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.

After a great suggestion in a recent blog comment, my book Errant in Iberia is now available on the Kindle at amazon.com and on amazon.co.uk (you can read Kindle books on laptops, iPhones, iPads Android etc too with the kindle app)

Errant in Iberia as described on Amazon:

This is the inspirational story of moving to a new country with nothing, then really living your dreams.

…Errant in Iberia is a complete picture of the troubles and delights of a new life abroad, of Spain as it enters the 21st Century, and of Spain’s most intriguing travel destinations.

Get Errant in Iberia on the Kindle at Amazon.com here

…And on amazon.co.uk here

(P.S. I’ll write soon about the amazing things I’ve found out this week about the ebook and self-publishing world.)

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Ben and Marina discuss on-going events in “The Spanish Revolution”.

Other links mentioned in the podcast:

- Our Cazorla coverage
- The 150 posters and slogans from the Sol encampment
- The best one of all, from this South of Watford post
- Rosa Diez’s party mentioned in the podcast (that we couldn’t remember the name of!) is Unión Progreso y Democracia (explained on wikipedia here)
- Our Spanish learning site: Notes in Spanish – new videos up for Spanish learners!

And Finally… 2 Videos

The first, from 4Ojos, shows life under the awnings in the Puerta del Sol encampment at its height, just a day before the May 22nd elections:

And this wonderful video (in Spanish) that is doing the rounds at the moment that really explains the whole mess in Spanish politics and economics about as well as anyone could hope to:

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!

Last weekend we headed about 5 hours south of Madrid to the stunning Sierra de Cazorla. If you don’t know where it is, then don’t worry – hardly anyone does! Which is a very good thing, as there is hardly anyone there at this time of year. Here is our trip in photos, with accompanying notes.

First we did the Cerrada del Utrero walk, an hour’s circular ramble, the highlight of which is this stunning waterfall pouring from a vast, sheer rock face as vultures circle above:

We spent the first night at the lost-in-the-hills Hotel Coto del Valle – 4 stars, a bit more luxurious than we need, but at 60 euros a night we felt it was a good place to start. (Later we moved to self-catering accommodation down the road in Arroyo Frio.) Just outside the hotel gates a large family of wild boar wandered past, watched by a stag further up the hill:

Our main excursion was a full days walk along the Sendero del Rio Borosa, a long dirt forest track beside a crystal clear, trout-filled mountain stream, than turns into the highlight of the trip, the narrow path known as the Cerrada de Elías, one of the most beautiful gorge walks I’ve ever encountered – filled with wild flowers and fig trees overhanging the stream:

Here’s the map, below, of where to find the Sierra de Cazorla, and here are instructions for the Cerrada de Elías route. I hope you get to walk it one day!

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I hadn’t bought a newspaper in a very long time until I heard about the incredibly exciting events of the Spanish Revolution last week – then I bought El Pais every day while we were out of Madrid on a short break, amazed by what has been happening in the capital’s Puerta del Sol and other parts of the country.

Rather than comment more on these historic events now, I refer you to two much better informed sources of information, that, unlike me, have actually been down on the ground in Sol to see for themselves what is going on.

Check out South of Watford’s reports from Sol, and Enrique Flores’ excellent reportage drawings and videos from the scene.

A wander from Atotcha up to the Plaza Santa Ana this morning shows that, despite myriad changes, Madrid is still the same old Madrid, and Spain is still fantastically Spanish… Much of what I saw reminded me of the city as I first found it, 12 years ago…

Here a lottery seller stands in the Paseo del Prado, the week’s previous results pinned to the tree behind him:

And still the bright red, back-breaking Bombonas (gas bottles) are a viable source of city energy in 2011… Fiambres (ham, chorizo etc) and Frutos Secos (nuts) are a viable source of human energy too!

Nacional products, like these walnuts, are still considered to be highly superior:

Spot the odd can out (hint, by Heinz!):

Posters on a closed-down fish market advertise a protest organised under the slogan “Joventud Sin Futuro – Sin Casa, Sin Curro, Sin Pensión, Sin Miedo” (Youth without a future – no house, no work, no pension, no fear):

The walk was roughly this:

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More good stuff: Did you catch yesterday’s podcast?

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Ben and Marina are back, talking about Sepulveda (photo above), the Hoces Del Rio Duratón, life in the Barrio and more…. Leave us a comment if you’ve listened, or have a question or topic for the next podcast.

More photos… A typical Castilla y Leon roadside landscape:

A view over the valley below Sepulveda town:

Amusing sign on the wall in Sepulveda:

Where to find Sepulveda:

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Photo: Cabo de Trafalgar, near Vejer de la Frontera

Two very interesting articles in the Guardian have recently been pointed out to me by listeners at our Spanish learning sister site Notesinspanish.com

First, A short history of Spanish cinema – loads of trailers.

Do read the Guardian comments too for more recommendations. (As the first comment points out, you might need a 3 hour lunch-break to watch all the trailers in the article!)

Secondly, Spain’s lost generation of graduates join wave of migrants in search of jobs tells the story of those fleeing the crisis in Spain to seek work in locations like London.

Finally, a quick plug…

…a very good friend of mine has put a website together to help his mother (also a great friend of mine!) rent her very nice house in Vejer de la Frontera. Even if you don’t want to rent a holiday house in Vejer, then I thoroughly recommend looking at the photos in the galleries, they are great! This is without doubt one of my favourite parts of Spain. Check it all out here: A house in Vejer

We’ve put up two great new Spanish-learning videos this week at notesinspanish.com – do check them out on the Notes in Spanish Blog! Gracias! Bén