I wasn’t in LA because of Joni Mitchell, but that was what I had told my Lyft driver and it felt good to have a story.

‘Joni Mitchell, Joni Mitchell,’ he said. ‘I’m just thinking if I know someone who knows Joni.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Hmm, wait I think I do. I’ve known Gillian Welch for like twenty years, I’ll give her a call. Maybe Gillian can hook you up, get you five minutes on the phone with her or something. Here, take my number.’

He told me he was a spokesperson for a car rental company. His hobbies were golf and doing extreme assault courses. I’m pretty sure his name was Robert Reagan, but he went by Reagan. I took his number.

Later that night, I searched eBay for Joni Mitchell ephemera. I found a cutting of a review of her album Blue, taken from a 1971 issue of Melody Maker. It was cheap, so I bought it. The review argued that Blue’s songs were ‘hard to relate to’, the ‘problem’ of the record ‘one of empathy’. The experiences cited were ‘the sweet dilemma of being stuck in Paris when she wants to be in California’, and were ‘divorced from our field of experience’.

The review felt bewilderingly off for me, for I relate to Blue on what now feels like a cellular level, before I’d even fallen in love; and many years before I had travelled outside of England for the first time.

I think back to 1992. My best friend had just started her periods. She was sleeping over on the pull-out bed that lived under my own. We called it ‘the surfboard’. My red and purple lava lamp was on, the rest of the lights were off. We listened – for the first time – to Joni Mitchell’s Blue on cassette, borrowed from my older sister.

In my memory of that night, the lava lamp was like the pain my friend was experiencing, the hot red pulse of it. Pain as a red energy, as hypnotic. Pain that moves as an octopus might in the unknown deep seas of womanhood and romantic grief. I was fourteen and I was yearning for both.

The first song on Blue is ‘All I Want’ and you join the song rather than waiting for it to enter. From in the dark cocoon of our sleepover, Joni sang ‘I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, looking for something what can it be?’ I remember having a queasy feeling, one that was not unpleasant, but the bodily sense that I would experience something transformative, and soon. I joined Joni on the road she was travelling, and I knew I would not sleep until the cassette had clicked onto the B side and I had heard the last note of the last song.

That night Blue ignited my project of romantic love, my idea of how I would press my heart against the world. The album laid it all out for me – I’d fall in love, it would be sweet and cosy, I’d be sad, I’d sometimes need to run away. I’d hurt someone. They would hurt me. The music’s harmonic cascades, in all their sprawling highs and lows mapped the course. Above all, I’d be prepared to bleed.

In early crushes and relationships, I’d test my feelings against Blue’s sentiments, as though the album provided a scale of intensity that would reveal whether the love had substance. Was this a love so strong I couldn’t numb it out of myself with wine? Was it a love with the endurance of the northern star? Could it keep away my blues? Would it anchor me where I stood, or let me sail away? Looking back now, I think I tricked myself into believing almost all of the romantic attachments measured up against that scale.

But there’s something I’m not saying. It wants to escape, like a secret that’s too big to keep. I want to love; to put ‘you’ in a sentence, to put a ‘you’re’ in my blood, but I have somehow failed. This is the secret I find unbearable to admit: that I’ve let the pain of love ‘get me scared to feel’. And I yearn more than ever. For the wild rushing river of a love affair, the doom momentum of unrequited love, the touch of someone ‘so gentle and sweet’. I gave my up project of romance and now decades have passed. I don’t know how to find my way back to the road.

 

*

 

Sometimes I feel a kind of gratitude for my cat’s little hot tongue on my hand, when she occasionally includes me in her grooming. I notice what it activates in my body – a feeling of being tended to, like someone briefly stroking my hair. I know the action of a cat is not unnatural but I worry my experience of it is. The brief pleasure of the cat’s attempt to care for me is sharply replaced by shame. How is it that I lack physical intimacy to such a degree that this interaction is a ghostlet of bodily affection? I notice that the older I get, the less I talk about my cats to people who I’m not close to, such is my discomfort of performing the trope.

In ‘All I Want’ Joni sings, ‘I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some’. A manifesto of romantic ambivalence, of how the mind ‘see-saws’ when you love. Joni plays a stringed instrument I had always assumed to be a guitar, but now know is an Appalachian dulcimer, which she used for the first time on Blue. The dulcimer flits cleanly between chords, but is tonally nervy – a musical agitation, and Joni’s mezzo-soprano voice glides above it, making full use of its range. It wasn’t until recently that I paid attention to the line ‘I love you, when I forget about me’. In the loving I’ve done I’ve often obliterated my sense of self: I’ve not located my needs, let alone asked for them to be met. I have just doggedly pursued a kind of abstract reciprocation, and because I’ve not paid enough attention to what I want, the vast contrast between what I want and what I’ve received hasn’t been as visible to me.

My friend Roddy and I would call these people, these ones who made us grateful for their scraps of attention, our ‘givers of crumbs’. At the beginning of this year Roddy died after a long illness. A few years before, he spent some months in hospital and suffered from Hepatic encephalopathy, which gave him delusions, making conversations with him hard to follow and often very distressing. Because I was so frightened that every time I saw him might be the last, after each visit I would write down everything that I could remember him saying, and, in doing that, sift the Roddy I knew from the Roddy carried away by his illness. Most of the time he’d be animated by a fantasy that was gripping him at the time – that he was married to one of the nurses, or that the man in the neighbouring bed was a murderer, or that he’d booked us a table for dinner and could I order a taxi? One day, he was in a quiet mood. I was fussing with his lunch, trying to get him to eat. He looked at me and said, ‘Love hasn’t happened for you, has it?’ I was shocked, the acuity and cold blade of his observation.

On my flight back from LA there was a couple in the row in front who shared a pillow between their two head rests and watched a film together. It moved me, in the way that feeling can flood your body sometimes, in the way absence can pour in. I was being let into a private scene and witnessed its easy intimacy. I sat there thinking of what I wish I had. Someone to refold my blanket after I’d left my seat. Someone who set up the film for us to watch together. Someone to include me in their ‘we’.

When I am cooking, I sing a line from Joni’s ‘My Old Man’ to myself, ‘the bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide’. That’s what the couple sharing the pillow brought to mind: they seemed like the kind of couple who’d never spent a night apart. I love my empty bed; it never feels too big for me. And I’ve slept alone for so many years that I find it hard to share a bed these days. The frying pan on the other hand. The frying pan has an altogether different intimate energy. Perhaps it’s because people so often fry eggs for someone they love. And to eat eggs together suggests a synchronised hunger, suggests sleeping and waking together, and says please linger, please stay. Perhaps it’s the sweet balance of ‘you cook and I’ll wash up’, how the pan moves from one person’s job to another, and the ordinariness of that joint endeavour.

The friend with whom I had first listened to Blue, her surname was Green, and so ‘Little Green’ became a song for her. And her eyes were blue, like the child Joni sings to in this song – the child named Green for spring, for the aurora, for the children ‘who’ve made her’.

As I spent time in LA this confluence of blue and green revealed itself to me, and these colours filled my eyes everywhere I went, in that way noticing allows you to rapidly accrue. I went to a bar to read my book (Blue Ticket by Sophie Macintosh) and I ordered a ‘Garden Cocktail’ which was a shimmering, near-metallic green colour. Across from me were two women with blue/green tattoos on their faces and necks, and blue streaks in their curly brown hair. I walked through the streets to take photos of the abundant cacti and mutant succulents which seemed so casually growing in those scrappy little patches of earth between the street and the pavement. Every green thing had a halo of blue. I dreamt I was the curator of a museum called The House of Blue. The walls were painted the colour of Debbie Harry’s eye shadow. The perimeter of the floor had a dusting of the pigment, hazy but alive – a kind of neon blue glow seen through a steamed-up window. The House of Blue didn’t work without green. I made a pilgrimage to Joni’s old house in Laurel Canyon where she wrote many of the songs that would end up on Blue. Walking down Lookout Mountain Avenue, there were purple flashes of violas, the flowering rosemary and thyme. Every green thing had a bleed of blue.

I had a difficult feeling in my chest and throat, a tension, as though a rigid flower was attempting to open its petals in me, and I needed to give myself over to it. I stopped for a few minutes and watched young deer spring across the hillside opposite. I picked a violet and closed my hand over it. I was aware of my dramatising of this journey as it happened.

I reached Joni’s house and stood on the driveway outside, unsure of what to do. On my tiptoes I looked over the sage-green fence, and a golden dog appeared in a window on the second floor of the house. It noticed me and began to bark.

Absence of romantic love in my life has created its own awkward space in me. Like a corner of a room you cannot find a comfortable use for, a deficient space, grasping for its own utility. And I sense other people can see this and that it makes them uncomfortable. They seek to solve it (‘get on the dating apps!’) or to refute romance as goal (‘I wish I had your freedom’), and some people, the coupled ones who rarely use ‘I’, all their tastes, habits, opinions tethered into ‘we’, seem to panic about how to interact with me, like the barking dog sounding the alarm to its owner. I did not want to leave Joni’s house, having travelled from New Cross to Los Angeles to be there, having imagined the experience of seeing the house where she lived so many times and then experiencing that happening, anxious to make that experience count. I thought of ‘Carey’, Joni’s song about a love affair on Crete. She sings: ‘it sure is hard to leave here Carey, but it’s really not my home’. I walked down the steep road until the pavement ran out.

I did not call the Lyft driver who said he would try to connect me with Joni. I thought she’d see my deficiency too.

I listened to Joanna Newsom instead, beginning with her song ‘In California’ a kind of proxy for Joni’s ‘California’. Joanna sings that she’s not afraid of anything, ‘save the life that, here, awaits’. I caught myself remembering something I’d read earlier that day. Dipping in and out of phone reception I finally found it on Twitter. It was from Deborah Levy’s memoir The Cost of Living: ‘I stopped by the fountain, only to find it had been switched off. A sign from the council read, “This fountain has been winterised.” I reckoned that is what had happened to me, too. To live without love is a waste of time.’

Joni knew about being winterised. One of the first of her songs that I loved was ‘The Gallery’ from her album Clouds. In ‘The Gallery’ she sings of how she gave a partner all her ‘pretty years’ but when their love began to fail, he left her to ‘winter’ alone. I hadn’t realised I’d winterised myself. I hadn’t realised I’d wasted so much time. I’ve been saving love for a special occasion, like a bottle of wine I’d hung onto, even though it would not age well. I’d given my pretty years to no one.

The desire for romantic love sometimes builds up behind my temples like a bad weather front. I want to be able to gorge on it, to live beyond the sufficiency of friendship. It feels like failure. I wonder if I have wrongfully positioned romantic love at the centre of experience, to which all other loves are subordinate. I wonder if I have convinced myself that it is weak to want it, that I’ve succumbed to lazy, heteronormative ideals of how life should be lived and what relationships and experiences are to be most valued. I scold myself for not simply valorising the platonic and familial loves I have. I tell myself it is due to a lack of imagination, intellect and gratitude that I can’t sustain myself on those loves alone. I tell myself I am deeply flawed else it would come to me as easy as I perceive it comes to others. When Joni repeats ‘Will you take me as I am’ with evolving emphasis and ascending pitch at the end of ‘California’ – each pushing at a different vulnerability, I wonder which of the variants is most persuasive. Which variant of me will succeed?

I’d been drinking wine on the train with ‘my headphones up high’ and realising that I still had three hours to go, I bought another half bottle and took it back to my seat, along with a cup full of ice. A lot of the time it’s someone to get quietly drunk with that I’m yearning for. A quiet abandon and unguardedness, that absolute giving way to being seen. I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it. I wanted to express it as Joni, Joanna and Deborah had. To summon the empathy, the relatability they generated, to see myself in the absence of a partner who could show me. The shore that the train had clung to disappeared then, and after the obscuring hills – which I resented – we passed through oil fields, crops, the scrub, until the sun went down and I felt dehydrated and bereft. The blue of the sea replaced by the blue of night.

The night my friend Roddy died, I was with my friends Amy and Bryony. We were watching videos of Canadian figure skaters Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. One in particular, their final (gold medal winning) Olympic performance, beguiled us. It led to a conversation – a game almost – about what music we would each skate to for our ‘short’ and ‘long’ programmes. My friend Amy knew immediately: she would skate to ‘Video Games’ by Lana Del Rey for her short programme, and then ‘Permafrost’ by Magazine for her long programme. We were drinking and got distracted by another line of conversation before Bryony and I gave thought to our own answers.

When I woke up the next day, I rewatched Virtue and Moir in bed, tears slinking down my face. It came to me that I would skate my long programme to ‘River’ by Joni – give myself a real river ‘to skate away on’. I played the song, visualising a routine. As the song ended, I went onto Facebook to send the ice-skating video to a friend who I thought would love it. It was at that moment I was told of Roddy’s death. I wish I had a river. I loved him.

At Roddy’s funeral I struggled to explain the nature of my relationship with him to his family. The best I could come up with was that it was not a romantic relationship, but it sometimes had a romantic dynamic. I ask myself what that dynamic consisted of – some of it was the ‘hate you some, hate you some, love you some’ feeling that I’d schooled myself to expect in my relationships with men. We really wound each other up; Roddy would often feel rejected by me, and I infuriated by him. But it was more the way we performed domestic intimacy. We did not spend the night together, but we’d cook simple meals for one another, the fanfareless meals I imagine exist in cohabitation (‘good omelettes and stews’), and we’d play each other favourite songs, songs that were then attached to one another. He once told me he’d listened to sixty-seven versions of ‘Both Sides Now’ and the Skeeter Davies version was the best.

When I sing ‘A Case of You’, there is no one I situate in it, but I do ask myself who and what might form part of what ‘pours out of me in these lines from time to time’. Absence of romantic love is part of how I manifest in the world whether I want that or not, and I realise I am at war with this idea. I can’t hold the lines that I am trying to sell myself, that the platonic love I have never lacked makes up for, or transcends, the lack of romantic love. If I look at the lyrics of this song on the page, rather than stitched into the formality of the music, I find their sentiment mildly hysterical. But if I sing it, I sing it with absolute solemnity. The austere guitar of ‘A Case of You’, its honest unadornment, balances with the rich blood of the lyrical meaning. So many songs are like this – the music, the notes we hang the words on, make us less self-conscious about the statements we are making. I say this as someone who once sang the whole of Jeff Buckley’s album ‘Grace’ to a man I’d brought home and didn’t become embarrassed about having done that until a decade or so later. I remember a line from Richard Scott’s poem ‘love version of’ where the speaker implores his lover to wake up and ‘tell me if the word soul still means anything’. Only a lover could use the word soul and get away with it. But it can’t be right that I need a lover to speak of having a soul.

An unavailable man I slept with over a number of years once said to me, ‘You’re not going to do anything stupid like fall in love with me, are you?’ We were sat at a beer garden table, an hour outside of London. I’d taken the afternoon off work to meet him where his barge was moored. He’d kept me waiting for him at the train station where he was due to pick me up. He’d texted me while I was on the train to ask me to take off my underwear. I’d been so compliant. His question-warning made me protest: how audacious to think I might love him! But it was no use, he’d already seen me. Seen how my eyes were moonstruck for him. Now I cannot locate a scrap of what I admired in him; I can no longer be certain which ancient romantic injury I am needling, and what losses have made me so scared to feel.

Joni’s voice on ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’ moves with such agility between syllables and notes, she’s like a mountain goat that scrambles up and down a rock face while you stand at the bottom, tense with disbelief and hope. Speaking about Blue in 1979 in Rolling Stone, Joni herself said, ‘there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals’. I’d go further – by the time we reach the closing song of the album, Joni seems sonically fearless.

A romantic dynamic is not enough. Being loved by friends is not enough. I am ready to face that, but unsure how to move out from the fear position. To say this is the sex I want. This is the communication I want. This is reciprocity I expect. To understand at forty-two years old that I’ve never had a relationship with these elements in place. The idea I have never felt safe in a romantic relationship feels painful, and that for half of my life I’ve existed on romantic scraps, that feels humiliating. As though I am utterly unloveable – the fear that rushes in, on ‘dark cafe days’.

The notion of romanticising pain is the trap I didn’t know I’d fallen into. On her album Ladies of the Canyon – the one that came before Blue – there is a song called ‘Willy’ which feels to me like the gateway to Blue’s sensibilities. She sings: You’re bound to lose if you let the blues get you scared to feel. I would apply that logic to the men I have desired. They were just too scared to feel for me and I was the brave woman who put her heart in harm’s way. What is biting at me now is the realisation that I’m the one who is scared to feel. I’ve kept myself away from love. I thought it was the responsible thing to do, to limit the harms I might inflict on myself, after all I’m not to be trusted. But in doing so I’ve enacted a different kind of harm. I’ve limited and denied myself. I’ve not met the romantic potential I assumed I had.

I know I can fully experience platonic love. And I have sustained myself this long with an emotional resourcefulness perhaps people with romantic partners don’t have the opportunity to develop. I’ve had the space to notice and celebrate loving actions and interactions – how floating in salt water gives me the bodily abandon of sex, a friend who reaches out to hold my hand because they are glad to be with me, my cat settling on my hip for mutual warmth, my cat seemingly sensing when I have a nervy heart, remembering an apricot sky seen alone is no less magic for being seen alone. A letting go of the givers of crumbs.

In my rational mind, I know that I don’t need to encounter my body through its interaction with another body in order to understand it. The body is always revealing itself to you. But there are always parts of yourself you can’t get a good angle on. I want someone else to notice things about me that I suspected but could not voice, and, in their perception, their noticing, to feel observed and understood. But I also remember around the same time I encountered Blue, I learned Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas for a school concert, and for the first time felt my voice sounded real and true – beautiful even – and felt the rosy swell of that in my body, and then the music teacher heard it too and asked me to sing it solo. As soon as my voice was noticed, I lost what had made it noticeable. At the school concert my performance was strained and sharp, my nerves pouring out of me in the sound my voice made. When I walked off the stage after it ended, a woman in the wings said to me, ‘Nevermind, love.’

I have never tired of Blue. Perhaps the reason I can listen to it with as much emotional candour as that first time back in my teenage bedroom with the lava lamp doing its mysterious work, is because I’ve no object to attach to the songs. That might be something to be grateful for – in the past I’ve had to give up whole musical genres because they were too closely aligned with a source of romantic pain.

I had always thought that in Blue Joni had taught me about love, about being in love and losing it. Now I think it’s more that Joni taught me about longing. About the gap between what you want and what you have, and what you have and what you had wanted.

In June of this year I saw some friends for the first time in a long time, to celebrate my birthday. We sat outside my flat and a thunderstorm came in. Recognising the romantic potential of a storm, I stood out in the rain and gave myself over to what heavy rain could activate in my body. Rain so heavy it felt like being touched. Later that evening, there were just three of us left. I asked if they wanted to sing Blue with me. And we sang.

 

Photograph courtesy of the author 

The post A Bleed of Blue appeared first on Granta.

When I started writing my first book, I knew it was destined for Amazon self-publishing. 

I had been working as a developmental editor for years at that point, so I had a pretty good understanding of the industry and the various publishing options available to me. The book I was writing was very niche, and I didn’t have any desire to commercialize it. I just wanted to write the book I wanted to write and make it available to people who would appreciate it for what it was.

So at that stage in my career and with that particular book, self-publishing on Amazon was undoubtedly the way to go.

Of course, even with my experience and the years I had spent helping other authors navigate both the self-publishing and traditional publishing paths, I still found myself feeling completely overwhelmed when it came time to put my book out into the world.

Theoretically, I knew exactly how to self-publish a book. But this was the first time I had done so for myself, which meant I had one heck of a learning curve ahead of me.

What is Kindle Direct Publishing?

As you might know by now, writers have several different self-publishing platforms to choose from. I chose to go through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). 

For me, it was a simple choice. KDP (which was known as CreateSpace back when I published my book) was one of the more established platforms, with countless reviews from other authors verifying how seamless the process was and even outlining step-by-step directions for publishing. I liked that publishing through KDP meant my book would automatically be available through Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited Program, and since selling through Amazon was a priority of mine, publishing through their platform made the most sense.

Is Kindle Direct Publishing really free?

Self-publishing through KDP is free. But as with all publishers, KDP does take a commission for each book sold — what you pay to them comes out on the back end, after your book has been purchased by an eager reader.

It’s also important to know that while the answer to the question, “Is it free to publish a book on Amazon?” may be yes, the reality isn’t exactly that simple. 

KDP doesn’t charge anything to self-publish, but if you’re hoping to make money off the book you’ve written (even if you’re just hoping to get it into the hands of readers beyond your friends and family), you’ll likely have to make a financial investment.

Formatting your book, edits, cover designs, building an author platform — you typically have to pay for these services to create a quality book. And while you could technically skip out these steps or do everything yourself, that would likely result in a finished product that contains errors and appears less professional. Which can impact your ability to sell the book once it’s published.

So yes, Kindle self-publishing allows you to publish your book for free. But remember that getting to that point is rarely free. And once you’ve published with Amazon, the company will be entitled to its share of every book you sell.Of course, this is true with any self-publishing platform. 

So if you’re wondering, “How do I publish on Kindle?” let’s get started!

How to publish a book on Amazon using KDP

I’m here to save you some of the research I had to do by walking you through the steps of Kindle Direct Publishing. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide for how to publish a book using Kindle Direct Publishing.

Format your book for KDP

Once your book is written, edited, revised and edited again (as many times as it takes to get it right), you are ready to format for publication.

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing makes both ebook and paperback print-on-demand publishing possible. Unfortunately, each of these options requires a different file format.

For ebook publishing: KDP uses a file format called “mobi.” This is a different type of file than used by other ebook publishers. While KDP does offer step-by-step directions for ebook formatting, this can be a bit of a complicated process, especially if you’re not comfortable with coding. I hired an ebook formatter for this step and considered it money well spent to avoid the headache and frustration of having to figure it out.

For paperback publishing: Amazon self-publishing offers step-by-step directions for preparing your file, and doing so is much simpler than preparing an ebook file. I am not especially tech-savvy myself, but I figured out the formatting of my own paperback version using KDPs instructions. That said, it took me several hours to do so. If you don’t have the time or patience to commit to that project, a book formatter can also help you with this version.

Set up your KDP account

Start by visiting the KDP registration page. You’ll sign up with your Amazon credentials, or your email, if you don’t have an Amazon account. Once signed in, you’ll want to click on “Your Account.”

From here, update all the pertinent details in the Author/Publisher Information Tab, the Getting Paid tab and the Tax Information tab.

Complete this information prior to publishing so Amazon can pay you for the books you sell.

Input your book details

Once your account details are established, you can return to the KDP home page, where you will find the “Create a New Title” heading. From here, you can select “Kindle eBook” or “Paperback.”

Regardless of which option you pick, you’ll be brought to a similar page asking you to input your book details:

Language: From a drop-down menu, select the language you would like your book to be published in.

Book title: Enter your book title (and subtitle if you have one) exactly as it appears on your book cover.

Series: If your book is part of a larger series, identify the series name and what number in the series this book will be.

Edition: If you have previously published this book and are updating it now, identify which edition you are on here.

Author: This is you!

Contributors: Did you have a co-author? Does your book include illustrations? Did you have an editor you felt was invaluable to your process, or a photographer whose pictures are prominently featured? This is where you would identify those people who helped to make your book a possibility.

Description: You know that initial blurb you read when looking for books on Amazon? It’s one of the first things to show up, and it’s usually what helps you decide whether or not to purchase the book. That’s the description you’re asked to provide here. Similar to back cover copy, you want to describe your book in a way that will leave people desperate to read more.

Publishing rights: So long as you wrote the book and the work is entirely your own,  select the “I own the copyright” option.

Keywords: The keywords you select are an important part of your marketing strategy. These words will help establish how easily searchable your book is and how often your book appears in the feeds of those looking for something just like what you wrote. Out of all the fields you are asked to complete here, the keywords really are the most valuable to your ultimate success. For this reason, make sure the keywords you select are true to your book without being too generic. Focus on your setting, your characters and your overarching themes. 

For instance, a book about a teenage witch trying to save some future version of the world might do well with the keywords “magic,” “witch,” “dystopian,” “YA,” “strong female lead,” “end of the world,” and “teen hero.” Or, if we were going to publish this article as a book through KDP, these might be the keywords we would select. KDP offers some great advice on how to choose the best keywords for optimal searchability. 

Categories: Just like in a physical book shop, Amazon has categories people search through. Children’s books, YA novels, historical fiction… what category does your book fit in? And where might you find it in a bookstore?

Age and grade range: Who do you imagine your typical reader to be?

Pre-order: You have the option of publishing your book right away, or setting it up for pre-order. Immediate publishing might be best for authors who have been promising their readers a pub-date for a while and have only now just finished their book. Otherwise, choosing pre-order can often be a better marketing strategy, allowing you to build hype for your book in the lead-up to your actual publishing date, and allowing your readers to support you before the book is even available.

Upload your manuscript and book cover

Once you’ve finished filling in your book details, you’ll be taken to the Book Content section. 

Here you’ll have to work through a few final sections: 

Digital Rights Management (DRM): DRM is basically a system meant to protect authors from the unauthorized distribution of their books. While you might be fine with readers sharing your work widely and elect not to have this protection for your book, DRM helps to ensure you get paid when people read and enjoy your work. Which means it’s generally a good program to opt into.

File upload: You can choose to upload now or later, but you will have to do so before your publication date — hopefully at least several days before so you can have some time to preview the finished product and check for any errors. Once you’re ready to upload, simply select that option and KDP will walk you through the necessary steps.

Book cover: You have the option of uploading a cover that has already been created or launching KDPs cover creator. Using the cover creator can be fun, but it is also time-intensive and might not be the best option for writers who don’t have an artistic eye.

Book preview: Once you have your manuscript and cover uploaded, preview the finished product before publishing.

ISBN: Ebooks do not require an ISBN, but print books do. The good news is KDP is set up to provide you a free ISBN if you haven’t already purchased one yourself. Simply select “Assign me a free KDP ISBN,” and they will take care of it for you.

Print options: For the print version of your book, select the type of paper that should be used, the trim size, bleed settings and paperback cover finish. The default options are the most commonly used and typically what you should go with for a standard print manuscript. If, however, your book contains a lot of photos or illustrations, you may want to select better suited options for the book you are planning on publishing.

Establish your pricing: How much will your self-published book cost?

The final step of your Amazon self-publishing journey is establishing your book pricing. 

KDP offers some wonderful pricing support and advice. For ebook pricing, you simply want to ensure you’ll still make a profit after KDP takes their cut (unless you are using some limited time promotional pricing to get your book into as many hands as possible). With print pricing, you need to consider not only KDPs cut, but also the cost of printing, which will be deducted from the overall price before you receive your cut.

Pricing can be complicated because you want to price low enough to appeal to readers but high enough to still make a profit. It may be helpful to look at other books in your genre to get a sense of where you might want to price your book. The good news is you can revisit your pricing later and reset your overall cost if you find you haven’t priced correctly one way or the other.

What about editing after the book is published?

You can absolutely edit your book after it has been published. Simply revisit your KDP account, click the ellipsis next to your book in your bookshelf, and select “edit book content.”

Keep in mind: Just because you can edit your book doesn’t mean you should rush to publication assuming you’ll just fix errors later. Every reader will judge the content in front of them — and leave reviews based on that content. So make sure your book is in the best shape you can possibly get it in before publishing.

The edit option is always there, but you only get one chance to make a first impression on your readers. Don’t rely on them to be your editors and point you to the sections you should  improve.

Can you make money writing a book and self-publishing on Amazon?

This is the question almost all of my developmental editing clients ask me. And I’m going to give you the same answer I give them: It depends.

That answer is then almost always immediately followed up by: It isn’t easy, but it is possible.

Very few people get rich off writing a book. And while getting rich may not be your goal, it’s important to understand that there is also a very small percentage of authors who even manage to break even on their publishing endeavors.

This is especially true for first-time authors. 

By the time you figure in the hours you spent on writing and editing, the money you spent on hiring editors, formatters, and cover designers, and whatever funds you may have dedicated to promoting your book — an author often needs to sell thousands of books to see a return on their investment.

That’s not an easy goal to accomplish. Especially if you don’t already have an established social media presence. 

You can make money writing a book, but it takes more than just writing a phenomenal book people don’t want to put down — it also takes having a phenomenal marketing plan, and knowing how to get your book into the hands of the people who will best help you to spread the word about it.

Just know it’s not as simple as hitting publish and raking the money in. Having realistic expectations about what success means to you, and how you plan to achieve that success, is the best way to avoid disappointment in your publishing endeavors.

However, writing (and selling) a book is a major accomplishment.

Once your book is published, take some time to celebrate. You’ve accomplished something huge — a goal most people won’t ever achieve themselves. You wrote a book, figured out how to self-publish on Amazon, and put your words out into the world for everyone to enjoy. That’s a big deal!

Photo by Vlada Karpovich from Pexels

The post Get Your Book on Kindle: Everything You Need to Know About Amazon Self-Publishing appeared first on The Write Life.

Write a top 10 list in the voice of a character.

Write a top 10 list in the voice of a character. Is your character a tween writing in their diary? A person making a bucket list? How about someone listing their greatest fears? What does the list they make say about the character?

Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.

This week, readers on Electric Literature’s Twitter and Instagram voted to narrow a field of 32 beautiful book covers down to their favorite of the year. Some of the margins were razor-thin—in particular, both Sin Eater vs. The Exhibition of Persephone Q in round one and Animal Wife vs. Follow Me to Ground in the quarterfinals were decided by fewer than 10 votes. But in the end, one cover prevailed.

First, let’s meet our Final Four:

Animal Wife by Lara Ehrlich, cover design and art by Caitlin Sacks

Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford, cover design by Jaya Miceli, cover art by Toon Joonsen

Sometimes I Never Suffered by Shane McCrae, cover design by Crisis Studio, cover art by Toyin Ojih Odutola

The Majesties by Tiffany Tsao, cover design by James Iacobelli, cover art by Joseph Lee

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From these four contenders, each of which had already knocked out three other hopefuls on their way to the quarterfinals, a vivid ultimate pairing emerged:

We spoke to the designers of the final two about the process of designing their eye-catching covers.

James Iacobelli, designer of The Majesties

What was the most important thing for you to convey about the book? How did you use the design to get that across? I wanted to find the right simple image that would portray the luxuriousness, complexity and destruction of this novel. It had to have menace but remain beautiful. Having been a fan of Joseph Lee’s art, I knew it was a perfect match.

Did you have any interesting false starts or first drafts you can tell us about? All along, I had been interested in the concept of deconstruction. I was working with silhouettes and butterflies. None had the impact I was looking for.

What’s your favorite book cover of 2020, besides your own? I’m obsessed with Howdunit.

Caitlin Sacks, designer of Animal Wife

What was the most important thing for you to convey about the book? How did you use the design to get that across?

The author, Lara, really guided me with the direction for the cover. We wanted to emphasize the duality of the title Animal Wife. Is she the human wife of an animal? Or is she the animal? The answer changes between stories.

I think there’s this idea so many women have, that once you get married and have kids, you’re trapped. Your life isn’t your own anymore. The cover wolf/housewife can be seen as a wild animal that’s been domesticated, or she’s a wife with a growing resentment for her family. Either way, those animal instincts are bound to kick in for self preservation eventually.

Did you have any interesting false starts or first drafts you can tell us about?

Two key phrases I used as my starting point were motherhood and abandonment. The title-story “Animal Wife” is a reimagined tale of the swan maiden, where the swan transforms into an unhappy wife and mother. So my original idea was a swan swimming in a lake with a gaggle of cygnets following close behind. The swan is reflected in the water, without her children; a life where she is free from familial responsibility. We ultimately agreed that it felt too tame a cover for this book.

What’s your favorite book cover of 2020, besides your own?

Wave If You Can See Me by Susan Ludvigson. My dear friend and jaw-droppingly talented designer, Vivian Rowe, created it. She and I met at Red Hen Press, an indie non-profit publisher, where we both became lead designers. I’m in constant awe of her work. She’s a fantastic illustrator, hand letterer, and graphic designer. She’s a triple threat! Hopefully you’ll be interviewing her next year for Best Cover 2021. 

I’m so thankful to Red Hen for allowing me to create book covers and distract the staff with my incessant talking. I used to get in trouble for it in fourth grade, but everyone at the press seems to like it. 

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And finally, here’s your 2020 Book Cover Tournament winner:

Animal Wife by Lara Ehrlich! Congratulations to Lara, Caitlin, and Red Hen Press.

The post Announcing the Winner of Electric Lit’s Book Cover of the Year Tournament appeared first on Electric Literature.

Life these past months has sucked everywhere and for everyone–from rising COVID cases to the terrible election that loomed over our shoulders to the seemingly endless advent of strange, terrible, bittersweet news. But here in Philadelphia, life has sucked uniquely—and also offered unique triumphs. 

From the massive and organized uprising for Black life after the murder of George Floyd which lead the Philadelphia Police Department to trap and teargas protestors, to Trump’s fearmongering false claims that Philly’s poll centers were part of a stolen election (“bad things happen in Philadelphia!”) to the murder of one of our own, a Black mentally ill citizen named Walter Wallace Jr., and the unrest that followed, to the whole world watching Philadelphia’s slow and steady vote counting process in a tally that would ultimately call the election for Biden to the exceptionally raucous jubilation that once again put Philly faces on screens worldwide to the stranger-than-fiction botched press conference held here at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, Philly has been the epicenter of this whole wretched and rich pandemic era. Our skies have been filled with police and press helicopters, our friends and comrades have become sick or died or been header photos for global news stories about disease and dissent, and our neighbors were the ones unwrapping and sorting those fateful ballots. 

We are all going through it this year, but Philadelphians have found a way to dig deep into our values and take care of each other.

But through it all, and as time passes in slow, quick, meandering ways, the resiliency of Philadelphia has been a warm blanket over my shoulders, at times the only thing keeping me going. As my personal life took many ups and downs through the pandemic, Philadelphia has been a constant for me, a friend in collective healing and refuge, a muse for my writing. Much of my writing ventures into loneliness, Blackness, and the mundane and much of this year has tackled all of these themes. I ask myself when I write, “What does it mean to be Black in America? What does it mean to be lonely this year? And how do I write during such excitedly unexciting times?” Walking through different neighborhoods has helped, falling in and out of love has helped, and re-discovering and re-prioritizing not only my words, but my values have helped in all of this. We are all going through it this year, but Philadelphians have found a way to dig deep into our values and socially-distant hold space and take care of each other.  

I asked other Philadelphia writers about the moments that have defined this era for them, the moments they’ll never forget, and why they think the whole world has lately been watching Philadelphia, a city that deserves the limelight all the time but is so often overlooked. Their answers are dispatches from a place and time we are still living through, yet one that must not be forgotten, months when one of the poorest and most gritty cities in the world clashed with fascism and despair and emerged proud and united. 

West Philadelphia, where the Philadelphia Police Department brought in tanks and weapons to use against protestors on 52nd street and where Walter Wallace Jr. was murdered, has also been a site of warmth, community and action. Fiction writer Asali Solomon writes about her West Philly quarantine: 

Though I still have my health and my livelihood, each day of the last eight months have managed to bring some new kind of terrible. Yet, each of those days confirmed something I suspected, but did not know, which was that there is no place I would rather live than West Philadelphia.

I live within walking distance of my parents, in whose yard I’ve been able to safely celebrate birthdays and holidays, on a block that immediately offered itself up as a place where I would never starve or be without toilet paper. When my gym closed, I took up long walks, mainly to the scenic Woodlands Cemetery, where I’ve been able to reflect calmly on time, disease (more than a few victims of the 1918 flu rest there) and death, while staying in shape. 

There has been, of course an increase in all manners of desperate violence in West Philadelphia, as in other parts of the city. Some of it highlights the brutal inequality that rapid gentrification engenders. But at this moment, the community remains a wildly diverse neighborhood of African American, Caribbean and African, Trans, Muslim, Queer, Latinx , Asian and Asian American, Christian and atheist and heathen people, mostly wearing masks, trying not to kill each other, trying to stay alive. In fliers threatening to march here, the hate group the Proud Boys called our community “the belly of the beast.”

West Philadelphia and its community members have remained a space for joy and pleasure and has been such an anchor during these times, As a community, West Philadelphians were defiant and they took care of each other. Fellow neighbor and nonfiction writer Cate McLaughlin writes: 

I find my friends in the gathering crowd at Malcolm X Park. There is the vibration of reverence and fury each time his name, Walter Wallace, is spoken and passed gently from person to person. As the sun lowers, the police begin to close in along a deliberate perimeter around the vigil. I can’t stop thinking about Walter Wallace’s mother, about what it is to watch the sun go down on the last day your child is alive, to plead for his life, and then to wake another day. There are activists and neighbors with snacks and medic bags, the exhaustion visible above the top seams of their masks. We smile grimly to see a kid writing TRUMP PENCE OUT NOW in yellow chalk on the pavement. The first speaker is a student who has to yell to be heard over the intimidation of the helicopters, who says what she wants is to be able to spend a day learning instead of grieving.

By the time we begin to move, the crowd surges toward Market street and people come to stand and watch us pass from their stoops. We clog the intersections and folks in SUVs sound obnoxious honks of encouragement.  Improbably, a beautiful man in a turtleneck is weaving among the protest mayhem narrating the events in what might be French to some streaming platform on his phone with the ease and confidence of a cooking show host.  The cops standing guard over the big chain sneaker stores on 52nd won’t make eye contact. We ask, Who do you serve? Who do you protect? but the questions bounce off the armor meant to make each officer appear more carapace than person. Later, on the news, the newscaster will lose composure at the footage of burning cars and broken glass, his face a green screen of disbelief. All night long the helicopters dog West Philly, a sound that will stay, like gravel sewn into the wound of my sleep

This spirit of defiance and resiliency has always been in Philadelphia, as has a history of violent anti-Black policing. But for a new generation of activists and thinkers here, their christening came earlier this year, back in June. 

Writes novelist Annie Liontas, 

On June 1, Philadelphia Police officers trapped us on 676, firing multiple rounds of tear gas and pepper spray at thousands of protestors. On June 2, I began receiving Facebook messages from those who had had to flee, many of them stunned and angry, some of them in bad shape. One person dislocated his shoulder trying to climb a fence: he now needed surgery. Someone who had been deployed with Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom lamented that the police always seemed to get away with things that would get you jailed in the military. A young woman who grew up in the Richard Allen Projects before they were torn down, said, “They call our movement hostile but this is the same city that thought it was ok to bomb a Black neighborhood—my family’s neighborhood.” 

In writing about what happened on 676, which was ultimately published with NPR-WHYY, I was sent photos, shaky cell phone videos that proved that there had only been PG-13 shouting and chanting before police moved in. Until authorities ambushed protestors entering the highway’s long overpass, cars had been honking in support, people were getting out of their cars to applaud. After, I watched officers point-blank assault people who were on their knees with their heads bowed. I watched hundreds of people scrambling up a steep bank, remembering how I had had to stop to wipe my sunglasses of the residue of tear gas, how I had called out “Don’t run, don’t run,” to two teenagers, the danger of a stampede being not that we will knock each other over but that with nowhere to go, we will all suffocate. 

Not until the New York Times conducted its own investigation, with shiny infographics, did Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw acknowledge that they had turned chemical weapons banned by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention against peaceful protestors. But the people who had been out on 676, who demanded to be heard by the city that had betrayed them—the very next day, they were back out on the streets. 

From these events in Center City, the stories expand in every direction, east to the river, and into South, and North Philadelphia. Citizens have not only found kinship in the greater city, but a greater sense of appreciation for the everyday, the mundane. Much of early quarantine rhetoric was the question of productivity–Will you write the next great American novel? As time went on, much of that went by the wayside, replaced by a focus on the home, self-care and family. Then we moved on to the anticipation of what November would bring. Instead of sitting idly by, some Philadelphians threw themselves into political organizing full throttle. Some decided enough was enough, and ran for election themselves, like writer and now elected Pennsylvania state senator Nikil Saval.

In February 2019, someone posed the question: “Why not you?” I wasn’t horrified. We launched our campaign at Hawthorne Park. There had once been around five hundred units of public housing here; they were replaced by half that much. A placard marked the place where Martin Luther King, Jr., had spoken in 1965. A hundred people had shown up, dragooned by my campaign manager. Someone cajoled the crowd into chanting, “SA-VAL FOR ALL,” to my embarrassment; a slogan we had coined as a joke had become the actual one. 

A few months later, daycares were closed. I walked around with my toddler, in a determined circle around the block, as was his preference, dramatically avoiding the few people whose paths we crossed. I talked on the phone with another candidate about whether we should cancel upcoming events. We circled the seriousness of what was taking place. That afternoon, while my son napped, I called people to ask them for money. No one had money. Some of them needed groceries and medication delivered. We began to arrange those deliveries. 

On Election Day for the primary, we all emerged from our houses, masked. The hundreds of volunteers I had never met were in front of polling places, in orange T-shirts, with giant poster-boards of my son, me somewhat blurred behind him. A baby—running for State Senate! I nabbed voters on the way in, shoved literature into their hands. I talked—to people! It was the best day of my life. That night, early results put us up by 34 percent. A City Councilperson drove to my house. “Bro, you won,” he cried. “Get drunk.” I collapsed into his arms.

In November, following the general election, I was called up to the Convention Center, again, and again, to give speeches. I screamed versions of a stump I had written for one occasion that, in a pinch, I repurposed and revised, something to the effect of: millions of us had voted, nothing will turn us back, we will fight to count every vote. The day the news networks called it was clear and hot. We marched down Market Street. Someone hit a gong, and organizers lifted a large, yellow banner to remind us that we needed to take action on climate change—that the future was not guaranteed.

As the election loomed, everyday Philadelphians came into action to help others in voting lines, to help count the thousands of mail-in ballots, or to simply reach out to others for love or support to vote. Writer and professor Elizabeth Greenspan shares her story of election day:

The day after the election, we trekked across town to the convention center, where ballots were being counted and DJs were playing. I wasn’t sure what to call it: a party, a protest, a counterprotest, an exorcism? There’s dancing in the streets, I told the kids. You can have a piece of candy, I added. They grabbed their coats and masks.

We had spent the past months talking about the election, and about living in something called a “swing state.” They had many questions. How did voting work? Why did people like Trump? Who’s going to win? We drove out to Reading, PA to canvass; we dialed into phone banks. But the dance party downtown was unlike these previous activities. There was a swaying mailbox and a frolicking city hall, countless balloons and dozens of people dancing in lines, possessed by exhaustion, determination, maybe even a kind of magical thinking. If we keep moving, we will win.

A sense of foreboding threaded through the music and play. Three days later, Pennsylvania would deliver the election for Biden, but on that day after the polls closed we didn’t yet know the outcome. That we needed to be at the convention center with a sign reading “count every vote” was frightening. Nearby, a small group of mostly men wearing MAGA hats shouted in their own little area, surrounded by a disproportionate number of camera crews and curious onlookers. The kids wanted to see them, and I told them that this is why we came, too. All of us. To make our voices heard. To be present. As we watched the angry men, I took solace in the fact that we outnumbered them—at least here, in our beloved Philadelphia. Before we headed back home, we returned once more to the dancing, which now felt less like an exercise in diversion or anxiety management and more like the creation of a necessary, fortified barrier. A manifestation of our will to prevail. We raised our hands and sang out loud and filled a bit of the street. There was nothing magical about it.

Philadelphia lit up after election news, a city and its outer suburbs helping to cement a win and a move forward. Upon hearing the news of Biden’s win, Solomon embraced with her fellow West Philadelphians:

[. . .] that Saturday when news outlets called Pennsylvania for Biden, which was basically calling Philadelphia for Biden, which was definitely a massive West Philadelphia effort, not so much on behalf of Joe Biden but as a concerted effort to rebuke the anti-human agenda of the Republican party, we celebrated like our lives depended on it. We took to the streets banging on pots and pans, emitting mask-muffled cheers, dancing. Two bands played in Clark Park, the Black cowboys showed up and champagne flowed. The party continued later, even when the streets were dark and silent, and a thick cloud of marijuana smoke drifted into my passing car. It is true that during the pandemic, I’ve had my head turned by Canada, by Jacinda Arden and by the beautiful Black country of Botswana (check their remarkably low Covid stats), but most of these days confirm that, there’s no corner of this terrible world where I’d rather live or die than this one.

Not only did the spirit of community, the warmth of rediscovering home, and the elation and resistance of the election lift Philadelphians, but also the ways we connected and reconnected to others and our writing—through the random, the whimsical, and often the pure fun. Writer Amanda Silberling found enlightenment through poetry and reality TV. She writes:

Sometimes it can be hard to remember how to find the joy in writing, but it gets even harder during a global pandemic, especially if your income is even partially tied to your creative output. So, as part of Blue Stoop‘s Wednesdays on the Stoop series, my friend and fellow writer Maya Arthur and I started a series of workshops on Zoom about “Reality TV Poetry.” Reality TV Poetry is exactly what it sounds like—you watch Love is Blind, or Chopped, or House Hunters and write poems about it. If this sounds silly, that’s because it is. But there’s something intriguing about combining these supposedly “low-brow” and “high-brow” genres—some of the writers who came to our workshops didn’t even watch reality TV, but just thought the concept of the workshop was funny (which was as good a reason as any to be there). 

We wrote poems about Tyra Banks shaving our heads on America’s Next Top Model, how we’d get voted off the island on Survivor, or how it felt to watch Giannina become a runaway bride on Love is Blind. It’s refreshing to write about a fantasy, but more often than not, reality TV offers us a new angle to think through our own experiences. Scenes from Queer Eye and House Hunters moved our group of Philadelphia writers to talk about gentrification in our city, while other times, we playfully debated whether football is actually just reality TV marketed toward old men. It was healing to get at least a little bit of writing done, but more than anything, it was necessary to take time to laugh and think about something aside from the scary, isolating months that waited ahead. Being a writer doesn’t always have to be about producing something that other people want to read. In times like these, finding joy and community in being a writer is just as important as the literal writing.

I am so proud to call myself a writer and a Philadelphian. Through all this, layered upon its history of struggle, leadership and disinvestment, Philadelphia has remained a consistent and formidable force. Recently, I walked from my home in West Philadelphia on 46th Street to Penn’s Landing. It was a brisk fall day and after cocooning in my room, I decided I needed to breathe some fresh air through my mask. I walked through Clark Park, passing friends’ socially distant hangs and bocce ball players. I walked through Penn’s campus with only a handful of students and employees into Rittenhouse Square and the retail corridor on Walnut Street. The shops were quiet with few customers but the park bustled with people on benches, soaking in some of the last days of good weather. I walked by the restaurants of the Gayborhood, open and ready for pick-up and delivery, and the cobble streets of Society Hill into South Street, and finally came to Penn’s Landing. I sat down between the hum of the highway and the small crowds forming along the shops and restaurants of South Street, picked up my journal, took a deep breath and wrote. 

The post Philadelphia Writers on Living in the Epicenter of 2020’s Chaos appeared first on Electric Literature.