My Kindle Publishing Journey

I recently decided it was time to turn one my stories into a tangible published book. I picked one idea I had floating around, a story about my son building a snowman. It started out as a collection of phrases and sentences that I used with my 5th grade class to teach figurative language. I had made worksheets and outlined parts of my story. 

It was nothing special at this point, just "teacher models" of metaphors, similes, alliteration and so on. I pulled it up (9 years after creating it) and thought it would be something I could work with. I grabbed a pencil and started. In about a half an hour, I had fleshed out my first draft of "Ronin's Snowman". 

Over the course of the next week, I read it. I edited and tweaked it. Mostly though, I just let it rattle around in my brain. I doodled illustrations of my characters and scenes on my work breaks or before school. 

I decided to use watercolor  pencils to create my own clipart and backgrounds. Then I took photos of the art.  The photos of my art were uploaded to a program to remove backgrounds and save them as PNGs. 

The more I drew and wrote, the clearer my vision became. I could see my book in my mind. I could imagine someone reading it aloud, hearing the bounce and flow of the language in the story.

I used PowerPoint to design my pages. This needs to be saved as a PDF to be uploaded to Kindle.  I felt ready, I uploaded my manuscript. That is when I started getting one error message after another from Kindle. Yikes! Every time I had to fix something, I just reminded myself it would be worth it. 

I wanted to give up, seriously I did. I had come this far though, I might as well finish. Much like Ronin in my story, I pressed on. 

My margins weren't correct, I fixed them. My resolution for my cover page wasn't high, I fixed it. Now the image was far too many megabytes and the cover wouldn't upload. Eventually though, I fixed everything flaw and it uploaded with no flags. Yes! Yes! Yes! I ordered the author's copy. I was excited and I thought I was done. 

I hit submit. 

Kindle emailed me shortly after though. 

Aw shucks! My PowerPoint slide size was originally 7.5 x 11 (portrait orientation). I needed to add width and height to each page. For future reference, I will use a width of 7.625 inch and height of 11.25 inch slide to create a book an 8.5 x 11 inch book!  'Good to know going forward!

Those errors were easy to fix and I pushed onward. 

This time, my author's copy was spot on and Kindle thought so too!

Today, I peeked at the ratings. 

In the Folk Tales and Myths it ranks  #62. 

I would be pleased if you check out my story for FREE on Kindle unlimited. Of course, paperback copies are also available on Amazon because after all, I persevered.

Ronin's Snowman

Always keep writing,