My Writing Story So far

After having spent ages writing and re-writing my book I then spent hours and hours trying to find any typos and errors and also asked other people to check through it. It felt like a never ending task as no matter how many mistakes I found I could read through it another time and find twice as many still remaining. I don’t know how many times I went through the book but I started to find fewer mistakes each time to the point where I could only find one or two.

With the book ready I then had to learn how to publish it, a task that at first felt insurmountable. I had read that you can self-publish eBooks on Amazon Kindle and decided that was probably a good place to start but it turned out to be more challenging than I had imagined to do it properly. Signing up to publish with them involved filling in various forms and then once that was sorted I spent a good while reading through all the invaluable help guides they provide. After further researching on the Internet and some trial and error I discovered how to convert and upload my book so that it appeared for sale on Amazon Kindle, which was a very exciting and nerve-racking moment.

Now that I had the eBook for sale I could concentrate my efforts on getting a paperback of the book printed. First of all I had to buy ISBN numbers and then register the book with the database which involved more form filling. I couldn’t just use the word file I had converted and uploaded to Amazon though as I learnt it had to be properly laid out in a pdf before I could send it to a printing company. The more I researched the more I discovered how much was involved in typesetting, from using appropriate fonts to eliminating widows and orphans. In hindsight it would have been a reasonably easy task but not having any previous knowledge of the subject I spent a long time typesetting only to have to restart the process from scratch after discovering I had made some fundamental error. Eventually I succeeded in producing a pdf in the correct format that I could send to the printers and shortly received the proofs to check through. It was very exciting the first time I saw the pages of my book printed, even though they were loose and not bound in the cover. Three weeks later boxes and boxes of the finished printed book arrived.

Since then I have sold both eBooks on Amazon and paperback books and have received positive feedback and reviews already which has been very encouraging. I’m still only at the beginning of my journey though and have lots more to do.