Publishing my first book on amazon.com

I am very excited today. I have just published my first physical book, Double Your Website Sales!

As with all things, there was a process to go through to get this achieved, and I’m going to write about it here.

The first thing to do was to produce the manuscript. I did that with my favourite word processor, OpenOffice.org Writer. It would have been pretty simple to use Microsoft Word for this purpose; the reasons I didn’t were that (a) I haven’t got it, and (b) I don’t like the latest version with the ribbon bar that takes up so much screen space.

Manuscript completed, I had to format the book. There are various options that CreateSpace provides you with. These vary depending on whether you are producing a black-and-white or colour book, and if you want to take advantage of certain distribution outlets, you have to use industry-standard sizes. I settled on 5″ by 8″, the smallest black-and-white format available.

CreateSpace will publish books that are at least 24 pages in size, but extended distribution requires a minimum of 48 pages. Luckily, setting the book in 12-point Times New Roman, and formatting the content properly, brought the total number of pages required to exactly 48. The margin sizes I used are not ridiculous; the book is quite small, but looks normal.

I was already aware of CreateSpace and had set up an account with them a few months ago, but I owe my motivation to produce this book to Jason Fladlien, and specifically his product eclass training. Nevertheless, I did not entirely follow his approach. He works on his products until they are “good enough,” and then gets them done and selling. There is no wasted time with his products. His argument is that the customer is interested in the information.

I reservedly agree, but I do want to take a bit longer over my products and dot the i’s and cross the t’s a little. So I spent some time formatting my book to make it look like a properly-published book.

I searched through the CreateSpace forums and found an excellent resource on book design here that deserves some link juice:

Build Your Book

If you check it out, you will find that there are sections called front matter, body matter and back matter. Researching more about this, I found that the rules are pretty basic, but a short work should have the following sequence of pages:

• The first page is the half-title page. This is the title of your work, without the subtitle or any other information.
• The second page should list other works of the author, a frontispiece, or be part of the full-title page. It is OK for this page to be blank.
• The third page is the full-title page. It contains the title, the subtitle, and the name, city and country of the publisher.
• The fourth page is the copyright page. Full details of the copyright should be listed here, along with the first date of publication, whether the work has been published before, the ISBN (which in my case was obtained from CreateSpace for free), and any legal notices.
• There may be other pages that are additionally part of the front matter, but if there are not, then you can launch into the contents page, which is what I did.

None of the above front matter pages should have page numbers on them.

Then, launching into the body, each chapter should start on a right-hand page. That page should not have a header, but a footer page number is OK. Subsequent pages of the chapter should have a page number, and can also contain header information. It may be necessary to insert blank pages between some chapters, and these need not contain page numbers.

There can finally exist back matter. I didn’t use any back matter.

You have to produce a PDF for your book, and it should be formatted like a normal PDF, so you don’t have to worry about how it will be modified for printing. Page 1 is the right-hand side of the first leaf; page 2 is the left-hand side of the first leaf; page 3 is the right-hand side of the second leaf; etc.

The next thing was to produce the cover. CreateSpace helps you to design this, or you can upload your own. I used the CreateSpace design. You can use a stock image on your front cover if you like. Given the topic of my book, I quickly produced a spreadsheet chart, and uploaded that. You input the title, the subtitle, and the text that appears on the back.

You can upload a picture of yourself for the book. All images need to be at least 300 dpi, and because I didn’t have a decent picture of myself to hand and I wanted to get it done, I took a picture of myself which looks pretty dodgy really! But it did the job.

You can also upload a publisher logo. It’s not necessary, but for this I used a logo that I designed years ago which appears on one of my other sites.

Then I had to order a proof copy, and wait for it to arrive. I ordered my proof on 8th October, and chose the cheapest delivery option. It arrived today (16th October), which was quicker than I expected it.

I checked over the proof. I messed up the justification slightly in the copyright page, but that’s no big deal. Everything else was OK, so I approved it.

I decided to pay the $39 to get my book into the Pro plan which gives me higher royalties and access to expanded distribution. For my book, priced at $9.99, my royalty will be $5.84 for a CreateSpace sale; $3.84 for an amazon.com sale; and $1.84 for an expanded distribution sale. If I had not paid the fee, the royalties would have been $4.33, $2.33, and nothing respectively; you also do not get into the expanded distribution network without paying the fee.

Paying the fee also means that any copies you purchase are cheaper. I wanted some copies for various purposes, so I purchased 10 copies of my own work at $21.50, plus $16.62 shipping to the UK. If I had not gone for the Pro plan, my copies would have cost $36.60.

Now that I have approved the book, it is already for sale in CreateSpace. It will appear on amazon.com within 15 business days, and it will become available on expanded distribution network in about six weeks.

As a UK publisher of a physical book, I am required under law to provide one copy to the Legal Deposit Office of the British Library within one month of publication, which is today. Details are here. I can also be compelled to provide five copies to the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries within one year of publication, of which details are here. Apparently, most publishers do this anyway, so I will do that.

Finally, how well will it do? Only time will tell. Amazon.com pioneered affiliate marketing, so the book could attract many affiliates without me doing anything. It may not! I don’t know.

People can search amazon.com and the site has good SEO, so the book could rank in the search engines for useful keywords.

The expanded distribution network includes US libraries and having used a CreateSpace ISBN, I have access to that, though to be honest, I’m not really expecting the book to do well on the expanded distribution network. But who knows? The content is worthwhile, and perhaps I can do a press release and get the word out.

I also have to get a tax identification number from the US version of the inland revenue and then submit a W8-BEN form to CreateSpace to qualify for a 0% tax withholding rate, otherwise my royalties will be taxed with 30% going to the US government before I see anything. I am in the process of applying for this.

As with many endeavours, one has to experiment to find out what works. If nothing else, having written and published a book will certainly elevate the way I am perceived within this niche.

Finally, I’d like to add that all of the content within the publication is written first-hand by me. I did not use any PLR content, public domain content, or anything like that.

If nothing else, it feels good! Please check it out, and if you like what you see, buy a copy!