Someone recently mentioned in a comment that I should self-publish my book, Errant in Iberia, to the Kindle, and after a week of investigation, I have a) Done just that, and b) Become fascinated by what’s happening in the publishing world.

First: How I got Errant in Iberia onto the Kindle.

1. I signed up for a Kindle publishing account at kdp.amazon.com

2. I edited the original .doc document of the book to take out all the blank pages real books have near the beginning (opposite dedication pages etc), and all the headers, page numbers etc (Kindle doesn’t like these) that you find in a document for a paper book. Amazon had help pages to guide me through this.

3. I saved the .doc in word in html format

4. I used a free program for the Mac called Calibre to convert my .html book file into a .mobi file – Amazon tells you what the PC software you need is. (This took a while as I had to check the .mobi file on the Kindle for Mac and Kindle previewer software to make sure it looked right, and make a few tweaks to the original .doc file a few times, going back to stage 2 and tweaking the formatting about 5 times in total, which was a bit of a pain…)

5. I uploaded my final .mobi file to the kdp.amazon.com site, and bingo, 24 hours later my book was live on Amazon.com, .co.uk, and .de

6. I got a free account at Amazon Author central so I could feel like a real writer by having an author page on Amazon.

That’s it, took maybe 6 hours in total of investigating, and mostly formating and reformating, but pretty easy all in all.

Now for what I discovered about the self publishing world….

Wow, loads of people are doing it for themselves nowadays! Frustrated writers who couldn’t get a book deal are putting their stuff out in paperback and Kindle/Nook/ebook format and making a living – and most of it is coming from the Kindle!

The star case is that of Amanda Hocking, a 20-something from Minnesota, who writes young adult fiction in the vampire, paranormal romance and other similar niche genres, and has made over 2 million dollars in just over a year! You have to read her Epic tale of how it all happened…

No publisher would touch her originally, until they all found out how she made 2 million on her Kindle etc sales, then they all went into a bidding war, and now she has another 2 million in the bank from a recently signed contract with a real publisher (to publish 4 books with them).

Amanda was inspired by the tales of one Joe Konrath, a murder mystery writer who used to put real publishers first, until he started selling 1000 books a day on the Kindle, and decided to take matters into his hands from then on. His post on why you should go it alone and ignore the shackles of traditional publishing is very convincing. (He now also has a real publisher deal again, but it’s with a publisher run by Amazon that is apparently very forward thinking…)

I found this post by James Altucher useful too, another advocate of self-publishing from now on.

So will all the big publishers die out?

They’ll certainly have to change their game. Soon enough a really big name author will take this route, just as Radiohead have in the music world, and that will really stir things up…

Should you do it? Look carefully at all the extra work Amanda Hocking put in to get her books out into the hands of readers, especially things like getting involved with the book bloggers (all in her Epic tale post)…

Her work is obviously very tailored to her readers desires as well… and she had a few of them ready to launch in quick succession after a lot of very hard work writing and researching markets.

Plus she’s clever with her pricing. Several of her works form part of trilogies – she prices the first at 99 cents (“the new free”), and subsequent books in the series at 2.99 – still cheap enough to be an impulse buy, but a bit more for her, and at 70% Royalty a lot more than a real publisher might give her. Her first big success, Switched, has already been optioned for a Hollywood film. Quite a success story.

As for my book, Errant in Iberia, I wrote it many years ago, self published it in print format via lulu.com about 5 years ago, and it has sold about 2,000 copies over the years via Lulu – a bit of tapas money. It nearly got published by Lonely Planet, but then the editor in charge of the project moved on, and that project got scrapped.

So I self-published it, which made me happy. At the time it seemed like a cop out – only crap authors had to resort to self-publishing, right? Funny how things have changed. Now it’s a brave, forward thinking way to go! I don’t expect to make a living from putting the book out on the Kindle, but it’s a fun experiment, and it might give me an extra tiny bit of inspiration to write another book one day, now I know there are so few hurdles to getting it into the hands of readers.

As for self-publishing, for us it has definitely been the way to go. I suddenly realised during this whole process that we’ve actually been making a living from “self-publishing” for years via our work at www.notesinspanish.com – if all our Spanish teaching materials had been going through the hands of a big publisher instead of being designed, created, published and marketed by ourselves, I don’t think we’d have both been able to give up our day jobs so long ago, if at all. There is a huge amount of work involved, of course, but a huge amount of freedom as well.

Apart from my 6 month blogging absence here at notesfromspain.com, I also avoided almost all interaction with Twitter and Facebook.

I would occasionally log in to both to post news of new updates at notesinspanish.com, our Spanish learning site, (as well as my personal Twitter we have a NIS FB page and Twitter account), but this almost felt like it wasn’t ‘playing the game’ – using FB and Twitter as a service to publish news without being ‘social’.

Now I’ve been dipping my toes back in the FB and Twitter water, and have come to the following conclusions.

1. Both services are a huge distraction to getting any real work done – and I have minimal time to work as it is!

2. Twitter is much better for getting news, and for getting pointed to interesting stuff going on around the net, but it’s also a place to get pointed to an awful lot of stuff you just don’t need to know about at all, ever.

3. It is kind of nice when Facebook tells you what an old friend is up to.

4. When I use twitter (mostly via the Mac’s Twitter App), and follow links from there around the web, my blood pressure rises very quickly – so I’m not sure Twitter is good for my health!

5. My life was not in any way poorer for not being engaged with these services for 6 months. Therefore, I could give them up again, but the fact that EVERYONE is now in there, and that they form such a firm part of the fabric of the net, will probably keep drawing me back every now and again. FB is winning over Twitter though, as the distraction factor is lower, and it doesn’t make my blood pressure go up so much.

6. As a wise person once told me, you have to give something up to really understand it, and what it does to you. He was talking about wine, though I think there are parallels with the long term effects of Social Media!

PROJECT FOR THIS WEEK: Self Publish my book Errant In Iberia to the Kindle. I’ll keep you posted… (It might take more than a week… especially if I can’t keep off Twitter…)

Update: It’s Done!

Off-Topic:

Working from home for the last couple of years, I’ve tried just about every productivity idea, software and system in the book to get more (or any!) stuff done, and pretty much most of them don’t work for more than about 2 days… after which they drive you so mad trying to follow their complex productivity rules that you feel you want to explode!

So this is the latest system I’m using, I reckon it’s pretty good whether you work at home or in an office, and I certainly can’t claim to have invented it. I’ve cobbled it together from a few sources (Eben Pagan, Tim Ferriss, me…) Here we go:

1. Start the day with a list of a couple (no more!) of really important things you need to get done. Write these down on a piece of paper on your desk. As you get them done through the day, put a big satisfying line through them! Alternatively use a simple text document, and write DONE next to things as you get them, well, done.

Now the IMPORTANT bit:

2. Work in the following way. 50 minutes work, 10 minutes rest, 50 minutes work, 30 minutes rest. Repeat as necessary.

During each 50 minutes block you work 100% on the task of work you have set yourself. No email, no youtube, no IM, nada, just hard work on the most important task you have to do that will inevitably lead to more money for you or your company. Sounds tacky, but that is what work is for, isn’t it?

I have a little desktop timer/alarm widget for the Mac that I set for 50 mins, it chimes when it’s time for the break.

3. At the end of every 50 minutes, make a note somewhere, on or off the computer, of what you have done. This is your work diary. It helps you see how much you are doing, making you feel good about yourself when you review it at the end of the day.

4. In the 10 and 30 minute breaks, get far away from the computer if you can. Make a cup of tea, go for a walk, talk to the cat… Don’t do any sneaky work!! (If you are in an office and can’t leave the computer, read some relaxing newsy stuff etc)

5. Never process all your email until you have done at least one 50+50+10 stint. If you really have to look at it, do, but don’t start answering email. Make ‘email’ one of your 50 minute sessions, but not during the first 2 or 3 of these 50 min sessions of the day.

I find it is best tackled just before or after lunch. And once you get into it, empty your inbox! Process all of it! Then leave it. Close that program. No cheating. Email is a ‘productivity’ killer. The biggest. Give it it’s allotted time, no more.

Conclusion

Well, it’s working a treat for me. More work, less guilt about not doing enough, and a good record of everything I’ve done. Even if you just get two, max 3 of those 50+10+50+30 sessions done per day, and you don’t break the rules of distraction, you will be doing more than before, guaranteed.

Thought it might help someone somewhere! Comments welcome…

1- Go to Google

2- Type in the word “Failure”

3- Instead of clicking “Google Search,” click “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

4- Spread the word before the people at Google “fix” it.

Last night I saw the film Groundhog Day for the first time in my life, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Wow was I surprised to discover today that it really is a real day!

The excellent Radio Open Source has an interesting post on this must-see film, and is doing a show on it tonight. Should be worth listening to.

Technorati Tags: groundhog

No Thanks to Rich Pav for bringing me the best blonde joke ever. I guess everyone in the blogosphere has heard it by now.

Just what is it called? Anyway, having asked you many times if we should be videocasting or not I’m still no closer to doing anything about it. However, check out this v-cast from David Shuff’s hitchhiking trip across Northern Japan. Inspiring stuff. This is the sort of thing I’d like to try to produce one day…

Technorati Tags: video