Technical stuff. This is for writers with backlist books they want to put up online. Also for people who want to self-publish a book they’ve written. Same process, at least at the start.

As I wrote last time, I’ve re-published older titles for several years. I can’t emphasize enough that for published writers, the first step is to make sure you hold the rights to the books before bulling ahead. It’s possible to mis-remember your rights situation, so double check. (I gave a few pointers here.)

What comes next is a mental jump forward, and a decision everyone has to make. You have the rights. Where are you going to publish and sell the books, and how are you going to let people know they’re available?

Getting Started

The first step is deciding on an e-book publisher.

Take a look at this page for my novel The Corner Garden. You can click on buttons linking visitors to two publishing and distribution sites, Amazon/Kindle and Smashwords, if you want to see how it works. I publish my backlist e-books in both places, putting them up on the indie site Smashwords for readers who prefer not to buy from Amazon. 

There is also the online publisher Ingram Spark. Smashwords and Ingram Spark both sell books they publish through Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Scribd, Apple, Overdrive and other online sellers. Amazon only sells Kindle e-books on Amazon sites, but it’s the behemoth. It also makes e-publishing easier than other self-publishers through its Kindle Direct site.

I find Smashwords a little fussier than Amazon, and Ingram Spark even more exacting in its requirements. Plus, on Ingram you have to pay. It isn’t much, but the others are free. I gave Ingram Spark a try but eventually took down a couple of test books I’d put up there. Making any sort of changes to your books is difficult on Ingram Spark. Smashwords lets you make changes yourself directly on their site. On Ingram Spark, you have to get in touch with their customer service department, and they can be slow to answer e-mails.

In any case, there are ways to publish fairly quickly on all three sites once you get your book ready for re-publication. All require two things: a new cover and a clean manuscript file. 

The Cover

I advise handling the cover first since it might take some time, especially if you’re hiring a designer and have to get in line for their services. 

The rights to the cover design of your backlist title belong to the publisher, so you need a new one even if you love the earlier version. You’re probably going to want to give it a new look anyway. I hire professional designers for my e-books, all of whom charge around $500 to $600 for a new cover. I can happily recommend both Anna May Henry and Michel Vrana. You might also want to check the names of the cover designers on some of your favorite Canadian books and navigate to their websites to see if they’re available for freelance work. 

If the price sounds too steep, you can check out Kindle Direct for freelance designers around the world, most of whom charge much less. You have to open an account and navigate to their Help page for the list. I can’t link you; it sends you into my account. The last time I checked, their prices started at around half the fee I’ve quoted and went down from there.

Alternatively, Kindle offers a Cover Creator program that allow you to design your own cover for free. Again, check it out after opening an account. You’ve probably noticed the current trend for covers with a bright background colour behind a large title in an interesting typeface that dominates the design. Publishers like them because they stand out on online sites and look good on e-readers. If you like them too, you might be able to design a professional-looking cover through the online program. I’m not good at design, so I pay. 

Step Two

Elemental, but you have to start with a Word .doc of your manuscript. The problem is, some writers haven’t kept digital copies of their published books and they don’t have clean paper manuscripts in their archives. 

I’ve been asked what to do in this case, so I’ll point out a workaround. You can cut up a finished copy of your book carefully enough that all the writing on each page is legible. Afterward, you can use your copier to .pdf the pages into an electronic file. Next, you need to convert the .pdf file to a Word document. 

If you don’t have the software to do this at home, most local copy shops can convert your paper copy to a .pdf and then into a Word .doc for a small fee, whether it’s a cut-up book or a paper manuscript. You will then have a workable Word file for your e-book.

Step Three

You need to prepare your Word file for uploading onto the publishing sites. I know this is starting to sound like a lot of work, so I’ll point out again that there are services that will take care of it for you. I haven’t used them so I can’t give a specific recommendation. However, sites like Reedsy will take care of the whole publishing process, from creating a cover to preparing the Word content and .epub files for upload onto Kindle, Smashwords, Ingram Spark and other sites. They’ll even help with marketing—all for a fee. Once you open a Kindle account, you can also navigate to their Help centre, where you’ll find a list of people and services you can ask for a quote. 

If you’re going to do it yourself, there’s an easy choice. I’m not recommending it. I’m just saying that if you want to get this over with quickly, this is the way to go.   

If Amazon/Kindle is the only place you want to publish, you can open a free account here, and try uploading your cover and Word files on the Kindle Direct site. Kindle will walk you through the process, and it’s easy to navigate their site. You will be asked to upload your .jpeg cover file, then the Word file. If the Word file is clean, it can be converted by the Kindle site into an e-pub document in a couple of minutes, and go out within hours for sale on Amazon sites worldwide. 

If the manuscript uploads successfully, you still need to make sure to hit the Previewer button on the publishing page to look over the new .epub file generated by Kindle. And I mean, look at every page. There will probably be glitches, and you will have to go back and correct them in the Word .doc. After making the corrections, you can upload the document again. In fact, you can do this as many times as it takes to get a clean file. 

One common glitch: paragraphs can be indented erratically if you sometimes used the tab key while writing the manuscript. If there are only a few glitches, you can correct them manually. If there are a lot of problems, you need to retreat and fix them globally. Fortunately there’s a free site that provides step-by-step help to get a Kindle-ready .doc. 

Troubleshooting

If you face problems with your Kindle conversion, it’s probably because you need to re-format the Word file of your novel. It can take a few hours, and it’s tedious, so I’ll repeat that you can hire someone to do it for you. 

Having paid for a lawyer and cover designers, I used a free site put up by author Christine John that offers a step-by-step guide to preparing a book for Kindle, which is also a good first step in prepping the file for other publishing sites. One thing to keep in mind: what passes for an ordinary paragraph indentation on a printed page looks too deep on an e-book. This site helps you quickly reformat the paragraph indents throughout your Word document on a Select All change. John speaks of inches, not centimetres. I have found that an indentation of 0.9 cm. works for me. You can try different settings and see what you prefer. 

A poet friend asked about republishing one of her early titles. The different line breaks and indentations in poetry are tricky, and it takes a lot of work to get them looking good on e-publishing sites. If I were a poet, I would hire someone to do it for me, and design my own cover to keep the costs down.

Step Four

Once you have a corrected Word doc, it’s time to add some features that will make the book look professional. This is a good time to take a few days off if you’re growing bored with the process. You don’t want to feel rushed or lazy at this stage, since the e-book will look shabby if you don’t spend a few hours setting up the interior design properly. 

When you’re ready, you might want to start by reviewing the first few pages of your most recent commercially-published book. These days, most books open with a couple of pages headlined “Praise For.” These include excerpts from reviews of both the current title and of the books you’ve published in the past. It’s a good idea to prepare an opening section like this for your e-edition, updating the reviews for the backlist title you’re re-publishing while including reviews of a few recent works to keep it current. 

Note: although you’re publishing an e-book, you can’t hyperlink to the other titles. The publishing sites won’t permit it. However, you can include an (unlinked) address for your website. You will need to prepare an “Also By” page that lists all your published titles, and your website address can go there. Once again, you can copy how they set up the page in your commercially-published books. After getting those first pages updated and ready, you need to prep the title page, epigraph and whatever else you choose to start with, again using your published books as a guide.

You will also need a copyright page. Everything above is optional. A copyright page is mandatory. I’m speaking of the page in small type near the beginning of the book, which will look something like this:

E-book copyright © Lesley Krueger, 2021

Originally published by Key Porter Books, 1999

Krueger, Lesley, author

Drink the Sky/Lesley Krueger

Issued in electronic formats. 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright holder is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

I warned you this was tedious. If you hire someone to prepare your titles for publication, you’re still going to have to provide them with the information for the opening pages, including quotes pulled from reviews of your books. If you’re planning to republish several backlist titles, you can create a template that works for all of them. 

Before publishing your e-book, there’s one final step. Since publishers own the interior design, you should go back and change the look of the chapter headings, the title page and the Praise and Also By headers. All you really need to do is choose a new font on your Word file. If there’s anything else you disliked about the original interior design—the use of asterisks in section breaks, for instance—you can change it now, too. This way you won’t be in breach of your contract. (Not that they’ll look.)

Afterward, you can upload the corrected Word .doc to Kindle, and it will almost certainly work. If Amazon is your target, you’re almost done. 

However, I’ve found that Smashwords can be fussier when it tries to convert your Word document into an .epub file for publication. Ingram Spark demands you upload an .epub doc in the first place. So there’s one step I recommend taking if you want to publish on other sites than Amazon: convert your corrected Word .doc into an .epub file yourself.

Step Five 

To convert my Word files into .epub files, I used a free app called Calibre, which you can download here. When you open Calibre on your computer, you’ll find a top menu that asks you to Add Books, which is where you can upload the corrected Word .doc of your book. Then you hit Convert Books, and it will prompt you to upload your .jpeg cover file before it creates an .epub file of the whole book, which you should preview page by page in case of glitches. Hopefully, at this stage, there won’t be many.

I only found one problem that probably wouldn’t have shown up on an app that I’d paid for, but showed up repeatedly on Calibre. If a chapter ends right at the bottom of a page, Calibre will insert a blank page before the next chapter. Publishing sites won’t correct this glitch, so you need to correct it yourself. This stymied me for a while. But since these were my books, I found a workaround: splitting a longer paragraph in the chapter into two. This was almost always enough to make the chapter slop onto the next page and avoid the blank-page problem. Once I had to break up two paragraphs. It didn’t hurt the work at all. Maybe people with some design training know of another way to deal with the problem, but this worked for me. 

Step Six and Last (For Now)

Once you have an .epub file, you can upload it without problem onto Kindle, Smashwords and Ingram Spark within seconds. Both Kindle and Smashwords will issue you with free ASINs, or tracking numbers, like the ISBNs you find on your professionally published books.

Ingram Spark demands a government ISBN, which Canadians can get for free through the Libraries and Archives Canada site here. After you apply for an account, it will take a few days for the account to be approved and for the ISBN to be assigned. However, once you have the account, you can sign in any time to get ISBNs for future books. They arrive much more quickly. 

Now you’re ready to publish, and with a quick click, you can send your book out into the ether. The next question is marketing, and that’s a whole nother kettle of fish. 

Since first publishing this series, I’ve experimented with several online marketing ideas. You can read my latest post here.