From the Type Face #3

I’ve been and gone and done it, all by myself! My debut novella, ‘Up the Community Centre Book One: The Thank You Sweets’ is live on Amazon.

How did I achieve this amazing feat, with my limited, and mostly self-taught, tech skills? I’d already begun my career when the internet was created, so I had to pick up knowledge about information technology in random chunks. As a result, I missed out on many basics. I like to describe my relationship with technology by comparing myself to a driver who hates turning right across traffic, and therefore plans routes where they only have to take left turns. I get there in the end, but often it’s a slow journey. My path to KDP was snail paced, but at last, I’ve arrived.

Why does the idea of self-publishing appeal to me so much? Because it feels like an adventure, and it’s an opportunity to add to my skills. I was first inspired to follow this route at the Killer Women Festival in October 2016, by Rachel Abbott, the highly successful author of numerous crime novels. Being a former marketing professional, she delivered a beautifully straightforward, well-organised account of what self-publishing entailed, and persuaded me this was the way to go.

Two years later I took part in an enjoyable and accessible course, fronted by self-publishing guru David Gaughran and Harry Bingham of Jericho Writers. ‘Let’s Get Digital,’ Gaughran’s highly readable guide to self-publishing, has been my go-to reference book ever since, while Bingham’s detailed analysis of the advantages of self-publishing convinced me I was on the right path. Other advisers are available, but the Gaughran-Bingham combo was the one that worked for me.

My adventure got real when I earned a money-off voucher for Scrivener by completing NanoWriMo. The Scrivener programme is not expensive, but it took a little financial ‘sweetener’ to convince me to invest. Once I’d installed it on my laptop, I read the manual obsessively and watched umpteen how-to videos. Eventually, having realised there was no way I could break Scrivener, I dared to try out the fiction drafting option. I was thrilled to find I no longer had to cut and paste within a long document, when I wished to make plot changes. Now, I could post chunks of text in boxes, then move the boxes around using drag and drop.

I fed chapters of my crime novel into a Scrivener project, arranged to back it up to Dropbox and carried on writing. After a few months of frenzied self-editing, I wasn’t yet ready to release it into the wild. My problem was not fear of engaging with Amazon. My hunch was, if they could send me puppy toys at the click of a button, their publishing process must be simple. It was formatting my manuscript that terrified me. However, I was itching to try out the process of transforming a Scrivener project into a published book on Kindle Direct Publishing.

At this crucial point, the wonderful team at FunnyPearls.com reminded me that I had written ten episodes for my serial, Up The Community Centre. The story had reached a natural break point, with the onset of Covid-19. Each separate episode had already been professionally edited, for online publication. Put together, they were the right length for a novella. With a few minor amendments, Up the Community Centre Book One was ready for publication.

At the top of the Scrivener screen is a button marked Compile. The manual explained that when I selected this button, it would assemble my manuscript into any one of several formats. The idea of Compile terrified me. I was convinced that, if I didn’t immediately guess the correct options, my precious novel would disappear forever, into some digital outer darkness. With the shorter manuscript of my FunnyPearls novella, this was not a problem.

I set out to prepare a Scrivener ‘project’ for ‘The Thank You Sweets’. I pasted each story into a separate box. On Scrivener, there are ‘texts’ and ‘folders’. When writing my novel, I’d been using the folders as chapter headings, with texts ranked under them as scenes. This did not work for the series of short stories making up my novella. When I tried to compile it, nothing happened. Apparently, there was nothing in the document. Of course, I panicked, but not too much, because I had the manuscript saved elsewhere. I tried pasting my text straight into the folders, and it worked! That’s how I found out it pays to ‘muck about’ with Scrivener until it delivers.

It was time to choose what kind of document I wanted to create. Again, I consulted the KDP manual, which is concise and uses simple language. Overall, I found it very helpful. However, manuals are written by people with a high level of technical knowledge, so of course they recommend the most efficient and effective methods. What I actually needed was the method that best fitted my low level of skills. When reading the section on formatting, I convinced myself I was going to have to learn to write HTML. Fortunately, it turned out this was not the case.

I did some more tinkering around with Compile. I was pretty sure I needed the eBook option, and the manual led me to believe I could include front matter. I had obtained a lovely cover which I managed to upload to the project. I felt very pleased with myself, until I tried to compile the text and it wouldn’t bond with the cover.

At this point, I made up my mind I was going to try every Compile option until I identified the right one. I ploughed through multiple options: Novel, Word doc, PDF, etc.. None of them produced the neat, complete product I wanted to take to KDP. I began to wonder if, after all, I should pay an HTML literate person to do the formatting for me. Just in time, my natural frugality kicked in. Did I really want to hand over hard earned cash, for a task people said was so straightforward? In future, would I be content to pay out every time I wanted to make a small change to my book?

At this point, I remembered that KDP do lots of the technical stuff for you. Also, I knew they uploaded the cover separately from the text. I selected the eBook Compile option on Scrivener and worked my way through the drop-down list, using my common sense. That’s when some kind of tech magic kicked in. I’ve often noticed, when I try new stuff, that the programme, or some friendly computer fairy, eventually figures out what I’m trying to do, and offers me the correct choices.

Somehow, I ended up with a perfect eBook. Inside it, by a digital miracle, were a Table of Contents, title page and rights page. Ignoring the instructions about back matter, or whatever it’s called, in the Scrivener manual, I shoved another chapter on the end, for author information. Hey presto, the job was done.

Signing up for KDP is simple. You have to have your IBAN number ready, but the rest is a doddle. You can save a draft and come back to it when you’re ready to publish. I was concerned to find that I had to use the same password for self-publishing as I do for ordinary Amazon purchases, but now I’m a published Amazon author, with my own author page, maybe they’ll let me change it.

When you complete the preparation forms on KDP before publishing, there are vital things you need to know, for marketing purposes. For example, you must be sure to select wide-ranging keywords and choose categories that will give you most exposure. A clickable link on the final page of your book will help you to collect essential reviews. I highly recommend David Gaughran’s book Let’s Get Digital for this kind of information.

Most wannabe authors I know hope to find an agent. At the early stages of my writing journey, I sent out a couple of rounds of ‘submissions’ and received a few polite refusals. Rejection doesn’t bother me, but the numbers do. Agents receive thousands of applications each year, but can take on only two or three authors. Writing competitions have thousands of entries, but only name a few finalists. Personally, I’d rather buy a lottery ticket.

Be brave! Give cheap and cheerful self-publishing a try! What have you got to lose?