The nuts and bolts of my writing journey.

 

Hi you! Me again. This is going to be a long one, so get comfy. I thought I would run through some of the stages I went through in my writing, giving you a full nuts and bolts account of the things that we go through in our first books publishing journey.

Hopefully this might help you a little if you are just starting your own writing journey. Or you may just be interested in reading more about my own journey, either way, here it is and thank you for reading it.

So, my previous blog about the UFO sightings might have given you a little insight on some of my influences for the actual story. But what about the work that goes into making the book? All the behind the scenes stuff. How did I start off? How did I publish it? How did I get a book on Amazon, and on the shelves at Waterstones stores?

I will try and answer some of those questions here.

So, once I had the idea that I wanted to write something, and I started to get ideas flowing for my story, rather than plan and plot (to start with anyway), I just started to type. Google Docs was what worked for me, for these main reasons - I could start the book on my laptop, signed into my Google account at home, and then if I was at work on my lunchbreak I could log on and carry on with it.

Also, and very importantly - Google Docs saves your work as you go, so no risk of losing your progress really. I have heard about some authors that have used Word, and not clicked save when exiting. Or their laptop has had a meltdown and they’ve lost everything. Google Docs instantly saves as you go.

I did find one disadvantage much later on in the process of using Google Docs over MS Word. I’ll go into that later and how we fixed it.

So anyway, you type out your story, they say to stick to 12 size text, double spaced, and Times new Roman, it’s like the industry standard. You write your story and then type “The end.”

Now, not to get too excited here, the work is far from nearly over. At this stage, I would recommend your first step is finding some “Beta readers.” You can start with people that you know, who love to read, and hope that they give you some constructive criticism of your story and writing.

I’ll be blunt here, sorry if I offend anyone, but it’s true, family and friends are lovely to have, you will need them for support, but honestly, they don’t make the best beta readers. Why? Because they don’t want to hurt your feelings.

You need someone who will be blunt with you, and honestly – if your writing or story is shite – to tell you so, nicely if possible.

I wrote out my first draft, and then googled “beta readers,” and made notes of a few to email. These are people that I didn’t know, they’re the best Beta readers. They will have websites hopefully explaining that they will do beta reads of your story. Some charge, but I managed to find a few readers that offer to read your book for free.

So, I sent off my first draft to three Beta readers, bearing in mind that I had already been working on my story for just over a year. Prepare yourself that you may possibly get hurt here. Out of the three, one agreed to read the whole story. One read the first chapter and kindly let me know that she would leave it there, and one just refused it point blank.

The one that very kindly read the whole draft, produced for me a very good report – what worked, what didn’t, what it lacked story wise, where it was slow, or needed further explanation. Also that I was switching tenses and viewpoints. When I started, I didn’t even know what this meant. She explained that I had the makings of a story, but it was not a story yet.

Obviously depending on your internal make-up, you are either going to cry like a baby, or get straight back to it.

I was shaken at first, I won’t lie, but then I went straight back into it. Looking back, my writing was shite!

I completely re-wrote it. Not simply editing my first draft, I took my basic plot across, and started again on a new file. I probably spent another year re-writing it. This time, with more note making of where I wanted a chapter to go, I made diagrams of the different timelines and time zones. I worked on making it more dramatic and with more twists.

Working out my timelines

To help me to write a proper book this time, I started reading a lot more. I read books at work, in the bath, in bed, listened to audio books while commuting, I read, read and read. I’ll admit to not being much of a reader before this journey started – and I think the best advice I had was read read read. I think this is very important!

Now, a lot more work went into my writing, a lot of sleepless night thinking of plot holes, even in the middle of the night - I finally ended up with my second draft. But even still, in the weeks after thinking I was finished, I would still keep going back into the book, and I would add things and take things out. It’s funny the things that come to you while you’re just driving about, at work, or in bed.

Making notes wherever I can.

Stephen King would recommend that you now put it in a draw and let it rest for a while. Which I did, or I tried to do. His book “On Writing” is very much worth a read.

Once you feel like you are definitely done writing, to the point where you can’t think of anything else to change, then it’s time to start deciding on which way we are going with the publishing. Are we self-publishing, or are we going for the apparent big money traditional publishing?

I can’t speak for every detail on either side of the publishing journey, but this is what I made of it:

If you self-publish your book, you are paying for, and designing every step of the book yourself. You are fully producing it and have full control over it. You are publishing it and marketing it yourself, from beginning to end. You will then get royalty payments from every copy sold, wherever you decide to publish it.

If you go for traditional publishing, you would spend time querying for agents, you will then have some input, and then from what I gather the publisher will give you a nice big cheque, to pay you for your book – if it is up to a certain standard of course. They will get it edited and the cover done for you. They will publish it and market it for you, sending you royalty cheque’s every month.

If you want to go for traditional publishing, “to query for a publisher”, you would start to send your manuscript off to agents first. Hopefully one will agree to work with you. You will get rejections, lots of them. But then if they sign you up, they will pitch it to the publishers on your behalf, aiming to get you, and them, the best deal possible.

I wasn’t patient enough for that, I had spent three years working on it, I was ready to go for it, now! So, I dived right into the self-publishing route.

I started shopping around for the services that I knew I was going to need others for – What would be the most expensive parts of the journey. These are cover design, and editing.

Some people will tell you … “Oh you can publish a book for free on Amazon.” Yes, you could, but it would be rubbish - In my humble opinion.

Let’s start with the cover. Only because it’s worth starting to gather ideas for what you want on it as early as you can and get a feel for how you want it to look. At this point, you will either know exactly what you want, or you won’t have a Scooby-Doo! I had already made some rough sketches at this stage, I had an idea of what I wanted on it. I had been scouring vintage science fiction books like Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov, so that’s the kind of feels I wanted for mine.

My rough arse cover sketch.

So then I started to shop around on Google and Fiverr for cover designers and artists. I saved a few of them to my browser bookmarks until I had decided.

The thing I would say with cover designers is – you must do your diligence, use common sense. Check that they have lots of reviews, examples of their work, and ask yourself if the reviews look genuine? If they’re on Fiverr, do they have a professional looking website of their own as well? Remember, cheap does not always mean good and proper.

One horror story that I read about some cheap cover designers - which scared me - is that there are some people who claim to be a cover designer. They might make a nice job of it, but some have been known to use stock images. Images that may have been used on other covers, or maybe even belong to somebody else. Ask whoever you use, “are these images that you are using properly licenced?” If they have just took them off the internet, or someone else’s website, you may well get emails from people trying to sue you for using their images or covers. So you have to be very careful and check that the cover designer is experienced and pays for the rights to use the images that they use.

In the end I didn’t use Fiverr for this, I googled book cover designers again and came across Flintlock covers, who took my rough arse sketch, and turned it into a pucka design. It wasn’t cheap (compared to Fiverr), but I was happy knowing that it would be quality, and all licenced and correct.

I also noticed on Shaun’s website that he would size the images correctly for Amazon and Ingramspark (more on those later too). So that I wouldn’t have any trouble when uploading my files to wherever I wanted to publish my book. You do see a lot of questions from people in Facebook writer’s groups asking why Amazon keeps rejecting their cover images. It’s likely that they have designed it themselves, or used an inexperienced designer, and they are not the correct sizes.

Next, I started the search for editors. Again I started off looking on Fiverr to get some ideas of what I was looking to pay out. Editing and the cover will be by far your biggest outlays!

I started saving editors that looked good to me onto my browser bookmarks again.

The thing with editing, is that you could spend well into the thousands on this. Again there are people claiming to be editors, but you might want to contact a couple and ask for an idea on cost, and what their qualifications are, Fiverr is useful, as it generally tells you the cost based on your word count. There are some genuinely talented people on there, I’m not knocking it at all. My editor was actually on Fiverr, I just checked that she had her own website as well, so I could see who I was dealing with.

Now, something that I had to learn, and you will come to learn, is that there are different types of edit that you need to have done, here are a few of the main types:

Developmental editing – this looks at things like the structure and plot, viewpoints and narrative styles, things like that.

Line edit – this looks at word choices, whether the dialogue makes sense, clichés used, past/present tenses and if you have used them correctly.   

Copy editing – things like spelling, grammar, letter & line spacing, dialogue tagging, hyphenation, capitalisation.

I know, bit scary and complicated, isn’t it?

Each of these rounds of edit will cost you. I read about, and then went on the journey myself, of trying to find an editor that would do an all-in-one package, they are out there. It just takes some searching.

Budget wise, like I say they can range from around £500 up to a few thousand easily! So - especially for your first try at doing a book - it is all about finding one that is suitable for your budget. The best you can find, compared to what you can afford. They mostly give you a price based on word count. Most writing programs will tell you the word count at the bottom of the screen.

I found one that I liked the look of – I was attracted by an affordable price, she had her own proofreading website, and that she says that she is a self-confessed “SCI-FI Nut” - Winner! Cleo Miele from Texas was the chosen one for my editing.

We’re still going for a while yet, sorry. Go and do yourself a cuppa. Much still to do yet.

With my story completed, I sent it off to her to begin her editing. After a few weeks, I started to get emails asking what something meant. There is one section in my story, where I had gone into some local Black Country dialect, which was funny and really threw her. We had some laughs about the way the British, and the Americans use different words for things. 

After a while I had my book back, with all of the edits shown to me on the screen, with notes down the right-hand side. I could either apply all of her changes in one go, or go through each one, approving her changes or keeping it as my version. This was quite another long process. It’s tough because you think you are at the end of it.

Ok, here is where I will say that Google Docs falls down. For some reason, I think maybe by now, the size of the file with all the edits on as well, was just too big for a web browser to cope with.

I could not open my book with all the edits on. Browsers would just crash. Luckily, very luckily, Cleo had a copy of it that she could send me on MS Word with the tracked changes on – Day saved! (Thank you, Cleo, 😊)

Once I had made all the changes that I wanted - on Word, I sent it back to Cleo, and then she goes through it again, (included in her quoted cost). To make sure that any changes I have made, are still grammatically correct and make sense. It wasn’t just grammar - I had made a few changes to the story too, Cleo would give me her input on scenes, which was invaluable!

Editing complete. Phew!

Now we go back to cover guy Shaun, I needed my book formatted next. Otherwise known as Typesetting. This will make our edited and final word file, look like a book.

It will be laid out properly according to your chosen physical book size, yes, you have to choose a book size too. Each genre of book will have a recommended physical size, so google what is recommended for your genre…

Measuring books to get an idea on what size to go for.

If your cover person is worth their salt, they will also help you with this. As Shaun did. You might want dropped fancy capitals at the beginning of a paragraph, things like that to add a bit of style to the words. You will end up with the correct file types from your formatter – PDF, ePUB, MOBI are some of the file types that you will need to upload to amazon for kindle and ingramspark for print books.

I noticed on Shaun’s website that he offered formatting as well as covers, again, a bit dearer than someone on Fiverr would charge, but I liked the thought of keeping it in house with someone who knew what he was doing. If I had any issues in the future, I knew that Shaun will help me.  

So I placed an order with Shaun for the formatting as well as approving the final cover design.

Now we almost have a book. We have the edited file, typeset and a shiny cover.

Now to look into actually publishing it. 

I knew I wanted to end up with a paperback and ebook versions of my book, so naturally I started thinking about Amazon. They have the biggest market share, so it makes sense to start there.

Now, here is an important thing to be considered, and another purchase you have to make, sorry! ISBN numbers. You will need one ISBN number for each format of your book. So for example, you will need one for ebook, one for paperback, one for hardback and one for audiobook if you so wish to have them. This ISBN number is the long number on the back of every book, what the world database of books knows you by. It makes each book easily trackable for the bookshops, libraries, and everyone who deals in books, searches for this number.

If you are going to be self-publishing, and in all of those different formats, and likely doing another book, it is better for you to them buy in bulk. They get cheaper the more you buy, if you can afford to buy in blocks of 10, or more this is better.

Each country of the world has its own official agency that sells you the ISBN numbers. So for the USA its Bowkers who will charge you $125 for one, or a block of 10 for £295 – See what I mean?

In the UK its Nielsen BookData. £91 for one ISBN, or £169 for 10.

So whichever country you are in, just google where to buy ISBN’s in your country.

A couple of extra points I want to make on ISBN’s before I move on. And something that affected where I brought mine from, and who shows up as the publisher.

Very importantly, some people will tell you – “You don’t need to buy an ISBN number, as when you publish on Amazon, if you don’t have one, one will be supplied to you by Amazon.” Yep, but then you can’t publish your book anywhere else aside from Amazon, if you have dreams about getting your book in bookshops – forget about Amazon’s free ISBN number!

That’s why it is important to sort your own out, and then when you publish to Amazon, you tell it that you have your own ISBN, thank you very much!

I didn’t buy mine from Nielsen BookData – and I’ll explain why. I had a thought, and then found a bit of a work around for that thought.

If you are self-publishing, and you buy your own ISBN number direct from the agency for your country, if a bookshop searches for your ISBN, it will tell them that you “Dave” are the Books publisher. I personally think that this could cost you a little cred when that happens. I could be wrong – that is just my impression – I imagine the bookshop owner looking at newly published books for that month on the book release catalogue, wondering what to stock …

“Shall we stock this one Fred?”

“Who is the publisher?”

“Dave!”

So, here is another way. While searching for ISBN numbers online, I came across Compass-Publishing UK, and Alexa there sells ISBN numbers from her publishing house. Cheaper than you can buy a single one from Nielsen’s – she obviously buys in bulk being a small publishing house.

If you buy your ISBN from Alexa, and publish using that number, when a bookshop now searches for that ISBN number – the publisher will show up as “Compass-Publishing UK” – It adds a little more cred points doesn’t it? Do you agree?

You now have a self-published book, but it also now looks like you have been traditionally published by Compass-Publishing UK! Result!

That’s what I did. You still get to keep all your rights and your profits too.

Now, to start the ball rolling on hitting that publish button, to make it public, all you do is open an account on Amazon KDP, and upload the files, it pretty much walks you through everything step by step. You upload the cover, you upload the files that your formatter sent you, you set a price, but don’t click publish just yet. It lets you save as a draft. Do that, and again I’ll explain why below.

Ok, so you have your files waiting to go on KDP, saved as a draft, all you have to do is smack that publish now button, and you are live. Don’t hit it just yet.

So, Amazon KDP will get us our paperback, and an ebook for kindle. But what bookshop or library is going to order your book from Amazon? None!

You will likely, like I did want to “Go wide” to get your book into as many places as possible – not just on Amazon, so you need another option for publishing that will get you the trade contacts, the bookshops, the libraries. So this is why we will also create an account on, and upload our files in the same way as on Amazon, but on Ingramspark.

Ingramspark will get you the chance to get into bookshops, as for example Bookshop.org/Bookshop.UK/Waterstones and I think, but not 100% on this - Barnes & Noble, all order through a book wholesale system called Gardners Books. And Gardners order from Ingramspark – who are a book printer and distributor.

There is a small charge to upload your files to Ingramspark, but sometimes they do introductory offers. But you still need to do it if you want to sell in more places than just Amazon. So even if you have to pay, its worth it.

Ok, in the interest of transparency, here is a stage where I really cocked up, Big stylie!

I want to explain what I did, so that you don’t have to cock up, or it might help you handle this part a little better than I did.

Your sell price, my thinking here was that I would keep my cover price as low as possible, so that people could afford it, and that I would hopefully sell more copies. Nobody knows who the hell I am, so who is going to want to spend more money on your book than say, Stephen King’s book?

I was set in my head that my book was going to be £9.99. Sounds fair right? So I told Shaun the cover guy, to print on the back by the barcode that my book is going to be £9.99.

Shaun said, I wouldn’t put the price on the back if I were you.

Now, I had read that bookshops prefer a price on the back, so that’s what I wanted dammit! 

Anyway, I can’t remember what the actual figures were here, but when you upload your files to Amazon and Ingram, which I was now doing after having £9.99 on my cover and approving it.

Amazon and Ingram take into account printing and handling costs, and have a wonderful calculator on there that now tells you what your royalty from each book sold will be. I would be making a minus figure from each book sold! Whoops!

So now I needed to go back to Shaun, and say, sorry Mr Shaun, you know how I demanded a price on the back, and you told me not to, I need it changing now please. He had to charge me for the changes to the files. Bugger and Feck!

Anyway, sorted, £12.99 is my cover price now. For three years of work, and a fortune spent, I would like to have at least some money coming back in.

So to continue on with the publishing. I have my files on Amazon KDP, saved to a draft for kindle and paperback.

The same on Ingramspark, saved to draft waiting to go. I choose a publish date and set it, and away we go.

Now, this is why you don’t hit publish yet on Amazon, for some unknown mystifying reason, Amazon will allow you to upload your book files, and set a release date for your ebook. Say you’re in July, and want it to release on August 20th, Amazon will let you do that for your ebook. But not for your paperback! I know right, weird as hell.

Ingamspark will allow you to set a release date in the future, it’s just the Amazon paperback part that won’t. I don’t get it.

So, once you hit publish on your Amazon paperback, it is live. So I found that the best way to handle this, is with Amazon and ingram both having your files saved as a draft ready to go, set Ingramspark to release on August 20^th, your kindle book to release on August 20^th, and hit publish on your Amazon paperback the day before, so on August 19^th.

There is another option that I dabbled with for publishing your ebook wider – Draft2Digital. This website if you upload your book to it, gets your ebook onto more marketplaces – so you will get on Apple Books, Kobo, Scribd, Smashwords, Vivlio, Barnes & Noble and a few more sites. It will literally get your ebook around the world. It doesn’t cost you anything, but obviously they take a percentage of your royalties. If you do try this, just remember to untick that you want Draft2Digital to list your book on Kindle, it will already be on there.

Personally, I did try Draft2Digital for the first few months after my release, but to be honest I sold barely a few books that’s all, Amazon is by FAR the market leader. It does make you appreciate how much market share they have in the book world.

So, after a few months of being live, I decided to try putting my book on Kindle Unlimited, which I didn’t do to begin with, as this means pulling your book off Draft2Digital. Amazon must have exclusivity if you go on KU – only for ebooks though. You can still sell your paperback on as many places as you wish.

I have had some joy with Kindle Unlimited, people are reading my book – Thank you, if that is you! As of the end of April 2023 Just over 4000 pages have been read. And I made it available on KU in January, so that is in just three months.

Basically, how that works is you get paid per page read, from the Kindle Unlimited world fund. So you do still get royalties. Although some of its appeal is also gaining new readers.

Remember - Kindle Unlimited readers, read that much that they pay for the privilege every month. So in my opinion it is worth being on there.

When you have got to your chosen date, and the books became live, you will be checking every hour of every day to see how many have sold.

Being self-published, well, kind of… (With my little work around) You’re not talking big numbers, that’s why every single sale means the world! You can go long periods where you haven’t sold any at all, so it is important to dabble in some paid ads, Amazon and Facebook are the ones I have used, with varying results. But if you don’t try any, you will just disappear off the page.

My finished book.

Now you have to get your head around marketing. This is a different story for a different day!

If you are going through the same as what I have been, I sincerely wish you the best of luck.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my mad ramblings again!

And thank you to everyone that has read my book, I honestly appreciate you so much!

Please remember to review if you have read it, this can really help me.

Thank you so, so much!

Wayne.