This evening I have come to a decision that I’m going to take my book to the publishing stage with Kindle Direct Publishing without paying someone else to help me. I received quotes from £999 up, more typically £1500 plus

I see I have been programmed by the thought that certain things are difficult and can only be done by experts and yet by using common sense and following instructions from Amazon themselves I can achieve a ‘halfway decent job’ by using my observational eye, not being afraid to experiment, and knowing that if the technical specifications are not in accord with Amazon’s requirements that it will tell me so and tell me what to do.

The only thing I have to do is to buy my ISBN number for which I require two examples one for the eBook and one for the soft cover. This will cost me £180 for up to 10 iterations.

I was also encouraged by the fact that you can order a sample book to make sure it is up to standard before selling it to the public.

I don’t know whether it was lack of familiarity, lack of confidence, or a bit of both but I finally overcame that the evening when I realised that Amazon are not sadists, they want to make money and they are going to make it easy for any *Tom Dick and Harry to publish anything.

Another good thing is that if you want to increase the number of pages on your book in other words new content, you can do that and the book will reappear for publishing up to two to three days later.

I was advised not to print the price in case for any reason I wanted to raise it. This is a great relief. Just to remind readers that I started writing the book on Monday the 15th of September this year and I hope to finish everything by this time next month so I can spend December on the look and feel and adding images, send it off, and with any luck it will be out in January.

I could not bear the thought of hassling traditional printers with my effort hoping that someone somewhere would see the value of it. That would have taken far too long, normally between 18 months and three years.