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Interested in publishing with Amazon KDP? I'm here to help! |
| Now that you have published your Kindle book, it's time to turn that puppy into a paperback. In case you're wondering if you should turn your e-book into a physical book, ask yourself these questions: **Is my book long enough to be made into a paperback? Books less than 50 pages are more like pamphlets than books. Plus, Amazon won't put the book info on the spine of books less than 100 pages. I love writing series fiction. Each of the books in the series is around 10k words. Too short for a paperback, but when the whole series is released, I put out a paperback that has all the books in one. This gives me a physical copy that I can give out to loved ones and sell at fairs. It also saves me the hassle of having to format so many paperbacks, because, quite frankly, it's kind of a pain in the butt. (Please don't let that scare you away from doing it, but it will definitely test your patience.) You know what? That's the only question I can think of for whether you should publish a paperback or not. Is it long enough? Otherwise, you might as well. So, let's get started! The first thing you'll want to do is go back to your book document in Google Docs. You'll want to copy the whole thing and paste it into a software that will allow you to change your page size. Microsoft Word should do just fine. I don't have Word, so I've been using WPS Office. I've also used Libre Office, but it's really hard to put page numbers in your book with Libre Office. Once you have your document into the new software, you'll want to decide what size you want your finished paperback to be. Now would be a good time to hop over to Amazon KDP. On your bookshelf, you should see your Kindle book listed there. Next to that should be a "create paperback" button. Click that and begin the process of listing your paperback on Amazon. Since you don't have your book ready yet, anything you do here should be saved as a draft until you're ready to publish. Amazon will ask you to select from a dropdown menu what size you'd like your book to be. Go ahead and look at the size options. The most common size is 6X9. I prefer to go with 5X8. It's up to you which one you choose. Now is a great time to also decide what you want to do about obtaining an ISBN number for your book. You can purchase one on your own and then tell Amazon the number, OR you can get a free one through Amazon. There are pros and cons to using the free one on Amazon, but basically, it limits you to only being able to use this number through Amazon...you don't actually own the number so you can't just unpublish your book on Amazon and use the number elsewhere. So far, I've only used the free Amazon number as I don't have any plans of leaving Amazon. Once you choose a size, this is the size you'll want to use for your manuscript. Go ahead and change the size. Next, apply page numbers to the manuscript. It's up to you where you want them to appear on the page and also which page you'd like them to start on. You probably don't want a page number to appear on your title page or copyright notice page. Otherwise, it's up to you. Speaking of copyright notices now is a good time to add that USBN number to your copyright notice. Now, you'll want to pay attention to what will appear on the front and backside of pages. You don't want the first page of your book ending up on the backside of a page. It used to be that the first page of each chapter always appeared on the front side of a page, but lately, I'm noticing that people aren't as picky about that now...but the very first page of your book--the first page of chapter one--always starts on the front side. Some programs will let you view your manuscript as an e-book which will help you see which pages will end up on the back side. If you only have a title page and copyright page as your front matter and then go straight into your book, you'll be fine. Title page (front side) Copyright notice (back side) Chapter One (front side). Pick up a book from your bookshelf and flip through it to get an idea of what I mean. If you want to have all chapter headings appear on the front side, you'll need to figure out which ones would normally appear on the wrong side and then insert a blank page just before those chapters. This will put the blank page on the wrong side and that chapter heading on the front side. Next, decide if your line spacing is how you want it. Does it seem like there are too many words per page? Not enough words per page? I tend to keep my line spacing at 1.5, but single is fine as well. It's up to you which one you use. You may also change your font size. 12 is standard, but you can increase it. If you want to publish a large-print book, you'll need to increase the font to 16. Then when publishing on Amazon, check the box for large print. If you're writing a novel, you don't need a table of contents(TOC), but if your book is non-fiction or a collection of poems or stories, you may want one. You can insert one using your word processing software. Make sure that your table of contents has actual page numbers and isn't the type of clickable TOC that you'd use for an e-book. Of course, if you insert a table of contents, you'll now need to adjust your pages to make sure your chapter headings are still on the front side of the pages. (See, this is what I meant by pain in the butt). If you'd like your book to use drop caps, just highlight the first letter of each chapter and apply drop caps. If your book has no back matter, you may want to add one or two blank pages. If it has back matter (author's note, about the author, the first chapter of an upcoming book, etc) then this isn't necessary. You may be noticing that the margins of your manuscript look too wide. If it really bothers you, it might not hurt to google what the margins should be. I had trouble with one of my books because I decreased the margins and then I had problems when uploading to Amazon--error messages galore. With my last book, I left the margins alone and had no problems. When you're all finished with your formatting, you have a couple of choices. You may save your manuscript as a pdf or as a doc or docx. In the past I've never had problems with saving as a pdf, but for some reason with my last book, the size of my book (5X8) was lost in the conversion to pdf so Amazon gave me an error message. Saving to a doc file was the only way I could do it. There's not really much difference between the two as far as Amazon is concerned, so whichever one works and gives you the least amount of a headache is fine. Once uploaded, Amazon will scan the manuscript for errors. You'll want to use the previewer tool to make sure your book is exactly how you want it. If not, you'll need to make some changes and re-upload. You will also need a paperback cover...I will cover this in the next post. I highly recommend formatting your book for paperback, but be prepared to invest a decent amount of time to the task. It's tedious and involves a lot of swearing. As always if you run into any problems or you have questions beforehand, please drop them here or message me and I'll try to help you out. I've published quite a few more Kindle books than paperbacks, so I'm still learning it all myself.  Order my new book on Kindle!
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