I Did It – Who Says you Can’t Teach an Old Dog, New Tricks?

As you look back on the year what were your accomplishments? Moments that made you extra proud of yourself? Did you take on a new venture? Do something that you have never done before?

What was my best accomplishment? It was getting my cookbook on Amazon as a paperback and an E-Book for Kindle. I had been working on this for over a year. Sometimes trying to do something with one’s own brain takes a lot of work. Some people have the luxury of hiring someone to do this work for them. However, my daughter and I figured we would get this figured out one way or another. And that is just what we did. Set some timeline goals and made it happen. Did I make mistakes? You bet I did.

What were some of the challenges and what were the things I learned for the next time? Here are a few.

Challenge #1 was that my cookbook was not a standard chapter book. It had “tweaking notes”, which were empty pages to allow people to make notes of their own as well as pictures. I wanted all of the chapters to start on a right-hand page – another challenge. Next challenge what format would I have to use to get the book uploaded to Amazon and Kindle?

In my original Word document, I had created tables to show metric and imperial measures with the recipe. I was going to have to remove those to get it on Amazon.

Publishing the cookbook on my own also created another situation. Once I had my cookbook completed in Word I had to export it to Adobe to create a PDF version. Some of the formatting was lost going from Word to Adobe. All of the final edits were made in Adobe as the publisher I used couldn’t do what I required. The way it was going to be sent to the publisher is the way it would look.

Anybody can take a Word document and turn it into a PDF, but the re-formatting of it in Adobe took a lot of time. I had created a table of contents and the numbers on the bottom of the pages from Word did not stay the same when I exported it into Adobe. These page numbers all had to be changed manually in Adobe.

Another mistake I made was not keeping track of any grammar edits I made in Adobe. So many things I have learned through this process.

Wanting to publish my book as an E-Book as well as paperback created its own issues too. In an E-Book you don’t want page numbers as people can create their own size fonts. Therefore, the formatting between the two books – paperback and E-Book were different. This challenge I created wasn’t realized until sometime later.

Here are some of the points I learned for the next book I write.

Keep a #1 Master Copy and make sure all edits are kept up to date in this copy. Use Microsoft Word as your main word processing software. Take time to learn it and spend the money to own it. You will be glad you did!
Remember the name of your document and where you have saved it as you work on it. This seems like a simple thing, but sometimes it may be days or even weeks before you look at that document again. Know which is the last version you have worked on.
Create a backup copy at the end of an editing day. Keep your backups in a separate folder from your main document.
Print out a hard copy of the document to proof-read and proof-read again.
Once you know you have all of the edits and the formatting done in your Word document you can start getting it ready for Amazon as a paperback and an E-Book.
Your E-Book will be saved as a Word document and your paperback is going to be a PDF document.
There are lots of good articles available on the internet on how to format your document to get it ready for Amazon. Become familiar with what you should know. I used a free book available from Amazon called “Building Your Book for Kindle”. There were some really good tips and also some outdated information.
Having actual pictures in my book was also a challenge as we were not sure if they would format properly when uploaded. We had to do a test run to see what would happen to them. And this became another challenge. A whole other scenario – a story for another day.
Be consistent in your formatting. Know where you want a new page to start and “insert page breaks”. Find an easy to ready font. Check which fonts are recommended.
Use Styles for your Headings and make sure you know how to create a Table of Contents. And don’t forget to update your Table of Contents when you have completely finished your edits. One of the last things to do is update the Table of Contents.
Most importantly you do not need to pay money to get your book uploaded to Amazon. You just need to create a KDP Account (Kindle Direct Publishing) and do it yourself.

These are just a few tips.

Don’t be intimidated by these points I have shared with you. Just write your book. Find help to get it from the written form to the published form if you need to. Check in with someone else who has done the same. Join a reading group – odds are someone else has published their book on Amazon and can give you some tips.

My latest accomplishment has been getting my YouTube channel running. It also had been on the back burner for a couple of years. This was accomplished just at the end of December. You can find me @merleleeannskitchen on YouTube. My video “Bake a Simple Loaf of Bread” is doing very well. If you take time to go find it all you have to do is Like, View, Share and Subscribe!

What song is on my mind for this blog? I looked for something to do with motivation and decided to use Bon Jovi’s – It’s My Life. Bon Jovi was known for bridging the gap between heavy metal and rock and pop. Jon Bon Jovi was the lead singer – thus where they got their name. Although, I haven’t listened to a lot of their music – I definitely enjoyed some of their hits.

Stay warm and by the time you read this we are supposed to be back to normal temperatures and towards the end of January above normal. Weather – who can predict it??

Merle Lee Ann Pratt – merleleeannskitchen.com – Email: merleleeann@gmail.com

This column is sponsored by MacKenzie Funeral Chapel and Crematorium – We will be there when you need us – Bev and Brian Stobbs

130 9th St. E, Prince Albert, SK

Phone: (306) 763-8488 – https://mackenziechapel.ca/

by Merle Lee Ann Pratt – Merle Lee Ann’s Kitchen, author of “A Baker’s Dozen”

I Did It – Who Says you Can’t Teach an Old Dog, New Tricks?

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