If you’ve been reading my blog or following my Twitter posts, it won’t have escaped your attention that I’ve recently self-published a collection of short stories called Something Special. It’s available at Amazon in eBook and paperback formats.

One of the first things I learned along the way was the difference between anthology and collection. An anthology contains stories by multiple authors. A collection contains stories from one author. Something Special, then, was going to be a collection.

Lets start with some lessons learned from publishing the eBook version.

One of the first things that surprised me is that, even though you’re the author of the eBook, you need to purchase it like anyone else to get it into your Kindle library. If I’m mistaken, let me know, but I couldn’t find any other way to do it.

If you use Kindle Create to put together your eBook, then you must never, ever, compose text within that tool. Ever. Instead, write text in a word processor and then copy-and-paste it into KC. Why? KC does not have a spell checker. My published eBook ended up with a typo on the dedication page. I mean, of all places ….

I was concerned with making the text as perfect as possible before publishing. However, in the back of my mind I thought that, even if there was a mistake, I’d be able to upload a corrected manuscript and that my readers would receive an update. That’s not the way it works, unfortunately. Amazon seems to keep track of which version of the eBook you purchase, and even if you delete your local copy and re-download, you end up with the same version you started out with. My early readers, then, are stuck with the version that has the typo in the dedication as well as some other formatting glitches. As the author, I wanted the corrected version but couldn’t get it. I’d even permanently deleted and re-purchased the eBook, and still had the original version. I had to contact KDP support so that I could get the corrected version in my Kindle library.

And now some things to consider when publishing a paperback on Amazon.

In preparing the paperback, it would have been very helpful to be able to get a copy and review it before it went “live” and was available to everyone. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case, and being in Canada, I got my copy after some others in the US had already received it. And as it turns out, I wasn’t completely happy with my first go at it.

But let’s start with Microsoft Word. It’s best to use that tool since the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) site has detailed instructions on how to configure a Word document. I’ve had a lot of experience with Word, off and on over the years. As is the case with many of you, my relationship with it can best be described as love/hate. While preparing the paperback version of the manuscript, I would have sworn on some occasions that Word gremlins were busy making changes after I closed the document. Section breaks that were to begin on the next page became continuous breaks, headers that had been disconnected with the previous section’s header were suddenly connected. It was maddening. I had to make a lot of passes through the document to get it (mostly) right.

One of the things about the paperback version that was tricky was the gutter margin. This is the inside margin of the page that is bound to the spine. The first version of the paper had too wide a gutter margin. In the end, I’ve gone with half inch margins on the left and right plus a quarter of an inch extra for the gutter. This for a roughly 300 page book. I’m much happier with how that turned out. I did something a bit different for the front matter, eliminating the extra margin space altogether. For those few pages, the space lost to the binding was negligible and, with the change, the text that was meant to be centred actually look like it was centred.

Speaking of centring text, here’s something I learned about centring header text. They default style, Normal, includes a paragraph indent on the first line. Unfortunately, as I learned the hard way, Word centres your text in-between the start of the indent and the right margin, and not between the left and right margins. You have to manually remove the indent (or apply a different style, I suppose) for the text to be centred properly.

Although this post is basically a collection of “gotchas”, I don’t want to leave the impression that it was a negative experience. On the contrary, there is nothing more magical than holding a book you wrote in your hands.

That’s about all I can think of at the moment. I’ll update if anything else comes to mind.