Dust Off that Manuscript

What do you do after spending 20 plus years writing content, stories, and scripts for other people? Dust off your own manuscripts and put them into the world!

I know enough about the digital world that I did not even try to get a publisher or agent for my books and scripts. I am publishing them myself. There’s no reason to keep secret how I am doing it.

Write Your Book

I wrote a fairytale in high school for an assignment in English class. It was an experience that influenced the rest of my life – truly. While writing the book, I lost track of space and time, as if nothing else existed. The words just flowed off of my fingers as I typed it into a computer in our school library – in 1990. I put in my floppy disc to save the story and get to my next class. When I put the disc back in to print it out, it wasn’t there. Our school librarian tried to retrieve it, but no luck. I didn’t actually save it. So I had to write it again. And the magic happened again. The story just wrote itself.

The feeling of inspired writing was like a drug. I couldn’t get enough. So I kept writing and writing. Every job I have ever held had some kind of writing involved. At first I wrote a lot of scripts for theater productions for children. Next I wrote marketing copy. Next I wrote training material and training video scripts. The further I got from my own work, the more I was pulled back to it.

Now the tools exist to easily publish my own work for real, not just for my own production or my own students, but for a larger world that needs the kind of writing I am good at.

So I dusted off a few things, like this first fairytale, and used it to figure out how to publish my own work. Luckily for you, there are a lot of tools that exist now to help you write your book, even if you’ve never written anything before.

Decide What Platform To Use For Self-Publishing Your Work

There are a ton of sites and services out there to use for self publishing. I used Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing for some of my books and scripts so far. It allows my readers to choose either the e-book version or a traditional print version of the books. I do not want to hold an inventory of books to sell and have to mail out orders so this was the perfect option.

Benefits of Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing

1. 1. Free software to format your book
   2. Free publishing, no up-front fees to get your books listed
   3. Satisfactory royalty structure
   4. Print on Demand or E-book formats

 

Direct Download on Your Website

Another way to self publish your work is to create a digital download of your work and use a tool like a website or service like etsy or even amazon to sell your download directly to your readers. Again, there are soooooo many options for this. I chose to have my own website for a number a reasons.

1. 1. I control ALL content on my website (not a larger market that other people can be distracted by)
   2. I don’t have to give up any of my profit to site fees or royalties
   3. I can take up internet real-estate with my own dot com
   4. I can drive traffic to my site from all my socials
   5. Did I say I control ALL content… ya there’s that

 

Building Your Downloads

My fairytale books are all built in power point. Yes, that’s right. I had the images built by AI and then used power point for The Princess and the Flower of Dreams and then google slides for The Princess and the Whispering Lanterns. I followed the size guidelines in Kindle Direct Publishing to tell the programs what size my pages should be and that was that.

Kindle will use a number of different formats for their platform, including pdf’s and the slides are exportable as pdf’s so that was the perfect option. No fancy software. I am allergic to a number of free design software options that are very popular these days so I stick with what I know. Even though I am selling those two books print on demand in Amazon, you could build a pdf download in either of those programs and sell the pdf directly to your audience. I do that with my production guides, scripts, how-to guides and more.

A Word About AI

I don’t teach anyone to use AI to write their whole book like so many get rich quick schemes that you see across social media. I am a writer and I write words. I am not a graphic designer, so AI enhances the look of things that I could never achieve on my own. I love that it exists because it is a tool to help me tell the story better, either visually or analytically, and even grammatically.