November’s meeting brought 13 of us to watch and assist in the uploading of The Writers’ Mill Journal Volume 7 to Amazon. Those of you who missed it missed some fantastic healthy snacks from Ria and an ongoing scene of great stress, excitement and triumph. The minutes below are LONG because I’ve tried to cover everything we did and all the questions I was asked about what we might not have done. So here goes…

Our “Let’s make another book” presentation covered and/or touched the following book-creation topics, with notes and additional information below:

• How to Title your book
• How to Format your book
• How to Edit your book
• How to Prepare your book for Printing
• How to Prepare your book for Kindle
• How to Upload your ebook
• How to use Amazon’s Cover Creator
• How to Upload your print book (and use Cover Creator again!)
• How to get your book onto your Author Page (yes, I know, I didn’t have time to cover this, but some of you asked…)

So, if any of these topics interest you, please read on.

But first, Matthew handed out contest awards for November’s “set in the future” contest. Third place went to Sheila’s mum for her Blue Chair, second place to Sheila for her Last Day poem, and first place to Karin for those Beloved Children. Sheila could perhaps have timed her presentation with the delightfully time-themed gift, but instead she just delighted in looking at and enjoying it whenever the stress got too great.

Upcoming contests (I promised to announce them here), each with a 1200 word limit, each with a deadline on the first Sunday of the month, are:

• Family Traditions, for December 1st
• The Morning After, for January 5^th
• The Bridge, for February 2^nd

Entries go to contest @ portlandwritersmill.org and voting starts on the Monday. Find out more at http://portlandwritersmill.org/contests/upcoming-contests/ 

And now, those book creation steps. (Please note, while the talk centered on self-publishing, a lot of the information below will be equally important to those of us looking for agents and publishers.)

How to Title your book

While you’re writing, your book probably has a “working title.” Ours was “Back and Forth.” If you want to send your book out to agents or publishers, you probably want a snappy, jump-off-the-page title to make them read your submission. They’ll probably change the title before publishing anyway. But if you’re considering self-publishing, your title should:

• Make it easy to find the book if you know what you’re looking for. (The Writers’ Mill Journal is great! Just type it into Amazon and see.)
• Make is easy to accidentally find the book when browsing the internet. (Fine Lines was great. The Writers’ Mill Journal less so, as no one is going to accidentally type it.)
• Let people who might like the book find the book. (Subtraction by Sheila Deeth brings up books on teaching math to five-year-olds, not her intended demographic. Fine Lines brings up books on aging (our book was about aging) and literary volumes (our book was literary), so a really really great title!)

Google will help you see what people frequently search for:

• Start typing your “title” into Google and see what “completions” Google offers. They are “common searches” and might lead to a better title.
• Then look at what Google offers when you type the whole title (or the newly revised title) into the search bar. Is it remotely related to your book?

Amazon will help you see what books people who search for your title find:

• Type your title into Amazon and see what appears.
• Restrict the search to books or kindle and see what appears.
• If these are nothing like your book, you might want a better title!

Yesterday looked like a good keyword (especially with the recent movie), and short titles provided more likelihood of being found by accident, so we picked “Beyond Yesterday” for our anthology.

How to Format your book

Anthologies are made from lots of separate files. Sometimes novels work the same way—if you write each chapter in a new file for example. Whether you’re self-publishing and submitting to agents and publishers, you’ll need to combine all your files into one (self-consistent) file.

• Use “headings” for your chapters or entries. Headings are under Styles in Word.
• Use “normal” for your text. Normal is another Style in Word.

If you do this, you will be able to change the whole document to the style you want (for self-publishing), or the style requested for submissions. The arrow to the bottom right of “Styles” in Word will open the “Styles window.” A button at the bottom allows you to “manage” or “edit” your styles. You would make your file double-spaced by:

• Clicking the manage styles button and selecting “normal.”
• Click “modify,”
• choose the font and font size,
• then click “format,”
• choose “paragraph” and
• set the line spacing to double.

If you’re self-publishing, you need a few more steps. The simplest approach is to download book templates:

• Google “kdp paperback template”
• Choose templates with text, so you can see what you’re doing
• This downloads a zip file. Unzip it to get files in different languages
• Choose your language and unzip to get files of different sizes
• Choose your size. 6×9 inches is common
• Then cut and paste your text to replace the “put your title here” and “put your first chapter here” text in your template.

Of course, you can do this by hand. Start with the page layout>margins>custom

• Set the Page Size on the page size tab.
• Set the Margins: These need to be big enough to look good in print, say 0.5”
• Set the Gutters: So the writing doesn’t get lost in the fold in a print book (use Mirror Margins)
• Assign enough space for headers and footers

At this point everything is in “normal” style. You might want to create new styles for, say, centered poetry, left-justified poetry, indented quotations, etc. From that Style window, click on the button for “New Style,” base your new style on “normal” (so you can change everything at once), name the style appropriately (so you can find it), then select any text that needs the new style, and select the style from the options in “Styles” in Word.

(Just a warning here, Word does make mistakes. When you insert your text and try to make it “normal,” make sure your italics haven’t been reversed or removed along the way.)

How to Edit your book

Whether you’re self-publishing or submitting to agents and editors, you will want to make the following edits:

• Avoid special characters unless you really know what you’re doing. These can be created accidentally, depending on what device you were typing on.
• Avoid tabs. Let Word (and “normal”) indent your paragraphs. Don’t do it by hand.
• Avoid blank lines between paragraphs. Let Word (and “normal”) define the spacing between paragraphs.
• Avoid double spaces. Let Word determine the spacing at the ends of sentences.
• Make sure you used em-dashes and en-dashes appropriately
• Make sure you let Word create ellipses rather than using strings of periods.
• Make sure your quote marks and apostrophes are “curly” not “straight.”

Here are some ideas to help with this:

Click on ¶ in Word to see

• New pages
• New sections
• Double spaces
• Non-breaking spaces
• Manual line-breaks
• And lots of other strange stuff that you might want to remove…

Remember, you can make chapters start on new pages just by editing the “style” for the appropriate header, adding “page break before” in the appropriate tab.

Use Word’s find and replace “advanced.”

• Replace blank lines between paragraphs. Find ^p^p and replace with ^p
• Remove tabs at the start of paragraphs. Find ^t and remove them
• Find manual line breaks using Find>advanced>more>special
• Find straight quote marks and apostrophes by looking for ^34 or ^39 (ask Google if you can’t find a symbol in the “special” list)
• Find strings of periods and replace with ellipses
• Find italics using Find>advanced>more>format
• Find “space en-dash space” and replace with “em-dash”
• Might look for em-dash followed by a space, ellipse preceded by space, etc. and fix them too.

To create:

• Em-dash. Type “character(s) hyphen hyphen character(s) space”
• En-dash. Type “character(s) space hyphen space character(s)”
• Type “period period period”
• A backward-facing apostrophe where Word has given a forward-facing one (at the beginning of a word), the simplest approach is to type two apostrophes then delete the first one.

How to Prepare your book for Printing

This only applies if you’re self-publishing. You’ll want to add headers, footers and page numbers to your pages, maybe move entries around in an anthology, shrink text to fit, avoid widows and orphans, add section breaks so that new sections start on left-facing pages (the page in your right hand “faces” left), add pictures, adjust some font sizes, add a contents list etc.

Headers and Footers

These are a good place to start because they can change the size of your pages, which changes what fits on a page, which… (Word is a word-processor, not a page formatter. Just be glad it does so much for us!)

• Headers are under the “insert” menu but that might change. Just look for them (or double-click them!)
• Choose your header and footer style.
• Add page numbers – and note, they don’t have to start at 1, and shouldn’t start on the title page! Use “format page number” to say where you want them to start. (You can even have Roman numerals for the dedication and contents, then regular numbers for the rest!)
• Keep in mind that left and right pages might need to be formatted separately (and differently: You might have “Title” left-justified on the left-hand page, and “author” right-justified on the right-hand page)

Sections

In an anthology, you might use the section name instead of the author name on right-hand pages. “Section breaks” are under “page layout.” (So are columns should you need them.)

• Add a break after the contents list.
• Make it an “odd-page” break if you want the next section to start on a “left-facing” page. This makes the blank page between sections (if there is one) have no header or footer, which looks way more professional
• BUT be careful – removing an accidental “even-page break” is MURDER!
• Looking at headers, it’s nice to have “first page header different” for each section – just looks clean
• You’ll need to uncheck/unhighlight the “link to previous” so sections can have their own headers and footers.

Left and right facing pages

What if…

• You’d like that poem to fill a two-page spread, rather than needing a page turn where the reader doesn’t know if it’s finished.
• You’d like that story to fit on one page rather than having just one line left over.
• You’d like to avoid blank pages, so can you move this piece into a different section…?

You can

• change font sizes, line spacing, paragraph spacing etc in the paragraph dialog to fit things on a page (but keep the changes small)
• Use view>navigation pane to move entries around in the anthology BUT
• Be careful about sections – you might end up moving the section break too (in which case use ¶ to see and remove the stray break, insert a new one, and remember to fix up the headers and footers again).

Pictures

Word lets you add pictures anywhere you like BUT, remember it’s not a page-formatting program, and don’t be surprised if they move every time you blink. For safety and sanity’s sake, you might want to add them separately from the text, between the header and text for example, or at the end of a chapter or story.

If the picture’s not the right size, use “format” and (for simplicity) “wrap text top and bottom,” so you can resize it using the corners. Again, it might jump. Move your page up and down till you find it. Drag it back to somewhere SEPARATE from the text, and you’ll be okay (probably!).

Contents

You’ll want a contents list for your self-published book, but you might also want it for your non-fiction submission to agents and editors. “Contents” is under “references.” And yes, it might be different in different version of Word. Also, yes you CAN edit the contents after insertion, which is useful in an anthology with lots of entries…

• To make the contents look better on the page breaks (keep sections together)
• To add pictures
• To fix a typo…
• but your edits will disappear if you update the whole table (updating page numbers is fine)

PDF file

For self-publishing, you’ll create a pdf file of your book. More recent versions of Word let you “save as” pdf. Alternatively, you can upload .doc files to create your print book at amazon/kdp (not .docx). But it’s best to upload pdfs. That way you know the file looks how you want it to look, rather than how they changed it to look.

Check (and proof-read) the pdf file – read it like a book with view>page display>two-age view and show cover page. Use Word to fix whatever problems you find and make a new pdf. (pdf files make widows and orphans stand out much better than word docs, just because you feel more like you’re reading a book.)

Widows and Orphans

If you’re going to make an ebook as well as a print book, save a Word version to use for the ebook before dealing with widows and orphans. You’re going to add manual line breaks to make the text look good, but an ebook should always be allowed to choose its own line breaks within the text.

Make sure your “normal” has left and right justification (edit it—see earlier). Then insert manual line breaks (shift enter) just before a word to shift it to the next line, to avoid single-word ends of paragraphs and single-word ends of pages etc. If the result looks ugly, use shift enter again on the previous line, till it looks good.

You might see some lines get d   r   a   g   g   e   d out when you left-and-right justify. Add a real line-break at the end to fix this. It usually means there’s a section-break hiding at the end of the line, which fools Word’s justification.

Other Clever Things

You might indent all paragraphs, but removing the indent from first paragraphs of chapters can look good. You can set up a “first paragraph” style, or just click on the arrow at the bottom right of “paragraph” and choose “special, none” rather than “special, first line.”

You can backwards indent references. Choose “special, hanging” instead of “special, first line.” That looks pretty good too. Play with it.

Or, now you’ve unindented that first paragraph, you might select the first character and use “insert, drop caps” to make a nice dropped capital start. It looks really cool.

Find symbols under insert too.

How to Prepare your book for Kindle

• Download Kindle Create (Google it)
• Open kindle create, new project, and import the Word doc (the one with no manual line breaks)
• Decide what you want in the contents by unchecking unwanted boxes
• Looking on the left hand side, fix all those titles that didn’t become chapter headings, author names that look terrible in all caps, etc. (Use the right hand side menus to do this.)
• Remove the old contents list (if it’s there) and use + to let kindle create a new one.
• Replace any pictures that look bad (too small, too pixelated, too weird—Kindle Create doesn’t accept png files for example), then make them all full size, and add text for people whose devices don’t show pictures.

Save your file. Next time you open kindle create, resume an existing project instead of starting a new one. (Or just open the saved file which should start the kindle create program.)

Publish your file. Then google and download “kindle previewer” and preview it—with different fonts, different devices, different orientations, different text sizes… it’s another great proofreading opportunity.

And then you’re ready to publish to Amazon.

How to Upload your ebook

• Go to kdp.amazon.com (google it!)
• Sign in with your amazon account (or create an amazon account if you don’t already have one).
• And now you’re at your kindle dashboard. Click on + to create a new book, starting with ebook.
• And then…

Things that you will need

• Title
• Subtitle (these will be passed on to the print book and become unchangeable so get them right)
• Series title if it’s in a series (we’re not)
• Author names – there’s a limited number (a problem for anthologies) so have an ordered list AND
  • They’ll check the first name; make sure the name you’re going to use on the cover is the same.
  • For which reason, we list “The Writers” “Mill” as our first author. He’s a wonderful guy!
  • But please keep reading to learn how Amazon will let you add your name if you were one of the unlucky ones who got left out. (And please accept my apologies – I just made an author list “in order of appearance.”)

Things you will do

• Don’t add protection
• Do say you have the copyrights
• Create a nice blurb (and save it to use on the back of your paperback)
• Upload your kindle file (the one created when you asked kindle create to “publish”
• And make the cover while it’s processing

Once the cover’s made and the file has been processed you get to preview the results. You may have wanted to download them as well. You may be disappointed.

Then you save and move onto to setting the price. I recommend using the 35% option but I can’t remember why. I like to allow lending. I like to publish to all markets. I suggest you make your own choices. And then you push the button to start your paperback.

How to use Amazon’s Cover Creator (part 1)

Unless you have your own suitably sophisticated program at home, use Amazon’s cover creator. It’s limited, complicated, and frequently buggy. But the rules for covers are seriously obscure and hard to obey. The cover is designed in three steps.

• Use one of their pictures or upload your own. We uploaded our own.
• Choose a style from various options. Don’t panic. You can change the colors, fonts (to some extent), font sizes, and even the style (within limits) later. But you can’t drag things around, shrink and enlarge boxes, or do any of the things you didn’t realize beforehand that you’d really really want to do.
• There are three buttons (today… who knows—fewer, more, completely different ones tomorrow). One is for colors. Choose the primary and secondary colors for any boxes that appear over your image. You can choose from preselected pairs of colors, or click on primary and secondary to select them individually. It looks like you’re being offered a wealth of colors, but bear in mind, the one you want almost certainly won’t be there.
• The second button would let you change where text boxes etc appear.
• The third lets you select a different “font family”
• Click on the text to change its size, color, font, etc
• But be careful about deleting anything… deleting the author can upset the system unexpectedly, for example.

How to Upload your Print book

DON’T let KDP create a paperback from your kindle file, or you’ll be inundated with unwanted widows and orphans! (This is why you make your own pdf)

• Most of the pre-publishing documentation carries over from the ebook, but you’ll need an amazon ISBN
• Add the ISBN to the Word doc and remake the PDF straight away or you’ll forget.
• Check, change and add whatever info is needed, but be careful of making changes. I’d love to have added the missing authors at this stage, but anything you change can cause your book to be rejected.

Then make the cover (again) while it’s processing. Afterward you’ll preview it again, save and move on to setting prices. Amazon will tell you the print price (this is the author price, but you should add at least $1 per book for postage—more like $4 if you’re unlucky). They’ll also tell you a minimum “list price” which is higher. This is the price at which you (or the library) don’t get paid for sales. Set your price somewhat higher so you at least get some royalties!

And you’re done… oh, except for the trials and tribulations you suffer in creating that print book cover and having it rejected.

How to use Amazon’s Cover Creator part 2

Ebooks only have front covers. Print books have fronts and backs and even spines!

Our trials and tribulations went as follows:

• Amazon kept the cover picture but spread it across the front and back, which made us lose what attracted us to it in the first place. Solutions:
  • Our first solution was to drag, resize, drag, struggle, scream, etc until the image appeared sort of okay on the front.
  • Since that first cover got rejected by Amazon after the meeting, I made a double-image version of the original picture and uploaded that. Now we have the full picture on the front, as we intended, and a mirror image on the back instead of the bright blue back cover you saw during the meeting.
• Amazon not only didn’t retain our color choices from the kindle version, but also seemed to invert and combine the primary and secondary colors. Solutions:
  • We selected the closest approximation we could from the pairs of colors offered, since every change we made seemed to end in disaster.
  • Again, since our cover was rejected, I played with combining and recombining colors until I got a pair that look sort of the same as the kindle version. Here’s hoping they look good in print!
• The formatting of text on the back can be a pain. They offer left and right justification, but it would be much better if we could enlarge or shrink the boxes. They offer font sizes, but only limited choices. And they insist on telling you things don’t fit even when they do, or choosing automatic sizes that don’t work. Just go for it.
• Text on the spine is even more of a pain. The default font looked way too big so we tried smaller fonts until we found one we liked… and our cover got rejected because even that font was too big. Then…
  • I tried the smallest fonts. It looked okay until I asked for a preview. Then the title disappeared from the spine.
  • After failing to get the title back (except when I used a huge font size that clearly wouldn’t work), I tried deleting all the spine text. Then Amazon also deleted the title and author from the front cover!
  • So… I’ve left it with an invisible title on the spine and I’m hoping, desperately, they won’t reject us on the grounds of invisibility.

So yes, it’s buggy, and it changes day to day. But don’t let that scare you off. What doesn’t work today might work tomorrow, and what you can’t do today just might be possible tomorrow. In the meantime, be glad they give us a program that mostly works for something most of us would never have dreamed of attempting only a few years ago. The world isn’t perfect, and neither is the self-publishing world, but it’s FUN.

As soon as the final approval comes through, I will order the books. Thank you all for your help, your patience, your perseverance, and your orders! But there’s still this last step, the one I didn’t have time for in the meeting:

How to get your book onto your Amazon Author Page

And how to create your author page if you haven’t already got one.

• Go to https://authorcentral.amazon.com/ (or google “amazon author central” to find it)
• This used to require a separate sign-in from the rest of amazon. Apparently now, if you’re a kdp author, you can sign in with your amazon account. Otherwise… I suggest just trying your amazon account signin to see if it works.
• You’ll get a message inviting you to join Author Central if you haven’t been there before. Click on “join here.”
• Whatever your Amazon name is, give your “author name” as the one you’ve been published under. That will help them “find” your books. (I gave “The Writers’ Mill” as our name when I created our page this morning.)
• They will list books that they think you may have written. It may be a pretty weird list. You can change the search to look for, say, The Writers’ Mill Journal.
• Click “This is my book” for one of your books in the list.
• When you click “this is my book,” you’ll get (for the Writers’ Mill Journal) a list of possible authors. If you’re in the list, click “This is me.” (If you’re new to Author Central, you’ll probably get an error and have to wait until you’ve received and responded to your welcome email before going further.) Otherwise, below the list is the question “Not you? Please contact us.” In my experience, Author Central are very quick, responsive and helpful. Click the “contact us” link and tell them you are the author of your story (name it) in this book and they will confirm and add it.
• Then you can “view and edit our list of your books” and click on “add more books” to add more.
• You now have an author page. You might want to add a picture, an author bio, a link to your blog, and other wonderful things—you can even create a nice address for your author page, such as https://www.amazon.com/author/portlandwritersmill (created this morning; I’m still asking them to add books, but please follow the link and see what you can do). Just play with it, and enjoy being a REAL PUBLISHED AUTHOR.

Remember, you don’t need to have a book out to be an author. You just need to be published in a book.

I hope all this helps, and, if you were at the meeting, I hope you enjoyed playing an active part in it. Please contact me (you know who I am) if you need more information.