The Lavender Dawn

Phew!

I didn’t realize there was so much work that goes into getting a proof copy ordered!

A week ago, I made an account for myself on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. I created a new manuscript and began filling out the details. Some of the questions were easy. For example: cream paper or white? Hardcover or paperback? Other forms were more difficult, like the ISBNs, cover, and categories.

A book has several forms of identity, just like we do. There is your passport, ID, and driver’s license. A books identifications are in the ISBN and barcode.

ISBNs

ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. An ISBN is a specific code of either 10 or 13 digits. This set of numbers is assigned to your book. This way, your book can be registered in bookstores and places like Amazon KDP or Ingram Spark. It helps identify your book. If you upload another edition of your book, you need another ISBN for every new edition. ISBNs contain information about your book like the title, publisher, language, edition, and version.

Amazon KDP provides free ISBNs, but for my first novel, The Hidden Haven, I decided to buy my own ISBN so that it would identify as being published by Noble Knoll.

America’s top issuing agency is Bowker, so that’s where I bought my ISBNs from. ISBNs are much more expensive than I had thought they would be. On Bowker, the more ISBNs you buy, the cheaper they are. Bowker also sells barcodes, but I decided to take KDP up on their free barcode.

The Cover

The cover and formatting for ordering a proof copy were trickier than I honestly thought it was going to be.

My good friend, Christopher J. Watt, designed the cover for me on his company, The Squire. (Christopher also designed the cover for my debut work, Tales from Bethlehem!)

Something we were warned about with creating our own cover was the spine. We definitely had quite a few problems with the spine for Tales from Bethlehem because my little story was barely big enough to even have a spine! I had to be creative on how to add in a few extra pages so we could have the title on the spine.

Thankfully, we haven’t had any problems (yet!) with the spine of The Hidden Haven. Though once I uploaded the cover onto KDP, we were flabbergasted when the whole cover was too small! Christopher was amazing and quickly sent me an updated cover, despite the crazy time zone difference between us. (Shoutout to Christopher, his design skills are EPIC 😉 ) The new cover fit perfectly, no problems there!

Ordering a proof copy

After that, I previewed my document and was dismayed to see that there were quite a few problems with the illustration formatting! I had to go in and manually edit the images. I had at first tried to do the pictures with bleed format, but KDP wouldn’t allow that for my manuscript.

(‘Bleed’ in books is when the picture extends all the way to the edges of the page.)

Once the images were ready in the document, I uploaded it to KDP for a preview, checked everything to make sure it looked okay, then ordered a proof copy!

A proof copy is basically a “test copy” of my book! Lots of authors like to have proof copies so that they can read the book in physical form and take notes. They can also see how the cover and interior design looks and decide if they want to change something.

Well! That was my adventure in uploading a proof copy to KDP! I hope you enjoyed reading this. 🙂 Thank you so much and see you on the next page!

-E. Q.