A couple of years ago Francis Pryor wrote an ebook, FlagFen: a Concise Archæoguide, but recently the publisher decided his company was
moving on to new projects and so the book became unavailable. As Francis is my
brother-in-law I offered to see whether it would be possible for me to make it
available again, in my innocence thinking it might be a reasonably
straightforward process. I had the original files available, but unfortunately
the original copy was a Pages document, and I am Macless.
After pondering on how to convert this into a Word document
I realised that Francis should have one. After a short hunt he emailed me his
original, but unproof-read copy; I then had the task of bringing this text into
line with the previously published ebook. Proof-reading is a thankless task: I
had to go through the document twice, and then a third time using the function
in Word’s Review menu which will compare two versions of a document, before I
was happy with it.
Next I had to find out what format the text had to be: there
are specific ways to show chapter breaks and titles, sizes of images and how to
insert them and their captions, even how paragraph breaks are handled are
important to how the book will display.
Once I had all this under my belt, and as I already have an
Amazon seller account I decided to start there. The first thing I found was
that it’s necessary to set up a separate KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing)
account. The second thing I discovered was that to set up a KDP account it’s
mandatory to complete an online tax interview with the American Internal
Revenue Service.
With a little wider research it transpired that I needed a
number called an EIN; this involves filling in Form SS4, which isn’t at all
difficult, but for some bizarre reason, if you’re outside the US, it is only
possible to do this over the phone to the IRS in Philadelphia.
I duly filled in a copy of the form and rang the number.
After an initial little speech I was told I was in a queue of between 30
minutes and an hour, so I hung up. On reflection, I decided that ringing at
0905 EST wasn’t sensible, so the following day I tried again at just after 6am
EST (mid-morning here) and the call was answered almost immediately. The call
took 18 minutes, longer than one might expect to read off the answers on quite
a short form, but having to spell out every word to the operator slowed things
down a bit - and then at the end she had to read the whole form back to me,
spelling out everything (yes, even U-N-I-T-E-D K-I-N-G-D-O-M). Once I had
agreed that this was all correct I was issued with my EIN, the magic number
that allows withholding of tax to the IRS under the relevant international
treaties. I am still waiting for the letter which will include details of when
and what sort of returns I will have to make, but I will worry about that
(possibly quite a lot) when it arrives.
So, back to the KDP website to complete form W-8BEN, having
looked up the bank account’s IBAN and BIC codes, and submit the form. I think
it was once this was complete I was able to upload the Word document to be
converted into a Mobi file.
Once that had uploaded and been accepted by Amazon (there
was a short wait for that) the next stage was to decide on pricing and royalty
levels. We’d decided to keep it the same price as previously. Amazon offer the
choice of two royalty levels – 35% or 70%. Why, I thought, would someone choose
to only get 35%? I read the ‘Pricing Page’, or as much as I could before my
brain glazed over, and set the royalty rate at 70%. I still didn’t understand
what benefit there could be in asking Amazon to give you only half as much
money as you might get.
The next step was to set pricing for Amazon.com, .co.uk,
.in, .fr, .de, .es, .it, .co.jp, .com.br, .ca, .com.mx, and .com.au, to be told
when that was done that the American, Indian, Japanese, Brazilian and Mexican
royalties are only 35% unless the book is enrolled in KDP Select. So on to look
at the page explaining what that is, and where the main benefits of KDP Select
became apparent. They seem to be threefold – to be able to offer your book for
free, to enable people to borrow the book (for free), and to give KDP exclusive
right to publish your book.
Deciding not to do enrol in KDP Select was the last step, I
think. It took a little while (about twelve hours, or so) for the book to
appear online. So that’s that, and now you can buy a mobi copy of Flag Fen: aConcise Archæoguide for your Kindle. If you want to find it in your own
country’s Amazon site you can search for B00K6JD1Z6. It’s available on all of
them except for China.
Next was to investigate which platforms to sell the epub
version on, and how. But that’s for Part 2.
This post was originally published on Bagotbooks's blog. You can
follow the publisher of the ebook on Twitter.
