V S Nelson

I’ve self-published two books, The Keeper of Portals in 2017 and The Archivist in 2022. With the editing, cover, printing and various marketing options, these books were far from cheap. If I consider only the costs involved in making the books (editing and printing) then The Keeper of Portals cost £3,362 and The Archivist cost £5,573. The reason The Archivist cost more was because I spent more on editing. The Keeper of Portals only had a copy edit and a proof read, whereas The Archivist had an editorial critique, a line edit, a copy edit and a proof read.

Either way, we can all agree that was a metric shit-tonne of cash!

With a new story in the works, I’ve been toying with the idea of how to publish, and also market, my books for less.

In this blog I’ll cover:

• Editing
• Cover
• Amazon paperback creation
• Final thougts

The story

It’s hard to publish a book without a story. At first, I thought about getting an AI to write one, but I’ve no idea who how to do that. Also, if I did that, I’d feel guilty if someone bought what would essentially be, a steaming load of crap. Amazon is already full of AI generated books, I don’t need to add
to the problem.

Instead, I dusted off a story about a couple of 11-year-olds called Gavin and Lily that I wrote around 13 years ago. I spent a lot of time on this book, and for a long while, I was convinced it would be the first thing I published. However, new ideas came along and Gavin and Lily were shelved along with so
many other stories.

So I had my story, a middle grade adventure/science fiction novel about a couple of kids who start secondary school only to find it overrun with zombie students and robot teachers.

I give you, Secrets of the Sibyl.

Editing

I strongly believe that editing is an activity worth opening your wallet for. However, that’s not the aim of the game here, it’s free all the way!

Fortunately, I’d spent so much time working on this story that it was in a reasonably good shape, though it was interesting to see how my writing style had changed in the 13 years since I’d last looked at it. For a start, everyone appeared to be beginning to do something.

“Gavin began to run.”

“Lily began to walk to the shops”

Someone began to something all over the blood place! Why did I write it like this?

Time to make some changes. No longer did Gavin begin to run, he just ran. Lily didn’t begin to walk to the shops, she just walked there. Such a simple change, but so effective. The same is true for started. “Lucile started to leaf through the pages of a book.” sounds infinitely worse that “Lucile leafed through the pages of a book”. At least, it does to me.

So, silly mistakes taken care of, the next thing to do was listen to the story. This is where Microsoft Word comes in.

There are few features as amazing as Read Aloud on MS Word. Before you publish anything, even if you’re going to pay for an editor, use the Read Aloud feature and listen to a natural-ish sounding computer voice narrate your story for you. If you have the patience, do it twice or more. It’s fre,e and one of the best ways to edit your work.

So that’s what I did when editing Secrets of the Sibyl, I just listened to it. Job done and not a penny spent! Is it as good as hiring a professional editor? No, of course not! But we’re being cheap here!

The Cover

Story – check!

Cover – no check 🙁

My brother Tiberius created the covers for my last two books, and while he agreed to do this one, that would be defeating the point. This isn’t just about making something on the cheap, it’s also about creating something with no pre-existing network of talented friends and family.

So obviously I did what everyone else is doing. I went with AI. Now this was much simpler than I imagined. I used the Dream generator by Wombo and typed the following prompt: “Robotic teacher in front of zombie children.” I tried a selection of different styles and got these images.

I also got this really cool one from DeepAI.

Of the images I generated, this was the one I selected as the cover for Secrets of the Sibyl.

Not bad considering all I had to do was write a sentence and pay no money. Only problem is, there’s no text. That was fixed with a trip to Canva. Using their book cover generator, the image below became the cover for the ebook.

Now if all I was doing was making an ebook, my search for a cover would be over. But this isn’t just about ebooks, it’s about paperbacks as well. Now the problem with paperbacks is that, well, they have a back! And a spine too. This presents a problem, because a) I don’t want pay someone to make a spine and back image and b) I don’t want to spend hours in gimp trying to make one myself.

AI to the rescue (again…)

Now I was pretty sceptical about these AI image extenders. I’d seen videos of them on Instagram and Tiktok and thought they were a joke. However, with few options open to me, I decided to check them out. I went over to the Runway image extender. I didn’t have to do much more than upload my image (without the title or author name, it got very messy with that) play around with the ratio and click generate. It made some strange images, but also manage to produce something that fit very well with the from cover.

Once I had this, is was just a matter of putting the title and author name back on and cutting away the stuff I don’t need on the right.

And that was it, cover made!

Creating the book

I’ll try not to labour this point as I’m sure it’s covered in greater details in other blogs. Essentially, I used Amazon KDP, created the ebook first and then created the paperback.

One thing to note was that you need to make sure your pages are set up in your document software, otherwise it all goes wrong. Something else I discovered was that if I uploaded the Word file straight to KDP, it would screw up. To fix this, I exported to a pdf and uploaded that instead.

So, I made my first book! Ordered some author copies and… it was crap.

One of the reasons it was crap was because of the ridiculous size of the thing. Industry standard book size for fiction paperbacks in the UK is B format (129 mm x 198 mm). The standard size for Amazon KDP is (152 mm x 229 mm), which looks ridiculous. The book sticks out like a sore thumb because no other books are this size. The thing is huge, floppy and just feels deeply shit.

If you want your book to scream self published, pick this ridiculous size. If you want your book to look good, I suggest the following.

• • B Format trim size – 5.06″ x 7.81″ (12.85 x 19.84 cm) on Amazon’s sizes

• • Cream paper – white makes your fiction look too much like a text book

• • Gloss cover – it works for my kids book, though may not be right for everyone

I also suggest you remember to add page numbers (I forgot for my first version)!

One of the great things about the KDP paperbacks is you can make changes, print an author proof, see what it looks like, then change it again. Each proof only cost me £3.50, because you pay for printing only, so it’s a really great way to ensure your finished book looks the way you want it to. Compare this to standard self-publishing, where you get hundreds printed, only for boxes of them to turn up and you realise you hate them! I had a slight issue with my first book, The Keeper of Portals, because the matt coating they put on the cover peeled off really easily. I then had to peel a load off myself before I sold them because otherwise the books would look tatty.

After all that, here’s the process of first auther copies to final book.

If you want to check out Secrets of the Silicon an Amazon, you can find it here.

Final thoughts

I was impressed by how easy this was. I was also reasonably impressed with the final printed copy of the book once I had adjusted the size, margins and paper type. For free, it’s worth the money! But that’s the problem, right? Everyone can do this, which is why Amazon has slowly been filling up with shitty books over the last ten years. Not only is there no talent barrier to being published, there’s no financial one either. I’m not saying that you have to be rich to publish a book, but if you’re putting your own money on the line, then you need to be damn sure you’ve got a quality story. With KDP Publishing removing all obstacles, it doesn’t matter if your stories crap, why not just throw them out there and hope for the best with no care for the readers who’ll have to wade through the neck-high literary effluence to find something worth spending their money on?

That’s what I did.

Seriously though, I’m unsure I’ll do this again. I certainly won’t do it for my next story, which I feel deserves so much more than what Amazon can offer.

VSN