Self-publishing a book: anyone done this before?

[floppy]

slmkhoo:

Anyone self-published a book in print as well as ebook? Small, non-fiction book for a select audience. Any tips would be welcome.

Have not done it before but there’s a number of people I know who did. I guess have to know how big an audience are you looking at.

[sharonkhoo]

Just saw that Amazon has a self-publishing facility which is FOC. I will explore that and see how that is. Audience is fairly niche, maybe just a few hundred initially. I thought I had more time, but there will be an event in May which I would like to catch. I was aiming for Sep/Oct actually (another event).

[starlight1968sg]

Slmkhoo

You will have a strong support from this forum

[floppy]

slmkhoo:

Just saw that Amazon has a self-publishing facility which is FOC. I will explore that and see how that is. Audience is fairly niche, maybe just a few hundred initially. I thought I had more time, but there will be an event in May which I would like to catch. I was aiming for Sep/Oct actually (another event).

Locally, you can talk to the nice folks from https://www.booksactuallyshop.com (actual people, rather than an internet entity like Amazon).

They publish and distribute books under Math Paper Press, and they should be able to help. You can refer to their https://www.booksactuallyshop.com/pages/math-paper-press-submissions here. Good luck!

[sharonkhoo]

starlight1968sg:

Slmkhoo

You will have a strong support from this forum

Not an \"educational\" book, so quite niche. I will update here if/when I actually get the book published!

[pirate]

Don’t forget to get an ISBN number for your book. Then you have to deposit 2 copies with the NLB.

[sharonkhoo]

pirate:

Don't forget to get an ISBN number for your book. Then you have to deposit 2 copies with the NLB.

Kindle provides the ISBN, so I won't need to get one from NLB. But I will comply with the legal deposit requirements if/when my book actually gets published.

I'm still finalising the main text (asking someone to write a foreword), and I'm playing around with Kindle's Cover Creator - a bit limited and restrictive, but OK for non-fiction, I guess. It took me the better part of 2 days to format the manuscript as I'm not so familiar with things like styles, headers/footers etc. Kindle has a good document with guidelines, and I have worked as a book editor (but formatting was done by other people, not me), so I think it's OK now.

Maybe after this experience, I can freelance to help people publish on Kindle.

[zac's mum]

Jiayou slmkhoo! :rahrah:


Yes that would be a good freelance gig! I may want to hire your expertise if I publish some short stories for kids on Kindle too! (I did a ghostwriter gig some time back, but couldn’t advise my client on how to publish the anthologies small-scale).

[sharonkhoo]

zac's mum:

Jiayou slmkhoo! :rahrah:


Yes that would be a good freelance gig! I may want to hire your expertise if I publish some short stories for kids on Kindle too! (I did a ghostwriter gig some time back, but couldn’t advise my client on how to publish the anthologies small-scale).

Not an expert, but have worked on a set of children's stories before, when I was in a publishing firm. I don't think Kindle self-pub is the right place to publish kids' books unless you can prepare the artwork offline, or it doesn't have much artwork. The Kindle cover creator isn't very flexible, and the templates are basically Word templates. You would need to get all the artwork already prepared in high-res files to upload. From what I've seen so far, Kindle self-pub seems to be more for books which are mainly text. If there's a lot of artwork and more fancy layouts, you might want to find a full-service publisher to handle it.