As I’m still applying and interviewing for jobs, not only have I been writing on Medium, but I’ve also been doing Yelp reviews, finishing up my first planner, and now — working on my first book.
Psst…I wanna let you in on a lil’ secret…
One tool I didn’t even think of was Amazon’s self-publishing program, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). I never even heard of KDP before, but it’s awesome because you can publish your books and e-books all through one platform. You can choose to buy an ISBN (good one is Bowker, which KDP gives you a discount for!) to distribute your book across different platforms. Another option is you can choose to have KDP assign you an ISBN (free!), but this means you can only sell that particular book on Amazon.
With Amazon, since it’s a global company, you can distribute it around the world, all with no cost to you, which is great!
Now, if you want to do specialized works like planners, it’s best to do your own production work since you want it specialized and with KDP, they don’t offer custom, specialized work such as the finish of your cover, binding, and more.
With my planner, I am doing my own production work and will sell it on different platforms because it is a specialized work with spiral bounding and all the bells and whistles of a planner.
For my book, I will definitely use KDP, which is great for paperback, hardcover, and e-books. You simply upload your work and Amazon prints and distributes it for you.
This is a great starting point to self-publishing and for more on KDP, I recommend signing up for the KDP training. I did this training which is a series of easy modules that tell you everything you need to know about KDP. You do have to pay for it but it’s so worth it because it helps explain KDP from A to Z and gives you great guidelines and insider tips for publishing success!
It’s very user-friendly and one thing I recommend is to do your research on the competition. Look at hot keywords and make sure the type of work you want to publish is does not have a high search results count (under 3,000 keyword search results). The course explains this process more as well.
Here are a few quick tips for figuring out what you want to do for your first book!
1). Be specific with what you want to do.
How do you get specific? Good question! Since there are are several types of genres and ideas for books. What helped me narrow down my list was writing down things I am passionate about, which leads me to…
2). Write down 5 things you are passionate about.
This could be anywhere from your professional work, hobbies, activities, personal things to you such as faith, lifestyle, etc.
3). Write down what you want to tell people.
In other words, how do you want to inspire people? What do you want them to learn from your book?
Your book is unique to you so just follow what you want to do and have fun!
Thanks for reading everyone! I hope this gave you some good ideas to start your first book.
Part II of my first book journey will be coming within the next two weeks, so stay tuned! Part II will give a sneak peek into how I started the writing process for my book.
Until then,
Happy Brainstorming!
Busayo
