Writing

This is not printing out yourself, and putting the pages together yourself. the printing is all done by the system after you create (upload) the files for the book.

So here is some advise on using KDP = Kindle Direct Publishing.

You can select various sizes for the final print out, as small as a paperback, and as large as what I'd say most songbooks are printed.

Once you decide on the size, you get all your documents formatting in place to match.


The text is in one file (Word or .pdf) - this should include your Title page, publishing info, Acknowledgements, Table of Contents (all of those are optional) and page numbering, headers, footers. etc.

The Cover Art is in another file, this final was submitted in .pdf, but we used Gimp (kind of like photoshop, but free) to get all of the measurements correct, and then generated the .pdf. The cover art should be pretty good quality in terms of resolution (if you have photos or art) for printing.

You will select whether or not you want the inside of the book to be in color or black and white (color is very expensive). We had a lot of photos in one book, many were already black and white, but we did not go with 'color', instead, I was able to make all the photos in B&W.

There are lots of help files and information. We didn't set up our own Kindle Publishing account because we actually had a publisher (a lot of good he did -not!) The Publisher is the one supposed to help generate interest in your book, but I think it was the author's facebook friends who really helped push its sales.

But this sounds like it is more for a family type of thing, KDP might not be the way to go. You can set the price (I think maybe as low as $5.00? to cover printing costs perhaps), once it is on Amazon, send the link to your family members, they order it and it gets shipped to them. Will other people buy it? Maybe? Not really likely, but it is possible. Just some things to consider.

Here is a link for the KDP. It is the only one I'm familiar with, otherwise I would give a comparison. I know that if you don't have the login for the Kindle Publishing account, then you can't see the data (how many sold, etc.). That is kind of a bummer if you don't have a good reliable publisher.

Here is a link: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/

Good Luck!!