Self-Publishing, Part 2

As I start this, it is Monday, September 1, 2025, Labor Day in the US. I started my self-publishing adventure (and it is an adventure) last Friday, and I’ve been making progress. I’ve also gotten myself thoroughly entrenched in Animal Crossing: New Horizons on my Nintendo Switch 2, but that’s not what I’m here to write about.

So far I have worked on publishing via Amazon, Kobo, Apple and Barnes & Noble. The experiences have been…mixed, at best.

I started on Friday with the big kahuna, Amazon. A lot of people don’t like Amazon, and for very good reasons. I won’t go into that; as an absolute beginning author, Amazon has too large a presence in the market, and I will not ignore the opportunity they present.

First, I’ll say that Kindle Direct Publishing was very well laid out and very easy to work with. I started out with the ebook version of The Immortal Remains (TIR from here on out). Amazon already knows who I am, but I needed to give them the additional information they needed to pay me in the unlikely event I actually receive any royalties. Then I uploaded the ePub file Vellum, my formatting software, had prepared for me, and the cover.

Next, I filled in the book details, including category and keywords. I got some help from Publisher Rocket to decide these; at the very least it was helpful giving me information on likely Amazon searches for particular search terms, estimated number of competitors, etc.

I also filled in the fields for book description, author bio, ISBN number, etc., and decided whether I was going to be exclusive with Amazon (using Kindle Unlimited). I decided against this; right or wrong, I decided to go wide. Besides, making the book exclusive to Amazon would stop me from finding out how the other bookstores work. I should note here that self-publishing is at least as much about the learning experience as it is getting the book out there. I want to figure out what parts of the process I can be better at in the future. And if I get sales out if it, I will be more than pleased.

Most importantly, I checked the box to make TIR available without digital rights management. I hate that stuff, and won’t subject my readers to it.

I set the ebook price at $5.99 US, hoping to hit middle ground between what I consider too expensive for an ebook (over $9.99) and to cheap for a 97,000 word story I’ve been working on for 12 years (under $2.99).

And I set the go-live date as November 7, 2025. Why that date, I’m not sure, but I figure two months might be enough to get some advance reader copies (ARCs) out, get a few reviews in the tank, decide whether I want to advertise on Amazon or not.

Once I hit the final “submit,” Amazon promised to have the book ready in 72 hours or less. In fact, it took less than 24 hours, and suddenly my pre-order site was live! Boom! Just look at that, will you?

The next step was the paperback version. I was a little scared of this, as I know very little about things like “bleed” and margins and all that. I was trusting entirely on the work my cover designer, Rob Williams, had done with the book size and page count I’d given him. I plugged in the trim size (8.5 x 5.5 inches), the paper and print type (plain white paper with black print) and the page count, and uploaded the PDF and cover. Amazon told me the cost to print a copy would be a little over $5. I set the paperback price at $12.99 and sale date as November 7.

Again, the approval came back in less than 24 hours, and Amazon presented me with the opportunity to get an author’s copy at cost, which I jumped at. I’m hoping it will be here sometime this week.

Interestingly, there is no pre-order page (that I can find, at least) for the paperback. I’ll need to look into this. I also found I’d made some unfortunate formatting choices for the book’s description page, but it was easy to go back and fix them, and they were live in a few hours.

Having apparently conquered Amazon, I turned again to Animal Crossing, leaving more publishing adventures for another day.

Saturday was busy, so my first choice for Sunday was Kobo.com. This is what I consider my “home” bookstore, since I’ve used a Kobo as an ereader for a couple of years now, having grown unhappy with getting books I hadn’t purchased from Amazon onto my Kindle.

I’d heard that publishing on Kobo was going to be an easy experience, and I wasn’t disappointed. Account setup was simple, setting up the book a breeze, and in an hour or so I was done. Kobo told me today that the book’s pre-order page was live, but I can’t see it yet.

Things went so well with Kobo I dove right in to Apple Books. I’m deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem, so this wasn’t a market I wanted to ignore. I can’t give a very complete account of the publication process there, though. Apple won’t let me upload and otherwise prepare the book until they get my tax information confirmed, so I expect I’ll need to wait until the next business day at least.

I decided to try Barnes & Noble next. This is another store that sells both ebooks and print on demand. And here I started running into actual problems.

The first involved signing onto their Barnes And Noble Press website. I have a BN login, but for some reason the press website refused to let me log in, saying the password I was trying to use was wrong. But when I put in the address again to get a password change, it told me the address wasn’t recognized.

An email to BN support received a reply late Sunday, and I was able to get into both accounts on Monday morning (points are awarded for having support seven days a week).

The rest of the process was not so smooth. Setting up the ebook was delayed by multiple times where the browser froze or the website gave me “unexpected error” messages. I had to log out and back in a couple of times, and redo several of the book information pages, before the ebook was finally accepted.

Before starting the paperback upload, I decided to switch web browsers. I’m a Safari user, but I also like to live dangerously and am running the MacOS 26 developer beta test on my Mac. Safari isn’t always the most compatible browser, and running a developer test version is even less compatible.

So I shut down Safari and started up my primary backup, Firefox. Before long I had to give up completely; when trying to upload my paperback cover, the website gave me endless “unexpected errors.” Unable to get past them, I wrote another message to support and gave it up for the day.

The last remaining markets are Google Books and either Draft2Digital or Ingram Spark for general print on demand distribution and ebook distribution for markets not covered by Amazon, Apple, Kobo, B&N and Google. I haven’t decided which to use yet.

I also need to complete my ISBN registration (now that I’ve decided on prices) and my U.S. Copyright Office application. In addition, I’ll be looking at my Amazon and Goodreads author pagess, websites to send out ARCs and, perhaps, Amazon advertising.

I guess that’s why I’ve given myself two months before go-live!