The First Thing I Learned When I Decided to Self-Publish on the Internet

    When the self-publishing revolution started on the Internet back in May 2009, you could say that I was technically living under a rock.  The reason I say this is because I didn't learn about this until 2012.   Back in May of 2009, I was still writing for my own enjoyment and still throwing my stories into a drawer.  I was also at this time working as a teaching assistant in an elementary school's computer lab.  I was basically going about my business just making a living.

     Anyway, I basically stumbled onto Kindle Direct Publishing through an advertisement on a youtube video in early 2012. It was sort of funny because usually when an advertisement starts on a youtube video I generally click out of it, but this particular time drew my attention.  My first thought when I saw the ad was that this was probably for the old, traditional self-publishing that I was used to with the cost ranging from $2,000 to $5,000.  (Believe it or not, this type of self-publishing is still around today).  Of course, I discovered this wasn't the case.  It was at this moment I started to do more research about this online.  I went on to discover that people were self-publishing their work and selling it out on amazon.com

     So I have to admit at the time, I was pretty sceptical about this program.  I just couldn't imagine I could do this for FREE.  (Today I know it does take some money to do this if you want to do it effectively).
     
     Now, back to the subject of this blog, when I decided to give this a try I was so excited, only to find out that it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.  First, amazon.com required a certain type of formatting and template, along with a certain size book cover in order to do this.  At this time, I have to admit I sort of pulled my hair out and almost gave up right there. But, I knew the Internet was the super highway of information, and I figured if these two things were needed then someone would have to be talking about it.  I started to do more research and I came across someone who was selling the Template.  Of course, when I got the template I discovered I had to reorganize my book into it.  I also had to learn about creating and linking my book's Table of Content to every chapter in the book so that the links would work. (Thanks so much for all of you who create instructional videos on youtube.com because this website became invaluable to me, and still is today).  Once I manage to complete my book in the template the next major hurdle was my book cover.  At this time in 2012, there was very little that I found to help me here.  There wasn't a lot of book cover designers around at that time that I could find, and when I did find someone they wanted a lot more money than I could afford.  There also wasn't a lot of sites that had public domain free photos that you could use. (I definitely didn't want to get caught using something that was copyrighted.  This would have opened a lot more problems for me if I had tried that route. DON'T DO IT)!  And, during this time Amazon didn't have their book cover launcher designer either, as they do today.  

   Needless to say, my first book cover STUNK. lol  I don't even have a copy of it, and this book has since been unpublished. The cover was something I created in Paint.net. It had an orange background and some stars.  It was pretty bad from where I sit today in 2017.

     In my next blog, I will talk about the first book I self-published, and what I learned from that experience.  (Believe me, I learned a lot more than the fact that I had a bad book cover).

So stay tuned!

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