As many of you know, I started as a self-published author. I didn’t do this out of choice, rather necessity. You see, I’d written four science fiction novels and I tried to get them published. It was a disaster. I stopped counting my rejections when they surpassed 300. I was ready to give up on writing when a tragic event of cyber-bullying caused me to write one more book; you can read about that event in my first novel as well as on “About Me” on my website.
Anyway, I’d written Invasion of the Overworld, and I thought it would be fun to self-publish it. I didn’t really know anything about self-publishing other than it was free, and Amazon takes care of everything, especially a huge chunk of the royalties.
Opening that Amazon envelop for the first time and finding my first book staring up at me was a pretty cool experience.
After achieving some success as an author, I started talking to elementary schools about writing. I’d been receiving countless stories from young writers, and I wanted to encourage more kids to write. As a result, I spoke about my rocky journey to becoming a New York Times bestselling author as well as teaching about storytelling pedagogy. Soon, I started receiving longer and longer stories. When I started seeing kids with stories that were surpassing Amazon’s minimum page count, I started encouraging kids to self-publish their own stories. You can see HERE many of the kids I helped with the self-publishing process.
The process has changed, with Amazon drifting away from CreateSpace and going to Kindle Direct Publishing. I recently recorded a video, documenting the process of self-publishing, and I want to share that video with you below.
The first video talks about how to set up your document for self-publishing. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I just tried to give a simple example. The second video goes through how to upload your document to Amazon.
I hope it is helpful.
Mark