Book Publishing Pride
Writing a book is such a huge accomplishment, and as an editor, I get to be in the midst of that artistic process. One of my clients has just finished his book, and it is ready to be purchased on Amazon both in paper copy and on Kindle. The look of happiness and pride on his face when it was finally downloaded to his KDP account was priceless. His happiness was also mine because I know how many thousands of hours he took to create the book. He spent so much time researching and imagining and writing, writing, and more writing. And then, when he got the book to the final stage, he hired me, and I made him do even more editing. Story building. Scene creating. Character enhancing. He told me that he felt I was giving him a creative writing education equal to that of a master’s degree. I like that because I learned so much in my master’s program at Cedar Crest College. I feel that helping people learn what I learned makes me a great editor. And, as an editor, also a teacher.
KDP is Amazon’s publishing company called Kindle Direct Publishing. Once the books are ready to go, they can be purchased through Amazon. In this case, he has chosen to publish both the paperback version and the Kindle version, which are formatted differently. Once you upload your paperback book, Amazon looks it over to make sure all is well. And, once you upload your Kindle book, Amazon looks it over to make sure all is well there, too. I guess just in case you’re trying to embed a secret Da Vinci code or something.
And then, it is ready for the world at large. When I published my mother’s book, Love is a Family: Memoir of a Lifetime by Charlotte Schwab Schmidt, I went through CreateSpace (Amazon’s publishing company at that time). Things have changed since 2018 when I published it, but not much. The KDP platform looks the same as CreateSpace’s did and is just as user-friendly as it was. And by ‘user-friendly’ I mostly mean that once you get ‘used’ to it, it can be ‘friendly’. Or not. Whatever it wants to be.
This leads me to this week’s writing prompt:
Write a story where the main character enters a book or short story that they just wrote. As the manuscript is published on KDP or any other platform, each part of the story is immediately alive. The main character must find a way to navigate this world. She/he then decides if the ending is plausible or farfetched.
After writing your story, please consider sending it to me so I can either make suggestions or enjoy it as it is. And ask yourself if you’d like it to be published on this blog, as a book on Amazon, or to be shared with your family and friends. It’s easy and safe to keep your stories to yourself. But perhaps letting others enjoy it may bring you a feeling of accomplishment that you can be proud of.
