I’ve written a short guide that I hope will be helpful to people – like me – who want their novel to be available in paperback and on Kindle, looking as much like a professionally published book as possible. The process has been much more complicated and confusing than I thought possible, as well as being a fair bit more expensive than I expected. But I set out to do this properly, and I’ve tried to stick to that.

This isn’t an all-purpose guide. I’ve just explained what I did, when, why, and what caused me problems along the way. By covering the whole process, I hope to save people from the endless web trawling that I had to do. I also hope that if you find this useful, you might buy a copy of my book, The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax.

Paperback

1. Choosing the printing company

2. Setting up an account with Lightning Source

3. Buying ISBNs

4. Getting layout software

5. Pagesetting

6. Designing the cover

7. Finishing it off

Kindle

8. Adapting your InDesign files for the Kindle