Blog Category: Self-Publishing (6 posts)

Luke J. Wilson | 22nd December 2025 | Articles

📘 How to Self-Publish Your Book Easily (Even If You’ve Never Done It Before) So, you’ve written a book—maybe a devotional, a character study, or your first novel—and now you're wondering: “How do I actually publish this?” Don’t worry. Self-publishing doesn’t have to be overwhelming or expensive. In fact, I’ve refined a process over the years that removes nearly all the hassle, even if you're just starting out. Here’s my streamlined, step-by-step guide to publishing your book without needing to learn complicated formatting software or juggle multiple publishing platforms. ✅ Step 1: Write and Format Your Book Using Reedsy (FREE) 📍 https://editor.reedsy.com Reedsy is a free online book editor that handles professional formatting for both ebooks and print-ready manuscripts. Just sign up, paste in your chapters, and Reedsy will: Automatically format your book to industry standards Include front matter (title, copyright, etc.) Add back matter like About the Author or Also by this Author Export both an EPUB (ebook) and a PDF (print) version This means no need to mess around with Microsoft Word or typesetting software—Reedsy does the heavy lifting for you. ✅ Step 2: Distribute Your Book Using PublishDrive 📍 https://publishdrive.com Once your files are ready, head over to PublishDrive. This platform lets you publish your book to multiple global retailers (like Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and more) all from one dashboard. There's a free tier for one published book. Paid tiers are available if you’re publishing more titles. It helps track and manage all your sales, royalties, and reports in one place. This saves you the headache of uploading your files separately to each store and logging into five dashboards every month. ✅ Step 3: Buy an ISBN (Optional but Recommended) If you’re publishing print versions, you’ll need an ISBN. 🔗 Cheapest ...

Luke J. Wilson | 21st January 2022 | Articles

So you've about to publish your book on Amazon, congratulations! That's it, right, nothing more to do now? This is just the beginning. Now is the time to make sure that your keywords and description are really on point and help drive your organic sales. I have recently discovered a tool called eGrow which lets you reverse lookup keywords from other books on Amazon, which you can also check per marketplace too (i.e. the .com or .co.uk Amazon marketplaces). You just paste a product URL into the dashboard, and it will bring up a list of results you can filter and look through to see what people are searching, and how much the keyword is worth, that are relevant to your book. egrow.io interface As you can see from the image above, it can potentially show you lots of good information to help guide you in what to include in your keyword section of the book details page. What I have done is search for a few books which are in a similar area and genre to mine, looked at the top keywords and then copied them to my keyword section on the KDP setup. KDP Book Details Page Another thing you can consult to make sure you are getting the keyword right and not adding any which will get your book pulled from the site, is the Make Your Book More Discoverable with Keywords (amazon.com) guide from Amazon. This page lists all the guidelines you must follow, as well as best practices for creating keywords for your book, such as: Combine keywords in the most logical order. Customers search for "military science fiction" but probably not for "fiction science military" Use up to seven keywords or short phrases. Keep an eye on the character limit in the text field Before publishing, search using keywords you’re considering on Amazon. If you get irrelevant or unsatisfying results, make some changes. When searching, look at the suggestions that appear in the "Search" field drop down Think like a reader. Imagine how you'd search if you were a customer Choose your ...

Luke J. Wilson | 07th July 2020 | Articles

Many people say they want to write a book “one day”, or that they have a great idea for a story. Some might even have had an exciting life which would make an interesting novel or biography to read. A lot of the time, it’s the thought that they would never get a publishing deal for their book which stops the creative process from even beginning, but in this digital age we find ourselves, publishing a book has never been easier! Self-publishing no longer has that stigma of poorly written and badly edited books anymore, as more and more people turn to it — especially with so many online options to do so these days. Even many famous authors began with self-publishing and hit it big! So let’s get into it: Step One: Write your book! Sure, this might sound strange to put in this guide on publishing, but you only get to publish if you actually finish (or start!) your book. Don’t let “one day” never arrive, make “one day” today. Lock yourself away and get writing! If you’re looking for motivation, join Twitter and get involved in the #WritingCommunity, or join in with NaNoWriMo as a way to push yourself towards your goal. Step Two: Edit your book This one is crucial to getting your book widely read and taken seriously (and professionally). Nobody wants to read something with many typos or grammatical mistakes as it will just come across amateurish. If you are unsure on how to go about this, here are some step-by-step instructions, or you can search for an editor on Reedsy. Step Three: Format your book Formatting your book is about getting it set right for the size of book you want printing, assuming you are making a print version as well as an eBook. Once you have decided what size book you want, head over to Amazon’s Paperback Manuscript Templates page where you can download a ZIP file full of preset MS Word files. All you need to do it copy your text into it and then you can work on adjusting the layout of the text and chapters to suit ...

Luke J. Wilson | 22nd June 2020 | Articles

So you’ve recently written a book. Great! Maybe you’ve published it online as a paperback already, but now you want to get it into the hands of those with eReaders and Kindle devices. Seems straightforward enough, right? Well, kinda. An eBook isn’t quite as simple as just handing out a PDF version of your book. I mean, you can do this, but it’s not very optimised for reading on a mobile device via the various eBook apps. It’ll require a lot of pinching-and-zooming on smaller screens! Your eBook Options If you’re publishing/published via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), once known as CreateSpace, then there is an automatic option for you in your author dashboard. It’ll take your uploaded manuscript and attempt to rework it into a formatted Kindle version. Related: 9 THINGS TO CONSIDER BETWEEN INGRAMSPARK & KDP Personally, I’ve found this method to be rather hit-and-miss leading to various formatting issues and messy internal code (that makes up the eBook), leading it to get rejected on other eBook publishing websites (I’ll come to these later). Other online publishers offer similar automated methods, and there are even extensions you can get to plug into OpenOffice or MS Word that’ll enable you to export to ePub format. But there is a way around this using a variety of tools and websites that can help, and using these methods you can create an eBook which will be accepted everywhere and work smoothly on all devices! As I’ve only had experience with KDP’s automation, I’ll be explaining my methods from that perspective, and the end result will be a working Kindle (MOBI) and ePub formatted eBook. Step One: Get your Kindle file The first thing to do will be to upload your manuscript to KDP if you haven’t already. Once Amazon has processed it all, you’ll have the option to download your book as a Kindle preview MOBI file. Doing it this way first will take out the bulk of the work you will need to do in ...

Luke J. Wilson | 23rd October 2019 | Articles

If you are about to self-publish your book but are unsure about which platform to use, have a read through this list of things I’ve learnt over the last year or so. I initially published my book on Amazon CreateSpace (now renamed as Kindle Direct Publishing) as that’s all I was familiar with at the time back in Dec 2017, but have since found many other platforms which are also similar. For the sake of this post, I am concentrating on KDP vs IngramSpark as I was looking into, and since have, published my book through IngramSpark. One of the best points between the two is that Ingram supplies many bookshops across the world. I’m in the UK and am trying to get my book in to the local Christian and indie bookshops. No one (or very few) bookshops will touch Amazon/CreateSpace, but through Ingram I potentially can get my foot in the door. While KDP is completely free, there are a few things to note about using IngramSpark alongside it. Let’s have a look at a few key differences to be aware of: 1. UPFRONT COSTS Ingramspark has an upfront cost, whereas KDP is free — but the pros of using IngramSpark outweigh the cons of any costs, in my opinion. Prices as of 21st Oct 2019 are — eBook: $25 (£19.23), Print: $49 (£37.69) See the full costing here: http://www.ingramspark.com/features Along with a title set up fee (above), there is also a cost to making revisions after you have submitted your book for distribution. Any changes to cover design or manuscript will incur a $25 fee on IngramSpark, whereas KDP is totally free. So the major con is the cost of using IngramSpark over KDP, but some of the main pros to consider include: Opportunity to get into brick-and-mortar bookshops The ability to create hardbacks, which Amazon doesn’t have. They also have UK distribution so you can order your own book at an Author discount with fair postage prices, this will like pass onto retailer who may buy your book on wholesale. Since CreateSpace became merged wi...

Luke J. Wilson | 24th May 2019 | Articles

7 Tips for Marketing your Book on a Budget Create a website and/or blog. Getting an audience who is interested in other things you write is a good place to start, and then you can tag on book promos etc. to your blog posts. It also gives you a mailing list for targeted promos later on as your audience and subscribers grow (And if you're interested, you can view my main blog here). Make promo advert graphics and share them to your Facebook/Instagram stories. These always show at the top of people's feed and in Facebook Messenger and so get seen more often than regular posts. Join Facebook author promo groups. Join and share links to your sales funnel/Amazon page etc. These groups are often just a massive link-drop groups but it gets your book seen by more eyes, and they often have "follow parties" to gain a few extra likes/follows. Every bit can help!Here's some Facebook groups I am in and which I recommend for different reasons:Self Promo Groups: Authors Promoting Their Books Author Book Promotions Writers and Authors Promotions Author/Publisher/Editor/Book Readers Authors, Artists, Book & Art Promotion Authors, Writers & Bloggers Motivational/Help Groups 10 Minute Novelists Indie Cover Project #SupportIndieWriters Christian Authors Book Marketing Strategies Join other Facebook discussion groups that are of a related topic to your book (if possible). Then you may be able to share links direct to you book/blog to people actually interested in your genre. You can also share your promo graphics to the group "stories" and get more eyes on it as well. Facebook will also tell you how many people have seen these stories, and I’ve often gathered 900+ views. That doesn’t mean 900 sales, but I have seen a few sales spike after doing this, plus it means 900 people are now aware of your book which they may have saved for later or recommending to others who might be interested. You never know where it can lead. Please note:...