It’s now been just over a month since the release of The Hawthorn Bride on Kindle, and I thought I’d write about the process of self-publishing on Kindle Direct Publishing – KDP.
It was back in 2015 when I first explored the possibilities of KDP and set up an account. I couldn’t believe how simple it was – upload a cover, upload a manuscript, write a blurb, set a price, and I could actually be a published author. OK, so it was only in e-book format, one of many million self-published novels available on Kindle. But it was a chance that I had never had before and I was keen to try it. After all, by this stage, I had three completed novels, and I was ready to share them with the world. I experimented by creating a cover and beginning the set-up process for my bookshop novel Have You Got that Book? even though I had no intention of ever releasing it. But it got me started, and I then spent another year editing and perfecting The Most Beloved Boy to be my first release in September 2016. I didn’t even have this website then and only publicised it to my friends and family on Facebook. It was soon followed by After the Rain. These novels were kindly bought by some of my friends and family and I enjoyed all the nice things they said about them. It felt good to be published, even on this miniscule scale. In 2017, I added No Such Cold Thing to the list and launched this website, complete with a Publications page, with links to my Amazon page. And later that year, I published Christmas Stories for Children as part of the promotion for my Advent Calendar stories.
Then came the BIG GAP. I had published everything* and needed some new material. However, 2017 was also the year I started training to be a Teaching Assistant, which took me into full-time employment doing that job in 2018. And it’s fair to say that in that time, I wasn’t writing. Not anything new, anyway. I was doing a lot of re-editing of my existing work, and I was looking for an idea that would finally settle down and become the next novel. As I have already written about, that took me until 2020, when the unexpected free time of Lockdown enabled me to get on with and finish The Hawthorn Bride. And then, because of other projects, it was another three years before it was ready for publication, finally adding a new title to my Publications page, the first new work for six years.
Since my first releases, the process has got even easier. There is now a thing called Kindle Create which makes it easier to create more professional manuscript. It takes care of the formatting and allows me to add author details at the back, along with links to my other works. I’m almost tempted to put my old novels through this process and upload them afresh. The uploading process is very simple but does come with its own nerve-wracking moments. First it scans for obvious mistakes – no matter how hard you try, there will be some mistakes. Then it takes up to 72 hours before it goes LIVE on Amazon, during which time you have to avoid finding any essential changes you want to make, because then you have to start the process again. Finally, an email is sent to let you know that your novel – your precious baby, nurtured and guarded so closely for so long – is now out in the world, standing on its own two feet, ready for anyone to see. Like a parent waving a child off to university (and I speak from experience, having been there and done that recently), it’s a moment of both great pride and total terror. Though of course, it means nothing if no-one actually reads it! That’s when you start hinting to your friends and family that they might like to read it – it would make great SUMMER READING. You can point out that it only costs £1 (ONE BRITISH POUND – what a bargain!) It helps to remind them that Kindle is available as FREE APP on most smartphones… 😊
So there it is, my obvious and blatant plug for The Hawthorn Bride. And any of my other novels, for that matter. I think they’re good. I was reading one of them last week and I was relieved to find that I still enjoy it. What else can I say? My mum gives me 5 stars!
* When I said that in 2017, I had published everything, I wasn’t overlooking Have You Got that Book? By this time, I had already decided that I wasn’t going to publish it. The photo is a screenshot of its entry on my KDP account, when I was having a trial run of creating a book, but it never went any further than this. The manuscript was never uploaded and I still don’t have any plans to go back and give it the work it would need before that could ever happen. But who knows what might happen in the future.
M J Schofield 