Progress, update, the journey and all that · Royalty Guild. Amazon KDP

Progress, update, the journey and all that

I have been a member for some time now, browsing, searching and learning but not posting very actively on this Skool.

I am also that one-book writer putting his life journey into ink. In my case, it is about my move to Thailand and living, working and surviving here for the past years.

About a year ago, for medical reasons, I left Bangkok to semi-retire with my wife in rural Thailand. That allowed me a lot of time to finish rewriting all my existing articles on the subjects contained in my book into storytelling reads that would appeal to a broad, interested audience.

Since joining this group, I have learnt a lot, especially from participating in one of Igor's calls. Thank you Igor and the two other people who were present. That was an interesting exchange.

My biggest obstacles were learning and realising that KDP is not simply uploading a .doc file, and secondly, keeping myself motivated a couple of hours a week to work on my book, especially since we moved to rural Thailand, where the pace is so much slower. The latter is still an issue, as life is good here.

Progress:

The word count, tone of voice, spelling (UK spelling), length and read time of each chapter, introduction, glossary, about the author and this book, and imprint – all that is done.

Photos:

One of the things I learned along the way is that colour is soooo much more expensive, so I had to remove all the hyperlink blue and emojis and then work on my imagery. Learning about the use of colour and the cost of size affecting your split (I wanted to stay in the 70%), I selected 14 black and white photos from my collection of hundreds of pictures taken over the past 5+ years and then went to AI to ask what should be done with them. I also secured written approval from anyone who appeared in the pictures.

Each picture is now:

300 DPI
900x1367 dimensions
total size is under 6 Mb

Notary & Trust:

Sadly I had a very negative experience with a publisher who mistook my being a first-time writer of a book for being gullible in business and unintelligent about publishing. He overlooked the fact that I had worked a hundred years ago as a proofreader and Jack-of-all-trades at a large Dutch/British publisher, and that I had also worked for four years at the largest newspaper conglomerate in the Netherlands. 😆 He also overlooked the fact that I had read about notaries and had taken some rather silly selfies of myself at my PC while writing my book, as well as other ways I was able to prove I am the author. It did, however, make me very insecure when other people asked me to read my work. Right now I am even too insecure to include the teaser (introduction and part of chapter 1) of my book here. Sorry for that.

Short Reads:

Again, Igor, thank you so much for this concept. During a call with Igor one-on-one, we discussed the concept of creating short reads. For those who don't know what they are, a short read is a combination of several chapters from your book that either works as an appetiser for people to buy the whole book or allows them to collect all the short reads on specific topics. There is a lot more to short reads, but perhaps I will share that some other time. As we speak, the setup for short reads of my book is done, and each short read qualifies the high set of quality markers that I gave myself.

AI:

AI is part of my normal field of work outside writing, and I have been a very satisfied customer of Quillbot, which I think is an amazing tool for writers (and one day I hope the founders realise that and not just advertise it). Very recently, Gemini has also become available in Google Docs, allowing me to use it without worrying too much about token usage. It's still not perfect, but I found many ways it can be helpful. I am proud to say that, even though I had a lot of help from AI, my book comes out as 100% human-written on any AI detector.

Obstacles:

Right now my greatest obstacle is moving on from writing to publishing. Every time I come here I get really scared when I see topics about: keywords, advertising, reviews, you name it. For people who intend to publish multiple books, that may be a learning process. However, I am only intending to write one, as that is part of my journey. Who knows what future brings, but for me the journey is about finishing something, not the money, although it would be nice to have a steady extra $100 a month that I can spend on massages and pedicures. 😉

Patience & Reward:

For those who had the patience to read to the bottom of this epistle, I have questions about publishing short reads on KDP. For example, I would like to offer a discount to someone who wants to buy the full book after already buying a short read. I'm happy to discuss it here or in a call, and as a reward, perhaps I can help you with something. Two brains often work better than one.

Cheerio and thank you for your time reading.

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Progress, update, the journey and all that