Are you one of those thousands of people with a book in some stage of development, whether it is in your head as nothing more than an idea or stuffed away in a desk drawer or computer file somewhere? Do you tell yourself that “someday” you will write a book? Do you have any idea how easy it is to make TODAY that “someday?”

As a published writer, I have enjoyed many weeks as a number one bestselling author in several of Amazon.com’s categories. A year prior to the time that I am writing these words that you are reading, I had written three books. I self-published these books and sold them at local festivals and made a few dollars from my rustic little saddle-bound books. I did not make much money, but the books hit their target audience and I would sell a nice handful at each festival. My husband and I spent endless hours burning PDF copies of ebooks to CDs, affixing custom labels onto the CDs, collating printed pages, creating book covers, and binding the books. Since the festivals we work only happen twice a year, there was no residual income stream and my reach was painfully limited.

In June of 2013, I decided I would try my hand at self-publishing through Kindle Direct Publishers (KDP). My thought was a common one: “It can’t hurt.” I had reached a point in my life where I would have to make money writing or find some other form of income, so I decided to invest my time in myself and believe in my own talent. I researched the basics of how to self-publish with KDP, formatted my existing books, and rewrote some workshops I had been teaching into books. One month later, I uploaded thirteen books, including the three I had written previously, and waited to see what would happen.

Fast-forward to the time when I am actually writing this article for you six months later. I now have a total of sixteen books available on Amazon.com in ebook format and seven in print through Createspace. If you are keeping score, that means I wrote and published thirteen books total in 2013. I make a modest living and the income is steadily increasing every month. Even with the advantage of over twenty years of experience in the work force, it is now more advantageous for me to continue writing than it is for me to go back to work at a traditional job. It is also important to consider that the books I have published and the income they generate do not go away. This is residual income and it continues whether I am actively writing or not. The more books you write, the more income you generate and keep flowing. In theory, this can provide security for my family if something happens to me and I can continue to build my portfolio with more and more books to earn an even greater income. Additionally, since it is impossible to predict what books will be popular, publishing many books creates a larger window of opportunity for one or more of your books to really take hold in sales. I have often been amazed that my book that performs best in terms of sales is not at all what I would consider to be my best work. You just never can tell what is going to resonate with the readers.

Once people began to see that I was actually able to make money through my writing, I found that I received requests for mentoring on a near daily basis. Even this early in the game, people would say, “I gave my relative/friend your contact information. I thought you could tell them how you because a successful writer.” Others would say, “I am ready to write my book now! Can you tell me how?” My thought was, “I just got here! I am not even sure myself how I did it!” Still, I did it and this site and the book I wrote show you the fundamentals of how to navigate the technical aspect of becoming a published author.

Obviously, if I took every aspiring author under my wing, I would never have time to write my own books, which is my primary vocation. This site is to share what I know about becoming a self-published writer. It does not guarantee YOUR success. That is up to you. It takes dedication and work. It takes luck and a touch of “right time, right place” magic. To some degree, it take talent, but I know of many, many writers who admit that their work is garbage and cry all the way to the bank as their books sell like hotcakes. Are you seeing a lesson here? The point is to write. If you do not write a book, it cannot sell (regardless of whether it is garbage). Ideally, your goal is to have a quality book that gains momentum and sells on a regular basis.

Correct grammar, style, sentence structure, and word usage are a whole other book altogether and it is important that you school yourself on these skills to do your job correctly. Simply put, talent is important, but it is not everything. You have to know how to put your thoughts together into an appropriate and readable format to convey your message. You would not start a bakery simply because you can imagine designs for pretty cakes in your mind. You actually have to know how to do the work. The same is true for writing. Just because you have pretty thoughts in your mind does not mean that you know about things such as subject-verb agreement and the importance of using the active voice rather than the passive voice. Those are tools and skills you should acquire and feel confident about before you tackle the job of writing a book. I know for myself, even if I love the message of a book, I will not take it as seriously if the grammar is slack or the formatting is bad. To make the best impression, look online for grammar instruction websites and educate yourself or take a course in basic grammar at your local community college.

This site specifically is about how to publish the book you do create once you have those skills well in place, although I will throw in some grammar and writing tips from time to time. You and I will take you from your book existing only in thought form to holding your printed book in your hand or seeing your ebook on your Kindle device. I will walk you through each step and provide you with precise instruction on how to publish your ebook through Kindle Direct Publishers and your print book through Createspace.

There are many venues available for book publication. There are also plenty of companies perfectly willing to take a share of your royalties to submit your raw manuscript to those companies for you and do all of the work. For myself, I like to keep my royalties, so I learned how to do it on my own. I spent days on end researching the many online tutorials that describe the submission process. I downloaded book after book on the technical aspects of how to be a successful writer with Kindle Direct Publishers. Many of these resources provided me with valuable input and ideas that still ring in my head every time I prepare a new book for publication. Here, I bring all of those ideas together into one place for your convenience.