Self-publishing on Amazon

This week I got the idea to self-publish some of my poetry combined with pictures. I have done that before but that was purely for myself and through a photo website, which was great quality but also expensive, like 90 dollars or so. So, I went to the Amazons self-publishing site and looked at some tutorials on YouTube and it seems to work great and for what you get it’s a good deal (I hope, haven’t read all the fine print). I have not received a copy of my little book, so I don’t know what the quality is, especially because I included color pictures, but for the 20 dollars (including postage to Norway) I spend there is not mush to loose…besides my time.

I used like 20 hours last week to make it, but it was the first time and I made some mistakes. I know there are many ways and programs to make a layout and present it in the right file format for the Amazon self-publishing system. I started for the kindle and they recommended a pdf file, so I used my preferred program Microsoft publisher because its easy to repeat pages where you want text and pictures on the same place. All wend well and it converts easily to a pdf without mistakes. But then I wanted to upload it for a “real” book and there they didn’t except pdf. They excepted other formats including docx files from Microsoft word. Converting from pdf to word gave all kinds of layout problems and you can forget converting publisher files to docx. So, I had to use word and I hate that program, specially if you try to put pictures in it and want them on the same place on other pages. I ended up downloading an addon for word from the Amazon site that helps you with the layout, so you stay within the boundaries of the sizes of books they offer. It is still not perfect, all pictures nicely aligned and suddenly one is a little bit higher…and there is no way to change it, frustrating, probably have to follow a course in word to find out how this stupid program really works.

But at the end it was good enough, it’s not that it has to be all perfect the first time, I’m not expecting to sell any besides to family and some friends. I am going to look for a better program to make the layout of my next book, there must be better way’s, if any of you have experience and know of a better program, please let me know.

All in all it’s a fun process and kinda funny to see your own creation on a website where you normally order your books, makes it all official despite the knowledge that everybody can do it nowadays.

A link to the book is here and for the Kindle version here