much and didn’t want to go fucking around with it, however I also definitely didn’t want the title pages to have numbers because I think that looks like shit. So here’s how to fix that up, and we’ll now go back to “Notice Me, Moonbyul” to demonstrate.

So how do we get rid of the page number on page one, but not page two? You can’t just select it and delete it, because that will delete all your page numbers across the entire book. Instead what you should do is go to the first page number that you DO want to keep, select it and “format page numbers:

 

Uncheck “continue from previous section”, and pick a number to start the count from. In this case I only have one title page so I’m starting the count from 2.

This decouples this section’s page numbering from the section before it. Now you can go and select the page number for page 1, and “remove page numbers”. This is one reason why section breaks are so important, it allows you to set different rules like this for each section, if you used page breaks instead you’d have to put up with either numbers on every page, or no page.

And we’re done!

You can also add all sorts of other stuff, like shit at the end (I have a glossary, don’t forget to section that off too) and so forth. Just look at your favourite books to get an idea. This is quite a basic book layout, they can get a lot more complicated than this (I haven’t even touched on interior images for instance), but if you just want to get your damn thing out there, this is the bare minimum that will get your interior over the line with a reasonably professional looking end product that holds up pretty well against whatever else is out there. In fact a lot of other self-published books probably aren’t even looking this good.

So once you’ve got your interior book ready, what are the next steps?

LEGAL AND FINANCIAL FUN

Well we’ve got to sign up to all the self-publishing websites first. I actually can’t remember how I signed up to the websites, so I can’t help you much here, but it’s mostly not that hard, it’s like signing up to anywhere, with the added fun that you will need to give them things like bank details so they can pay you, you’ll also need to give them stuff like tax numbers (in Australia, the Tax File Number or TFN, varies in other countries but they all have their own versions of this). The biggest challenge is doing the tax paperwork, but all the sites will help you with this.

People who are not US citizens but are individuals/sole traders wanting to be paid by a US company will need to do a tax form called form W-8BEN. I’ve provided a download link but the websites will point you towards one anyway. Oh and if you’re not a sole-trader but publishing as part of a business or whatever, then I believe it’s form W-8BEN-E for you, they are similar. Americans don’t have to do these forms, but I imagine they would have to do form W-9 instead.

I don’t know how to do W-9 because I didn’t have to do one, but here’s how I fill out the W-8BEN tax form as an Australian to receive income from overseas for book royalties.

Fill out part 1 like this:

1 – your name

2 – your country of citizenship

3 – your address (both rows)

4 – postal address is optional

5 – skip this if you don’t pay tax in the USA

6a – your Australian Tax File Number (TFN) or equivalent in another country

6b – skip this probably

7 – skip this

8 – your date of birth

Fill out the rest like this:

9 – your country of residence

10 – for Australia this is “article and paragraph” 12(2)/P8 and 5% tax rate. The “article and paragraph” will change depending on which country you are in and what sort of tax treaty your country has with the USA. If you’re not sure just google “how to fill out w-8ben in [your country]” to get this reference.

No conditions are required to be put in the form, or at least I didn’t have to do any.

At the bottom tick the box, sign, date and print your name where indicated.

It’s worth having these instructions handy and knowing how to do this because these declarations expire every few years so the website will probably make you redo them. Anyway whatever forms you do you’ll then have to scan and send these off to the websites you sign up for. That’s the hardest part of signup.

GETTING AN ISBN

The first thing I think about, after I write my book and sign up to websites, is, I’d better get my ISBNs in order. ISBNs are like your book barcode that allows you to sell it around the world. Yes you do need one of these and no you can’t just copy the barcode off your “Fifty Shades” books or something.

To get an ISBN you’ll need to buy one, and you can buy them off whatever place in your country sells ISBNs. Every country has only one official place where you can get them. While some book vendors do offer free ISBNs, I think it’s better to get your own. For instance Amazon offers free ISBNs but since Amazon controls about 80% of the global book market, to a lot of bookstores Amazon are “the enemy” and an Amazon ISBN therefore is like a black mark, meaning other book stores won’t even touch your book. Or so I’m told, fucked if I know, I don’t even deal with bookstores, but it’s something to consider. Anyway I buy my own because my book belongs to me, not Amazon, dig? It’s worth the $8 per ISBN in my country.

(Do NOT pay for a barcode however! More on this later.)

In Australia the ISBN website is https://www.myidentifiers.com.au/ but it’s different for every country, authors are searching for how to do this all the time, so if you type ISBN into Google the right place will probably come up. If unsure just do some research on it, it’s a pretty easy thing to research.

So once I get to the site I make an account there and then I click the option to buy ISBNs, here’s the prices (at the moment) in my country.

Note payment on this site is credit card/debit card only, they don’t have PayPal etc.

Some countries actually do free ISBNs for everyone but mine doesn’t. I’ve always gone for the 10 ISBNs option. One ISBN on its own is a bit useless because you’ll probably want to do at least print and eBook as two separate things and you’ll need one ISBN for each. 100 ISBNs is cool if you are planning to write a fuckton of books but it’s not a significantly better deal than 10 ISBNs if you’re just publishing a modest amount. These prices might seem steep, but check the American prices over at the American version of the ISBN site!

Fucking ouch! I think if you live in the USA and are committed to a lifetime of book writing, the 100 ISBN pack isn’t that much steeper than the 10 pack so you might as well go for the 100.

Once I’ve got my ISBNs then I can assign them to my books. At the Australian website (and I believe it’s similar for other countries) this is at Account > My identifiers > ISBN dashboard, which looks like this.

(click to enlarge)

Here you can see the ISBNs already assigned to my books, and also some extra ISBNs. Why am I using three ISBNs per book?

• One for Amazon KDP print edition
• One for Amazon KDP and Kobo e-book editions
• One for Barnes & Noble print edition (they require a separate ISBN)

I’ll now assign the extra ISBNs to my new book at the time of writing, “Love Carousel” by clicking “Assign Title” on the next entry in the list. (Obviously this process will vary depending on your country and how their website works.)

Assigning a title, subtitle and other data to an ISBN (click to expand)

In this example I’m going to do the promotional blurb for the book later. I can always come back and add this type of information. The same goes for the book cover art. So this panel on the right, you can ignore it for now.

ignore this shit

There’s probably some benefit to adding a cover image, but we’ll get to that when it’s art time. Whatever you do, don’t do the “expanded” form view because you have to fill out a whole lot more detail about your book in that, and there’s no real benefit to doing this that I can see, also you can’t go back to the short view after which is very annoying. This process is long enough!

Scrolling down a bit, I add myself as the author. Note surname is a mandatory field here but first name and suffix are not.

And also my artist as the illustrator because why not?

Then there’s some shit down the bottom about price. This is awkward because I don’t like doing this here before I actually set up the pricing with the retailers. I’m just going to go with a guesstimate $AUD paperback price which is probably wrong (because prices are pegged against the $USD for my print books so the $AUD constantly varies due to exchange rates) and a release date of March 1st, which is when I plan to release it.

Now I hit “submit” and pray.

praise Chuu

Now I can go back to my dashboard (Account > My identifiers > ISBN dashboard), and the new entry will appear.

A status of “pending” is fine. Now, we can hit the “clone” on the right, and clone the entry two times, one for the eBook, one for Barnes & Noble. But we won’t do this yet, we’ll come back to it. Why? Because we want cover art first, that way we can clone the cover art too instead of having to upload it three times. You’ve already paid for your ISBNs so nobody is going to steal them in the meantime.

We can also now put our ISBNs in the book manuscript itself. This isn’t mandatory but I like to do it.

I’ve just done the first two here. I’ll change this later for the Barnes & Noble edition.

Now we’re running into a few roadblocks because we don’t have art yet… but we also don’t exactly know what our art will look like until we deal with a book vendor and get our style guide. So now it’s off to Amazon to get that stuff, but before we do, we need one more bit of essential copypasta – a promotional blurb.

For god’s sake don’t pay someone to write this type of shit. You know your own story better than anybody else does, so just give it a description that does it justice. Copy the format of other descriptions if it helps. You won’t be able to capture everything about a novel-sized book in one paragraph, so don’t try to do that, just focus on the main points to give a feel for what your book is about, and try not to spoil anything key about the plot or tell so much of the story in the blurb to the point where nobody needs to even read the book.

It’s a good idea to at this point also prepare a plain text file with:

• your three (or however many) ISBNs and what they’re for
• your blurb
• your bio and the bio of any contributors

You’ll find this handy to have in a text file close to hand, as you’ll have to put all of this information into quite a few websites. You will use this little notepad document over and over again when setting up your web stores etc.

FINALISING ART, BARCODES, AND DEALING WITH AMAZON

Okay so once you have your Amazon KDP account set up, it’s a matter of clicking “create” from the dashboard, and filling out stuff.

A “series” is optional, if your book isn’t part of a series you can skip it.

“Editions” are for if you re-release an existing book with major updates etc, you can ignore that part. Note that we paste in our blurb once again in the description.

Yes you’re the copyright holder. Although if you want to make something public domain you could, but I wouldn’t. No the book doesn’t contain sexually explicit images or a sexually explicit title, but I make my reading age 18+ because I don’t write children’s books. Primary marketplace for an English-language book should always be amazon.com because if you make any sales at all beyond your circle of friends for an English-language book they will be majority Americans. “Low content book” leave blank, that’s there for the idiots who do things like spam Amazon marketplace with crappy AI-generated colouring books and notepads because they paid $500 for an Andrew Tate course that told them to get a side hustle, for heaven’s sake don’t become one of “those people”. Large print books are books with big text for people with vision impairment, I think, just leave it blank unless you’re doing that kind of thing.

So I’ve selected some appropriate categories and keywords because I have to. I don’t know if these are the best categories and keywords to use but they seem appropriate for what I’m doing. There’s a whole grifter industry focused around selecting the right keywords for your novel (seriously if you have insomnia check out the amount of YouTube videos on the subject), because it’s supposed to be some money-spinning thing that can make you book a best seller and blah blah blah, and therefore showing what your keywords are is simply NOT DONE in the book business because it’s like revealing the KFC 11 secret herbs and spices or some shit so I hope you appreciate this screencap. I don’t give a mad ass fuck about this stuff really though, because I only sell books to my audience of lovely readers here for your entertainment and I’m not out here trying to be the world’s top-selling author or anything. I don’t think I get too many “off the street” readers discovering me through the books first.

Set your publication date. Here I’ve set it to March 1st 2024 (forgive Amazon’s default crappy American-style mm/dd/yy date format).

From here you can save and continue to the next step which is content.

Here’s where you select your own ISBN that you purchased before (or just use the free Amazon one if you cbf ever dealing with anyone else besides Amazon).

Interior paper settings. Since we’re publishing a novel, not a picture book, black and white is fine, we will save significant money by not using colour options (we can still have a colour front and back cover though). Cream paper is typical for fiction and white for non-fiction, I have no idea why. Mind you my books tend to look more white than cream to me anyway, even if I select cream. Bleed, you don’t have to worry about this for novels that don’t have pictures on the inside. Matte vs glossy, once again matte is standard for fiction and glossy for non-fiction, and there’s no reason why you have to go with the standard but if you want your novel to look more “like a novel” then I guess you probably should go with the standard. 5 x 8 inches is a fairly standard novel size which is used everywhere but there’s many other options here.

Time to upload the book! You can upload a revised version later so definitely don’t worry if you’re still partway through editing. Just remember to upload the final-for-realsies version before the deadline.

For Amazon paperback I highly recommend uploading a Microsoft Word PDF. To make a PDF in Word go to File > Export and look for “Create PDF/XPS”.

Make sure you’re saving as a PDF, optimising for “standard”, and select “options”

Then select the following options:

If you’re having pictures inside your book you can “optimise for image quality” but if not, don’t worry about it. However PDF/A compliance is very important. Press OK and then Publish.

Amazon does have a “cover creator” but the results look pretty generic and like every other book on Amazon, I would recommend using your own cover.To build your own cover, use the Amazon print cover calculator to make a template. Here’s the options that I’m going to use.

Then you’ll get a nice diagram with measurements that explains all the layers:

Now you can click “download template” and it will download a zip archive, which contains .pdf and .png versions of the final template. Below is mine although it’s a shrunk version of course so don’t use it, calculate and download your own.

All you need to do now is import this template into Photoshop or whatever image software you’re using as a “layer”, and change the opacity of it so you can design your cover within the indicated margins.

Note that the template also tells you where the barcode goes, which is nice. The last thing I do before I upload my cover I need to place a barcode on my cover. Amazon CAN do this for me, but I’d rather do it all myself, so that’s why I’m checking the box for including a barcode myself (5 images above).

Now it’s off to the Kindlepreneur website to generate ourselves a free barcode in the correct ISBN format: https://kindlepreneur.com/isbn-bar-code-generator/

Very important – make sure that you keep the same hyphenation here that exists on the ISBN website where you bought the ISBN, ignore the suggested hyphenation on the Kindlepreneur site. Believe it or not, this matters. You don’t need to enter a book price here, and I’d advise against it because (hopefully) people will be buying your book in all sorts of countries and so whatever price you put on the book may not apply to them.

Here’s our completed cover including a barcode in the right place, and the blurb we wrote earlier.

We want to save this in Photoshop as a “Photoshop PDF” with the following options.

I’m not sure what “lower case extension” does, but the “ICC Profile” and “Proof setup CYMK” are both apparently important for some reason.

I’m using a VERY old version of Photoshop, so in newer version the options in these screenshots are probably in a different place. This will generate a BIG file for the master artwork. (We’ll make smaller files later on for other uses.) Be prepared for the upload to Amazon to take a while.

The AI-generated stuff is a new addition to Amazon, probably because they’re getting flooded with low-quality AI junk content from grifters. We’re ticking “no” here because we’re not oxygen thieves who use AI to write books.

After this we use the book previewer. This is an important step – you want to check and make sure that your book looks right, that you haven’t messed the interior format, don’t have any wonky pages etc. Click the right arrow and keep clicking, check every page! You’re not looking for typos here, just formatting things, like if your margins line up, if there’s an accidental blank page, or blocks of text that might have errored out, and so on. You can blast through this at about four or five pages per second.

Once done you get a neat little summary of your printing costs. You can now “save and continue” to the pricing stage.

Worldwide rights makes sense in this case so that’s what I pick, and Amazon.com is my primary marketplace.

I’m making this paperback book the same price as all the other books in the series, I’ve tried to find the sweet spot that I think is a reasonable price given the amount of effort I put into them so I actually get enough money back to make more books with, but without being so mega-expensive that nobody can afford them because I’d rather have more readers than less after all. (The eBook is cheaper, we’ll do that soon.) Note that you only need to edit the price in the primary marketplace at the top, and it will adjust all the other prices, pegging them to that primary price. You can adjust the individual prices of different other marketplaces if you really want, but you lose that automatic pegging feature, and we all know how much I like a good pegging. I don’t go for “advanced distribution” because of the lower royalty rate, and because it requires some exclusivity to the Amazon system, I’d rather have my book available in other marketplaces outside of them also so readers have maximum choice, and I don’t see the value in getting into physical bookstores as randoms probably aren’t going to buy my books in there.

Scroll right down to the bottom and click “save as draft”. Do NOT click “publish your paperback book” unless you’re actually ready to publish the thing, which you’re not, because there’s other stuff we want to do. You can also “request proof” and basically buy a cheap proofreading copy of the book for your personal use to check everything lined up okay. I highly recommend doing this! You don’t have to do it right away but make sure you do it far enough in advance so the book has enough time to get to you before the cutoff for changes before the publishing date. On Amazon “proof copies” come with an ugly “not for resale” bar across them (you can see it here) so you probably won’t want to keep them but it’s still a valuable exercise to make sure things line up and that the overall quality is what you expect.

Now since we’ve saved all our work with “save as draft”, we go straight back to our bookshelf and there’s our book, waiting for the day we click “publish” on it. Now, we’re going to make an eBook by clicking “+ create Kindle eBook”.

The “details” page is much the same as for the paperback, and the fields copy across so most of the information you don’t have to enter it all in twice. eBooks have slightly different categories though so you’ll have to do those again, as well as reader age. At the very bottom, there’s the option to do a pre-order, which KDP doesn’t offer for paperback but they do for eBook. I recommend this – readers love to pre-order! Once all set up, save and continue.

In “content”, you get a DRM option. Leave this off! It’s just a pain in the ass for your loyal readers, it’s easily circumvented by actual pirates, and once you switch it on, you can’t take it off later. For the eBook file, upload the original Microsoft Word .docx file, not the PDF you created for the paperback.

You’ll notice that KDP has noticed that my book doesn’t have a table of contents. That’s fine, it’s a novel, it’s meant to be read in a linear fashion, so I don’t care about this, in fact I don’t actually want a table of contents. For a non-fiction book it would be different.

Uploading a cover is next. Notice how the cover window is smaller? That’s because eBooks don’t have a spine or a back cover, only a front cover. So I’ll go to Photoshop and crop my existing full cover so it’s just a front cover only, and save it as a TIFF or JPG. I prefer TIFF as JPG is more compressed so the quality is less. I’ll also save a copy on Photoshop’s native PSD file format so I can fuck with the individual layers later if I need to. I’ll save it with the following options.

This will make the file pretty big but that’s fine, we want maximum quality. If these options don’t work, try again but discard the layers, as you don’t really need them for the TIFF as you have them in the PSD file anyway and can make a fresk TIFF or JPG from that if needed.

Then click no for AI content (unless you use AI content to write books like a loser) and use the book previewer, the same as you did with the paperback. There’s an automated quality check that runs first so wait for it to finish before running the previewer.

Oh and don’t take the results of the quality check too seriously when it comes to spelling. Do check it over though.

If you get this annoying prompt, it’s probably nothing to do with your book being corrupt or anything, it’s probably just KDP’s web-based previewer being janky. So download the standalone Kindle Previewer on your machine and open the book that way instead. To open a book in Kindle Previewer once you’ve downloaded it (because it’s not at all clear), download the HTML from here:

That’ll download your book as a zip archive with one HTML page per chapter. Unzip the whole archive to a directory, then go to Kindle Previewer and open the file in the directory that ends in .opf (there’ll only be one). The book will then open and you can check it there.

Once everything looks good, add your eBook ISBN if you have one. Remove the hyphens, you don’t need them.

Then once happy, save and continue.

The pricing page is similar to before. At the top you’ll get an option for enrolling in KDP Select. This option means that people with a Kindle Unlimited subscription (who basically pay a fee per month for near-unlimited books) can read your book for free, and you get paid per page read (only the first time they read though, you don’t get paid for repeat reads). The royalties seem to be about the same as if they bought the book and read it all, I haven’t done the math on this but it feels like it’s pretty close. This is a good idea and it’s how a lot of people make money from eBooks, BUT there’s a big, big downside – KDP Select is an exclusive agreement. If you put your book into it, you can’t also have your eBook for sale on other platforms, or even put snatches of it up online as preview content. I don’t do KDP Select personally, because although I’d love to, I want people to be able to also buy the book on Kobo if they choose. (Kobo have a similar thing called Kobo Plus, I do this instead because even though it’s less popular and I get almost no reads from it, it’s non-exclusive so there’s no downside to doing it.) If you try KDP Select and you don’t like it, you can withdraw your book from it after a 90 day period, I put my first book into it for a while just to see how it went but then withdrew it because of the annoying restrictions. However if those kind of restrictions don’t annoy you and you don’t ever intend to use anything but Amazon to sell your books, it’s definitely worth a try to see if it’s something worth doing for you. I did get a few readers through it.

Here you can pick your royalty rate. Amazon pay higher royalties (70%) for books within the $2.99 to $9.99 price range, and a lower rate (35%) outside of this. I personally think $4.99 is the sweet spot for eBooks – cheap enough to be affordable, but high enough to feel rewarding with the higher royalty, and honestly I would feel like an asshole charging more than that for a computer file unless the American dollar starts crashing heavily or something. Once again, adjust the primary market price and all the other prices will automatically change.

There’s no need to save as a draft here, we might as well just go ahead and submit for pre-order. We can still make changes to the text of the book manuscript later on as long as we remember to get those changes in before the cutoff, which is about a week before release date.

The book then undergoes a review process. This takes a while, they say up to 72 hours but in practice it’s usually a lot less. In this particular case my book got approved in about two hours.

That’s it, we’re done with Amazon! Now let’s go to Kobo and do it all again!

KOBO

I fucking love Kobo because their interface is a breeze. Amazon KDP’s interface is still pretty good mind you, but Kobo is just the best.

From your dashboard go to eBOOKS > Create new eBook

How clean and easy to understand is this interface? Do I even need to explain anything? Just one thing though – they have a 5MB maximum file size on book cover uploads, so go to the PSD “front cover only” cover that you made before in Photoshop, and save it as a JPG, and adjust the quality slider so it’s under 5MB in size (but as close to 5MB as the program allows you to get).

Then scroll down and fill out the rest. Kobo has slightly different categories to Amazon KDP, but not very different. Pick what fits.

I add both the print and eBook ISBNs, and the blurb that I used before.

Save and continue.

Look at this. How simple and great is it? Upload your MS Word .docx file here.

You’ll get a readout like this once it uploads. I’m not even sure what the “filename contains spaces” business is about, as my filename definitely doesn’t contain spaces, but it doesn’t seem to matter anyway, just ignore it if you get this and you don’t know what they’re talking about. You can download and preview the eBook in the same Kindle Previewer that you can get off Amazon, or you can use any other free e-reading program. Definitely do this just to make sure things look nice. Once happy click ‘next’.

Once again I leave DRM off because it’s a pain for readers and has no real benefit to me. I do enrol my books in Kobo Plus though because it’s awesome and doesn’t have KDP Select’s annoying restrictions so I have nothing to lose by making it available, and I also make it available to libraries because why not? Hopefully some conservative boring people find it in there and start complaining and I get a sales-boosting controversy out of it in some hick backwards town somewhere. I set the library price at twice my retail price because libraries have money from the government so they can afford to do things like send me some. Once happy, I save and continue.

Once again I’ve set the price to the same as the previous book, but I have to set it in my own country’s currency for Kobo, which is actually a little annoying because I’d rather keep things consistent. When I set the price of the previous book, $7.48 was equivalent to $4.99 USD, however those sorts of figures go up and down depending on country, so whether buyers use Kobo or KDP will probably depend on how the exchange rate gets interpreted between countries. For instance right now for Americans it’s cheaper for them to get the book on KDP, but for people in another country with another currency which is performing better against the Australian dollar but worse against the American dollar, it may be cheaper for them to get it on Kobo. At least this way people have some options depending on how their currency is doing, I don’t care where people get the book really as long as they read it and stan their Halcyon fave. Note the royalty rate in my example is 70% again, but I’m not sure with Kobo how that varies with price. once happy with this we’ll save and continue.

The book publishing page. Once again, we can make it a pre-order, which you should definitely do, as it gives you time ot both promote and edit your book some more before publication.

Just like KDP, it takes a while for the publishing process to get approved, as there’s a review that happens. They say it can take up to three days and unlike KDP, they don’t usually take the full three days but it is slower than KDP for sure, you’ll be waiting at least overnight.

TIDYING UP THE ISBN STUFF

So we’ve covered off KDP and Kobo. Next is Barnes & Noble, and dealing with Barnes & Noble is a true pain in the ass, so let’s do it later. For now we’ll do some other stuff first.

I’m going to go back to the ISBN site which for me is https://www.myidentifiers.com.au/ and upload my front cover image. I can use the same image that I just used for Kobo as both sites have the same dimensions and file size requirement.

Once upload just hit submit at the bottom of the page. Then I go back to my list of ISBNs on my ISBN dashboard and select “clone”, to clone the paperback ISBN to the eBook ISBN.

This will clone the details entered for the ISBN ending in 6-0. You’ll get a list of all your still-free ISBNs, and you can clone it to whichever one you want. I’m going to clone it to the ISBN ending in 7-7 as this matches what’s in KDP and Kobo.

Here’s where I found out that the front cover image DIDN’T clone over, how annoying, I assumed that it did because I assumed that the PSBN website wouldn’t suck for some reason. So I uploaded it again, added the blurb which I didn’t have before, and also added back the other information that didn’t copy across like genre, price and release date (not shown in the screenshot, it’s further down). For eBook I selected EPUB rather than Kindle (Amazon’s format) but I’m not sure if there’s a meaningful difference because it’ll be an EPUB on Kobo and a Kindle on KDP but they share the same ISBN so there’s no right answer to this question.

Once that’s done I’ll clone the paperback ISBN a second time to the next free ISBN ending in 8-4, which is the one I’m going to use for my Barnes & Noble print edition, and I then copy over all the same shit to there. More on that later when we deal with those fun-lovers over at Barnes & Noble, but let’s talk about copyrighting the book first.

COPYRIGHTING YOUR BOOK

Now legally, your book is copyright anyway, this is true. You do not HAVE to register for copyright, anywhere. The reason why I do it anyway, is because proving ownership in the case of a copyright dispute with someone like Amazon can (I’m told) be tricky. They tend to demand blood from your firstborn before they will believe you that you actually wrote your own goddamn book should a dispute come up, and that’s not even their fault, they’re just doing their due diligence because all the trolls and grifters hang out on Amazon because it’s the biggest book marketplace. If you’re lucky, they’ll believe what you say, but for someone like me who publishes under a pseudonym, maybe they might require a little extra convincing. That’s why I use the US Copyright Office’s electronic lodgement system, wherein you can register your book for a fee and get a legal document in return saying that you wrote it and some other cunt did not. The reason why I use the US Copyright Office is because even though I’m Australian if a dispute arises it is going to most likely come through a US website like Amazon and they tend to hold their own system in higher regard. In fact you can’t even register copyright in Australia and the Australian copyright website tells you not to even bother. They are correct of course, however I find the peace of mind of that extra layer of protection to be nice. It’s a tricky process to actually do, and you probably won’t need this, but just in case, let’s go through it.

Website: https://eservice.eco.loc.gov/eService_enu?SWECmd=Start

Now the first thing to remember with the US Copyright Office website, is that your login password has an expiry date. So make sure you sign up with a valid email address, use your real name, make sure you use a secret question that you’ll KNOW the answer to for sure (including case sensitivity!) and get used to having to reset your goddamn password each time you want to use the thing.

The second thing to remember is that their website is slow as shit, plus it tends to go down for maintenance a lot. So just make sure you’re not trying to use it during one of their scheduled maintenance times, these are listed on the login page if they apply.

I won’t go through making an account, it’s straightforward enough. The trick is how to register a book once you have your account. So here we go.

Once you’re in, click “register one work by one author”.

At the next page, click “start registration”.

On this screen, click the dropdown. Select “literary work” as the option. A whole bunch of text will come up. Then check the box at the bottom, then continue.

Type the name of your work, then hit continue.

 

Your work hasn’t been published yet as it’s on pre-order, but a pre-order counts as a publication as according to the copyright office, “the offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display also constitutes publication”. Nation should be your ‘primary market’ as per KDP.

Here’s how to do a pseudonumous entry, but if you want to use your real name you can. Don’t fake your year of birth though.

You can skip this page as it’s only used if your novel has other people’s intellectual property in it. Just hit continue.

 

If you have an attorney who will handle copyright claims on your behalf, put them in here, otherwise just hit continue.

Put your details in as the correspondent. This is so who they know to contact if there is a problem.

Where to mail the certificate to. Fill stuff out, hit continue.

Because copyright registration can take a while, “special handling” exists if you’re getting your ass sued right effing now and you need the copyright office to hurry their ass up and give you the documentation because there’s a court case around the corner or something. Don’t abuse it – if you don’t need this, just click ‘continue’.

This bit is just to clarify that you are who you say you are and that you are certified to make this claim. I always add something to clear up the pseudonym here just in case there’s any confusion about it.

There’ll now be a huge page of information with this at the top. Check everything is okay, then add to the cart if you’re happy, then checkout. Fee to register a work at the time of writing is $USD 45. I won’t go through the checkout/payment screens as it’s just like online shopping anywhere else.

We’re not quite done yet though, we still have to upload our work. Hit continue on this confirmation screen with the red text.

Hit the green button, select your pdf of the book text, then hit the blue button, then once uploaded hit the orange button. You should get this:

Then you’re done!

Okay now if you thought that wasn’t fun, it was still more fun than this next part.

BARNES & NOBLE PRESS (SIGH)

Okay, they’re actually not THAT bad (Ingram Spark is way worse). Their website UI is actually quite clean and nice, but there are some very annoying quirky aspects to putting books up on that site. We’ll go through them.

We’ll start off with the print book, so select ‘print’ and ‘next’.

Self-explanatory so far, right?

You might be wondering why you’re being asked this question. You’ll find out later. For now we’re going to go with ‘sell your book’.

Barnes & Noble has a cool feature that Amazon does not – you can set up physical books as pre-orders. So let’s select ‘yes’ here. You’ll want to make sure your pre-order date is at least a month away.

Note that we’re going for the same size as the Amazon KDP print book, with the same options. Save and continue once happy.

This looks confusing but they’re just checking whether you’ve done your margins correctly or not. We already did this when we set up our document in Word, so just skip to uploading the file. Don’t bother clicking “help”, you won’t get any, but you could download their totally-not-intimidating-at-all 31-page print platform formatting guide if you really wanted.

Now before you upload your book, go to your front credits page and change your ISBN to the Barnes & Noble one, then save new DOC and PDF versions, now you can upload the new PDF version. Give it a filename so you know it’s the Barnes & Noble version of your book.

We won’t worry about an e-ISBN. I’m not that fussed about the Barnes & Noble eBook, so we won’t spend an ISBN on it, because Barnes & Noble insist on separate ISBNs for their own e-books as well but there is literally no point to that. Instead we’ll just eventually use a code that Barnes & Noble will give us, if we even want to do an e-book. For now we’ll leave it like above.

Now we do the same page reviewing process that we do on Amazon KDP. You’re mainly looking at the start and end of chapters here to make sure that everything lines up and characters don’t go all wonky at the end of chapters, which is a thing on Barnes & Noble for some reason. Once happy, you can tick that you approve your manuscript and then continue. There’s no need to download a separate proof.

We already have a full cover design so we’ll go with the option on the right. (At this point the entire page froze and wouldn’t go to the next step, because this is Barnes & Noble. If this happens just refresh the page and it should start working again.)

Eventually you’ll make it work and you’ll get here. Download the cover template where I’ve highlighted in green.

You’ll get something that looks like this. Import it into Photoshop (I had to do this by dragging from the archive because when I extracted the PDF it got corrupted for some unknown reason) and since it’s not actually the right pixel size, stretch it over your existing art PSD file (in Photoshop you can hold down SHIFT while dragging a corner of the bounding box to preserve the proportions). Be sure to save your PSD art with a different name! Then put the template layer at the top and change the opacity so you can see what needs to be fixed underneath.

As we can see things aren’t quite lined up. The front cover is a bit to the left, the barcode is way too big, and the back cover text is going over the margins. (I pasted my template in a bit crooked too, so let’s also do that again.) Let’s fix all that up so Barnes & Noble don’t get upset with us and reject our book.

Okay that’s looking a bit better. There’s a very miniscule difference between sizes on Barnes & Noble vs Amazon, so I’ve hung the spare edge of template over the top. You can see it when you compare the white space above the red dotted line running across the top, vs the white space under the bottom red line running along the bottom. When you resize between KDP and B&N there’s always that discrepancy, but if you push your discrepancy vertically rather than horizontally, it will still all fit, pretty much. Now I just need to add the barcode again. Once again I go to Kindlepreneur for that, and paste in my B&N barcode from my notepad.

 Once you download the barcode it should pop up in Photoshop, then just paste it in as another layer.

Now remove the opacity, and push the template to the back so it can’t be seen (or just increase it to 100%, that works too), but keep the template layer in the background in case you need to make further adjustments later, or you accidentally slip something out of place.

The file has to be saved as a Photoshop PDF with embedded fonts. I use these options:

Now you can skip to uploading your file and upload it here.

Don’t worry about a “pre-order cover”, there’s no point to that, maybe it’s good for marketing or some shit I don’t know, but I just do the final cover. Be patient, it takes a couple minutes.

Once it’s uploaded, they give you this display with the template, so you can see how close you got to what it’s supposed to be like. The tiny discrepancy in the front cover horizontal position, I can live with that, because I think a bit to the right edge is nice given that the spine usually gets rough on the left. I forgot that with Barnes & Noble, if you give then the ISBN they print the barcode FOR you, so I’ll remove my barcode that you can see peeking above their overlaid white rectangle on the back cover. Also I don’t like the hyphenated word in the last line of the blurb, gotta fix that. Let’s do it again.

Okay, that’s better. Let’s approve this cover and continue.

Time to fill in the book details – again. A “long book description” really isn’t necessary, if you’re going over the character limit for the short one you’re waffling way too much. So just leave it blank. Remember that if it’s a pre-order, push the pre-order date out to where you want it to be. Note stupid American mm/dd/yyyy date format, hey it’s an American site, what can you do.

The author details go here, I’ll put Caius’ name in but I won’t use his bio because there’s no separate spot for it so I think it looks a bit funny on B&N when it gets published. It’s okay, he got paid well.

I pick “general adult” for an audience, and then pick some categories and keywords here.

Not the most accurate categorisation ever, but then it never is. My books don’t really fall into a genre box neatly, such is life.

Here I set a price, this is in $USD. Note that even though I’m charging more per book on B&N, I actually get less royalty per sale than on KDP. Sucks, right? This is why nobody buys my books on B&N, which is completely fair, I’d actually people rather use KDP anyway unless they have no choice. The B&N option is just there for those really weird cases where people want a paperback but can’t get one on Amazon KDP.

The reason why the second question exists is because if you’re using someone else’s “wide distribution” and they already distribute to B&N you can override it here.

I personally skip this marketing wank and go straight to the ISBN step.

Here’s where you put your ISBN in. Note how they INSIST that you have a separate ISBN just for them. Most book publishers aren’t like this and actually prefer or even insist on the reverse – that you use the same ISBN that you use elsewhere. Not B&N though because… they’re weird? I don’t know.

Then you’ll get a summary page with everything you’ve done so far, and this at the bottom:

Because it’s a pre-order, I can go straight to putting it on sale.

Now that “would you like to order a copy of your book before putting it on sale” question, may lead you to believe that you can use this page to order a copy of your book before putting it on sale. That would be a reasonable assumption, but NO, don’t be fooled, you cannot do this here. I guess just because they ask you if you would like something doesn’t mean they will do it for you. B&N are so strange.

You’ll get this scary popup. It’s fine, just click yes. Here you’ll know how long you have to edit and upload corrected versions of my book if you find errors. Note it down for yourself. (You can still change things after release date, but really, you shouldn’t be fixing errors after release date, you should catch them before.)

Yay! It’s finally fucking up! What a pain in the ass for an edition of the book that almost nobody is going to order! I hope you people who want physical copies but can’t use Amazon appreciate all this effort.

Now we can go ahead and create an eBook here if we want, but I’m not going to do that because I’d prefer people buy the eBook on KDP or Kobo to be honest, those two marketplaces pretty much cover damn near everywhere. What I am going to do though is create a “personal” copy of the same book, for proofing (like KDP’s “proof copy”). This is the only way you can send yourself a copy of the book before the release date.

If I click ‘start a new version’ a lot of fields will be pre-filled. I won’t go through and screenshot everything, I’ll just note the important differences in the process, which aren’t many.

This time, when we get to this page, we’re going to “keep it personal”.

Go through all the uploading steps again etc with the files you’ve already made.

Once that’s all done you won’t have to fill out author information or categories and blah blah, instead you just get asked to submit for approval. Once done you’ll get this:

Then you’ll get taken back to the dashboard and you’ll see your personal book sitting there next to the one for retail.

Once the personal version has been approved, I can just go in and order a copy for myself at the cheaper price. However, Barnes & Noble won’t post personal copies outside of the USA, so rather than sending it to myself, I actually send the book to a reader of this website, and they check it for me instead. I’ve never laid eyes on the Barnes & Noble version of the book myself, but I’m told that they do a good job.

So I have to wait for approval first. I’ll get an email when the books are approved. Once I do, I go back to my dashboard.

Now I just click buy and it’s a simple online shopping process.

A FINAL WORD ON LAST MINUTE CHANGES

Now, what if you need to make changes to your book while it’s in pre-order? Say you’re giving it one last read-through after you’ve submitted everything, and you notice that you’ve made a typo. Or perhaps you got something wrong on your front cover. What to do? In Amazon and Kobo, this is quite easy, you just go into your book content pages and upload a new file exactly like you did before, straight over the top of the old one, then publish again. However for Barnes & Noble, you have to take your book off sale first, then upload the new file, then put it back on sale. The website will give you popups saying that you can edit your book while it’s on pre-order, but this is a lie! Your new files will error out for seemingly no reason. So just something to keep in mind if you plan to use Barnes & Noble for anything.

SO, AM I GOING TO GET RICH BEING AN AUTHOR OR WHAT?

No. I have the benefit of running a popular site and I’ve sold quite a few books, like maybe a few hundred at the time of writing this post, which is probably a lot for a self-published author given how many people put books up on Amazon. A friend asked me if I made enough money to buy a car yet and I replied “maybe a nice remote controlled one”. But that’s not taking into account the amount of money I’ve dropped on artwork, and all the other expenses listed above, once I factor all of that stuff into the equation, my books have actually lost money, and I probably won’t break even on expenses for at least another year. So unless you’re selling a few thousand books you’re not going to make significant money from this, and the people who actually make a living from book-writing, they would have to sell tens of thousands of books per year. That’s difficult to do as a self-publisher.

The other option is of course trying to get a “book deal” but that’s just as fucked as signing with a major label in the music business:

• Book deal royalties suck WAY MORE than self publishing. 70%? Try 5%! You need to sell on a J K Rowling kind of scale in order to make anything even approaching decent money.
• You may lose the rights to your manuscript.
• Publishers have veto rights on things like your book’s plot, they may want you to change character arcs, story elements and so forth to make your book more marketable.
• Printing a ton of books nobody wants to buy kind of sucks for the environment, the print-on-demand processes of Amazon KDP and Barnes & Noble Press means books are only printed once they sell.
• But at least big publishing companies print and market your book for you, if you can even get such a deal in the first place. Maybe you’ll become rich and famous, but you probably won’t. I’d still recommend self-publishing, you’ll be just as broke but at last you went broke YOUR way.

So that’s all for this post! Hopefully it’s been helpful for all you aspiring authors! Kpopalypse will return with more posts!