One of my greatest accomplishments ever, has been writing my own book and then self publishing it.
I spent a few years writing poetry, and eventually came to a point where I wanted to put it into a book that could be sold. I first researched the traditional route of going through a publisher, which I found to be a road that not many succeeded on. The process of actually getting published through a company is something that's pretty impossible to do.
So I searched up some other options, and found out about self-publishing. Self publishing means that you do all of the work for your book. I was my own editor, along with being the writer of my book. I formatted the pages all on my own, and then created a cover as well.
Approaching these big steps that contain work you’ve never done before can be very overwhelming. This is especially true if you don't even know where to start. Having all of your content ready is the best place to start and then following that, you’ll have to find a company that’ll allow you to self publish through them.
I self published my book through Amazon and the process of doing so was easier than I ever imagined. They break the process down into steps so that you cannot move onto the next step until you finish the one before. The steps are oriented in such a way that you first upload the content of your book and figure out what size you want the pages to be for physical copies. Then you fill in the book title and the author’s name. After that information is given, Amazon will ask for the book cover. You can upload an image, or create one through the tool they have displayed. For example, if you already have an image you plan on using for the cover, but want to add the text for the title and author later, you can do it through the tool amazon provides.
After all your information goes through and is approved, there's a form where you set a price point. The price point is one of the main components to pay attention to, because Amazon takes a portion of each sale of your book for printing purposes, and for being able to sell under their name. But they make it easy for you, because whatever you list the price as, the form tells you how much you will actually be earning when someone buys your book.
Amazon makes it very easy to be able to upload all of the content, and with following the steps they lay out, there’s really nothing you can miss. They make the process a lot less overwhelming.
All this is ,of course, assuming you have content ready to go for a book. Writing itself can always be tricky, but the best thing I’ve found is that the more poetry I read, the more poetry I write. If there's a specific type of content that you like to read, it’s definitely possible for you to create content like it, and then publish it for people to read. Happy publishing!
