Publishing BRAVE

I started writing the actual story in September. Filling up 24 pages in the form of a comic would’ve been easy, but as a novel? Not quite that so easy. Things like word count, spacing, formatting in general, etc. play a big role in how much text goes on a page. I had come up with a plot that seemed like it would work, but had to stretch it to meet the page minimum. I spent about 3-4 months working on things until I came up with something that reached the page minimum.

That was when I was ready to get a test print done, known as a proof copy. I had written the story using Microsoft OneNote, then created the actual book files using publishing software. My tool of choice was Affinity Publisher as its basically the same as Adobe InDesign, though no subscription license is required. The uploaded process was a bit difficult to figure out because KDP wouldn't allow me to do any printing until the page margins were correctly sized. The same applied to the cover file.

Once I got the margins correctly sized I uploaded it and ran into another problem: I didn't have enough pages.

I didn’t understand how this was the case because I had over 24 pages. After doing some research from other KDP authors who ran into this issue I learned the problem was when KDP said 24 pages, they were referring to 24 sheets. A sheet refers to a sheet of paper thats double sided, meaning the actual page count needed for printing is 48.

That was a bit of a gut-wrenching moment because it took months of effort just to come up with 24+ pages of content. How in the world was I going to add another 20 pages or so without greatly expanding the plot well beyond what I wanted it to be? Well since I wasn’t willing to give up on it, that meant some changes were in order. I redesigned the plot to be longer to allow more depth. I changed how I formatted the story by breaking it down into chapters which helped to add to the page count. I also decided to add in illustrations as I figured it actually might be beneficial to add to the story given the ones I was thinking of doing would help to give the reader some idea of what that world looked like. Doing all of this allowed me to hit the minimum page count needed and I was finally able to get my first proof copy.

Overall that day marked a turning point for the book because once I had discovered how to go from just an idea to a printed book, my confidence began to grow and I knew then my dream of being able to create published stories was possible.

I spent the next seven months reworking the book making changes to the story, attempting to perfect it through many more rewrites, as well as getting a few more proofs ordered. I showed the proofs to family members, friends and several coworkers from job at NOMA whom all helped out with proofreading. I figured I had finally reached a point of completion in August when realizing another rewrite just wasn't going to improve things. At that point I decided to go through with publishing the book.