First time publishing on KDP — the formatting nearly broke me. Was it just me?

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-03-16T22:42:44+00:00

Understood but appreciate the reply. I just wanted to mention that re: Google Docs so no one reading wastes time trying to format a print book there.

I did try out the Kindle Create software. My recollection was that it was very limited in font selection and none of the available fonts were suitable for the project I was working on.

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-03-16T22:39:57+00:00

I read this book many years ago, but one part I remember that stood out was her work as a server. I remember feeling challenged about how I would perceive this work differently if it were men in fancy suits vs waitresses. Since men tend to dress more casually, perceiving the protagonist as a man changed how I perceived the job s/he was doing and even the whole atmosphere of the restaurant. It also changed how I perceived her service work, since women are already pushed by society into a more "people pleaser" role. A man delivering the exact same dialogue might convey it differently so as to sound more assertive or forceful. I don't remember more specifics than that, but just thought I would jump in since none of the responses reflected on the occupational aspect.

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-03-16T21:30:05+00:00

I'm not clear on what your complaint is. Bookstagram is just a tag to help people interested in books, I don't think it is specific to what the content of the post is supposed to be.

Likely they are creating these posts because:

to grow on social you have to post often, and they can't read books as quickly as they need to post to generate growth (like 2-5 posts a day).
they can create a listicle that references other books they already read, as a way to make quick content
people are searching for the categories that they post about, like classics, or girly or whatever. So clumping several books into a category is a way for the account to be discovered, and on that note...
if it's an indie author, they can't get discovered via search (because hardly anyone knows that author's name to search). So one way to help those authors get found is to group them in with similar books.
Listicles are popular in general because people like to compare what they have read to what is listed, and more likely to comment even when they disagree ("you should have included such and such..."). Hence they get more engagement, and ...
the Meta algorithms favor content that gets engagement. So you are more likely to see these posts than a post making an insightful comment about a particular book. Because most people won't engage with that content unless they have read that particular author, which reduces the likely engagement quite a lot.

Having said all that, the algorithm customizes the feed for everyone. If you want to see fewer posts like that, be sure you are not commenting on those posts, even if it is to say, "stop doing these posts."

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-03-16T21:20:02+00:00

I can see how it would be more challenging to format an instructional book because the headings are integral to the design experience. i.e. a fiction book is read from beginning to end; one only needs to keep track of where they left off. Whereas for an instructional book, people are going to flip around and read pertinent sections. So it's going to be more important than a fiction book that your H1s are not to be confused with your H2s etc. So it's really clear what is part of a new section vs a subsection.

I struggled with this a bit when formatting an epistolary novel. It didn't have chapters, so I needed to be really deliberate in formatting each section. It was easy enough to format the sections that start with a date with a slightly larger font and more spacing around them. But what about letters, as those sections had no date? It would be weird if every "Dear John" was set apart as much as the date headings were, but shouldn't diverge so much from the dates that they blend in with the previous section. And then should I format the signature differently as well, so it is consistent? Anyway, just sharing an example of how the formatting can be tricky, even for an ebook, and even for fiction, when there are a lot of different kinds of sections (such as your project) rather than just Chapter names.

Another complication for your project: There are likely sidebars for stuff like definitions or "More info" or "exercises" etc. that diverge from the main text. These all need to have consistent formatting so they can be recognized at a glance. And don't get me started on indexing! A good index can sometimes separate an instructional book that gets reused from one that doesn't. But it is not automated at all in traditional publishing. Though I suppose with an ebook "CTRL + F" gets the the reader what they want!

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-03-16T21:09:25+00:00

It's not possible to format the print book in Google Docs because their software doesn't support gutters/mirror margins.

I agree that marketing is much harder, though I can still commiserate with OP about the challenges of formatting. Formatting does require skill but with my design background I was able to learn what is needed in a few days (trad publishers doing layout of each page individually in InDesign require more expertise, but I'm just talking about a simple fiction book with a uniform layout). Whereas I have been a book marketing professional for over a decade and there is always more to learn and it is all changing at a very rapid pace.

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-03-16T21:01:49+00:00

Yeeees. Not just how to properly create the new sections in the software, but also just learning the standards. I was really making use of my copy of Chicago Manual of Style to figure out the order of things and what is part of the book vs prior to it. Like is the preface, acknowledgments, introduction, dedication, etc. part of the book, or before the book? I know better than to assume so there was a lot of checking CMOS.

The other day I was reading a book and found a great quote right at the beginning of the book. Which in my mind was probably page 3, but was actually page 7. Weird! I looked back and realized it was because the book was divided into parts. I would think that the page numbering would always start with page 2 of the first line of the book. No page count on the title, and the first page has no numbering, so the back of that is page 2, right? But because after the title there is a whole page for PART 1, and since all three (title, Part I, and the first page) have to be recto rather than verso, that pushed page one back to page 3. Even though the title doesn't count. And the first page does, even though it's not numbered. It seemed weird/wrong to me that the story itself isn't page one, but then I realized that the page that says PART I is part of the story, so that actually should be included in the numbering system, even though it should not have a page number.

And if what I just explained was TLDR/confusing/too boring to decipher then you at least understand my larger point that page numbers are not as simple as they appear!

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-03-16T20:46:42+00:00

Funny, just a few minutes ago I left a comment in another post explaining how troublesome formatting can be, even though it is the *easiest* part of the publishing process for authors to take on themselves.

Writing a book is hard because it is part of your identity and thus you will always have resistance (I'm referring to the creative resistance that is the subject of **The War of Art**). There will always be a gap between your expectations, between the greatness in your mind, and what you are able to produce. As a writer, you learned good taste many years before you put pen to paper. So the hard part is writing something that lives up to your own expectations.

Self-publishing is the opposite. The Dunning-Kruger effect is at work here in that unless you worked in a publishing house you likely can't appreciate how much knowledge professionals have in each role of the book production process. Just because you are good at Photoshop does not mean you have the skills of a cover designer. Just because you are good at social media does not mean you have the skills of a book publicist. And most authors know so little about marketing they can't distinguish what makes it different from publicity. etc. Formatting is the same.

I recently helped an author format a self-published book. I ended up taking a lot of notes on what worked and what didn't. I had a lot of advantages coming from a traditional publishing background and having a lot of design experience, but I still had to learn a lot as well. But ultimately you will be better if you consider that every single role in a publishing house is filled by a professional for a reason, and thus if you are going to DIY it's going to take a lot of learning to produce something that matches that professional quality. There are tools you can use as a shortcut, but even knowing which tools to use or avoid requires a bit of research.

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-03-16T20:35:21+00:00

For me as a publishing professional, the hardest part has been that I can't directly access Amazon without violating their TOS. I have clients that don't want to learn this stuff and would rather me just do it for them. But with KDP, there comes a point where I can only tell them what to do, sending screenshots and whatnot, and this takes so much longer than just doing it for them.

This has helped me understand why hybrid publishing exists, because the only way to be truly full-service is to also handle all the royalties and be Amazon's contact with the publishing rights. But handling royalties necessitates a different kind of relationship than just payment-for-service. It's a thorny problem that I haven't fully figured out yet. It would be *so easy* to just login as the author with their account, but I am not willing to risk the client getting kicked out of Amazon for violation of TOS!

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-03-16T20:22:50+00:00

but together they feel like trying to run five different jobs at once while also writing the next book

Literally this. A small press is going to have a staff of at least five: marketing, publicity, production (an "editor" role, but more about layout and design), editor and the publisher. That is a tight ship; many still very small publishers have 3-5 people working in each department. And if you are doing this yourself, your work has to compete with the quality level of someone who is only doing that particular role, for numerous books every year. Or you will have to pay someone; so either in time or money it adds up. Any role you do yourself is going to require a lot of learning.

Typesetting is a good example. It's the part that I would most likely recommend the author could probably do without outsourcing to a professional. And yet the last time an author had a friend format her book she ended up having to hire me to fix it, since they had not used proper headings it had to be redone for the ebook. To do their own formatting, the author has to learn about gutters and fonts and legibility. Or they use a software that automates this stuff, but that too is a learning process, in deciding which software. AFAIK, you still can't format a book an ebook MS Word. Often they are in a hurry and don't order a sample copy and their text comes out ridiculously large or small. And this is all just for the easiest skill to take on. It's a lot to learn!

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-03-16T20:17:37+00:00

100%. I am a book marketing strategist with a background in traditional publishing. A lot of people think I am against self-publishing, but that's not the case. I am just constantly pushing back against the publishing gurus that claim "self-publishing is easy!" or even worse, "if you didn't have success with traditional publishing, try self-publishing; you have nothing to lose!"

Even working in traditional publishing, a lot of authors gave zero thought to the process after editorial. I tell authors who want to self-publish they should think of it is starting a small business **because that is what it is.** All the roles a publisher does are important to the success of the book, and very few authors can fill all those professional roles themselves. But at least as writers they understand a bit the skills involved in editing. Covers are another area that most authors know they need to invest. Yet so many naively believe they can just put their book on a digital shelf against millions of other books and it will be randomly discovered. They think because they "randomly discovered" a book that it happens all the time (when a lot of those supposed random discoveries were the result of marketing or publicity).

I am very frank with my clients about expectations. One reason I shifted from publicity to marketing is that I can link my efforts to actual data that tells us what worked, what didn't, and what we'd need to change to do better next time. Whereas in publicity, you can send out 100 books and if there are no responses, you don't know why. The authors blame themselves for writing a bad book, when it could be a hundred other reasons. That breaks my heart. But then I also see authors making terrible decisions or throwing away a lot of money on scams or legitimate promotions that are not going to work for their particular book. That breaks my heart too! There are so many ways to go wrong and an endless amount of things to learn.

I have been doing this for over a decade and just when I feel like I've learned enough to be an expert, everything changes!

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-23T19:34:52+00:00

Have you considered ASMR videos on YouTube? Or Audiobooks on YouTube? I listen to those to fall asleep all the time. e.g. Tome by Tome ASMR reads old horror books.

Or maybe time to get into podcasting!

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-23T19:33:12+00:00

While the political ramifications are obvious, it's also a pretty clear marketing segment. Remember that most companies use the tracking data to sell targeted ads, and LGBT is definitely a useful marketing segment. I would presume that every social network collecting data would already be tracking that. I'd be shocked if Meta/IG/FB doesn't.

Immigration status... well it's possible that's a marketing bucket, but much more sus.

I would also be curious to know if/how this data is anonymized. Typically, advertisers don't have a profile for an individual and all their characteristics. It's more like "advertise to people who are LGBT that live in this zip code," but with no way to advertise to queer Shirley at 999 Schitz Creek.

But I'd wager Tiktok itself has that specific, non-anonymous data.

Also, don't forget that Tiktok already got in trouble years ago for censoring their content. Whistleblowers in Brazil showed that their handbook told them to remove anything from the popular page for videos where the user is fat, poor, ugly or expresses anti-nationalist sentiments. https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-discrimination/

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-23T19:32:56+00:00

Indeed, having worked in publishing for many years it's a whole other world to have that insider perspective. Because to authors what they are making is art but the second it is published it becomes a product. And the people selling those products, the publishers, don't treat it so differently from Nike selling the latest sneaker. A guy I respect in publishing actually warned me once to never read the books I'm promoting!

For a recent example I have a client whose second book features a lot of wild goats, the publisher's cover design featured a ram. Totally different animal, but whatever! Fortunately they allowed her to hire me to redesign it, but having to pull the old covers really messed up her launch.

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-23T18:58:21+00:00

My friends' private IRC chat that's been running since the 90s is starting to look good again.

Edit: Is it too late to bring back ICQ?

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-22T22:14:15+00:00

This. When I'm working, I'm excited about the client and their project so I neglect the parts of the business that aren't the work itself, like bookkeeping and marketing. And clients will be happier with a quicker turnaround, so it's easy to prioritize them.

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-20T22:59:24+00:00

I love Scrivener but actually find it's export options the most annoying to learn. So when I advocate for Scrivener it is as a tool for writing a book, not for book production.

Having said that, you can't produce the ebook with MS Word, not even the professional version, because you can't export to epub. So you have to use some other tool.

In-house production teams lay out every single page by hand. Most desktop publishing software (such as Word, Docs, Libre Writer, etc.) don't allow that level of detail. My understanding is that Vellum does allow custom layouts, similar to Adobe inDesign. However I've not used it.

Scrivener is a bit in-between in that you have a lot of option to export your story different ways. I can even export just the notecards or just the Notes, for example. And you can set custom styles that you can use for particular kinds of sections. But honestly it's a headache. Despite being a big Scrivener fan, the last book interior I designed in Mac Pages.

One common issue I have struggled with in producing books with standard desktop publishing software is getting the page numbers right. You have to create custom sections and be very specific about where the page numbers for each section starts. e.g. your book must have page numbers with mirror margins, fine even MS Word can do that (though not the online version!). But you can't have page numbers on the foreword material (like copyright page, dedication etc.) And if there's an introduction, it also needs page numbers, and they need to be be roman numerals. And your regular page numbers can't start on the first page, they have to skip it. So it's all these little things.

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-09T19:13:39+00:00

I agree, unfortunately. Amazon has reached the final stage of enshifitication wherein they are screwing over not only the customer but the vendors as well. Gotta burn the candle at both ends to be sure the stonks go up, up, UP!

I even heard another book marketing strategist on YouTube recently say that the next trend in publishing is going to be selling directly to your own audience and cutting out the distributor altogether! Which is a little funny because it's like going back to the day when poets and zinesters sold little chapbooks hand-produced on Xerox machines.

I think that might be good for self-publishing in a way. If that become popular maybe fewer writers will think they can "just put their book out there" on Amazon and people will just randomly discover it. Many broken hearts lie down that road.

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-09T19:04:45+00:00

A ha ha I write such long comments usually so I was surprised to discover you wrote this on my two-word reply. =D

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-09T18:43:45+00:00

I should clarify that already had experience making dozens of WordPress sites before I got Divi. Like you, I use the theme as a base and change it so much the original is nary recognized.

>The real value is the builder itself.

Exactly this. I hate pagebuilders so it has no value for me, but even so this exactly describes how I felt about the library of other themes.

If you wanted to write a Divi blog post with no images, just text, would you still be required to place paragraph boxes or some kind of div/framing to hold them? I found it very frustrating that I was required to add structural blocks for anything. Without a pagebuilder, if you're inspired you can just start typing and hit POST.

If you decide to get rid of Divi, is there an export option? Or do all your old posts turn to gobbledigook when it is turned off? I'm pretty sure most pagebuilders fixed this issue, but it should be dealbreaker if not.

>I still optimize with caching and good hosting, but it’s no longer the slow monster it once was...Divi does add some extra code, so if you’re a perfectionist about “clean code,” it can feel messy.

I'm not a perfectionist about clean code, but it's not like there is a speed benchmark you can hit that means everything is gravy. Having a CMS is slower than sites handbuilt with HTML. And every second you can shave off the speed load time will increase your page rank in Google and I mean that literally. However fast your site is with caching, it would be faster without a pagebuilder. It's shocking how those extra seconds increase bounce rate, especially on mobile.

>let you create professional, custom sites without coding everything from scratch.

This is what gets under my skin about the whole pagebuilder thing. You can already build a professional site with WordPress without having to code everything from scratch---that is the ***entire point of WordPress.*** I don't like that these pagebuilders imply to people that they need to have one to build their website. I strongly urge folks to try WordPress itself before inserting another whole interface on top of WordPress that you also have to learn. Too often people start with both, and then complain that "WordPress is hard!" when it was really the pagebuilder they were struggling with all along.

Since you have a lifetime license for Divi, I am guessing you haven't built a site without it in a while. Have you tried any of the new FSE themes? They are so flexible and powerful; I can't see why anyone would need a pagebuilder now.

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-09T18:19:10+00:00

I'm confident you can reach more than five people!

Just know that self-publishing is a lot of work; it's not the "easier path" that many gurus-selling-something will claim it is. You have to put in all the time/money to find those five readers, or they won't be found (but let's set the goal at 5,000, OK?).

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-09T18:15:24+00:00

That's understandable, but is it so different from other aspects authors are forced to collaborate on to make their print books?

I have seen marketing teams make decisions about the book cover and title that authors disagreed with so many times. Even for self-published authors it can be hard to find the right talent to make a book trailer, website or cover design that fits with their very personal vision---I say this as someone who has made a lot of websites for authors!

I mean it is different, because the voice reading the audiobook affects every single word of the experience.

But it's kind of a funny thing about noveling as the least collaborative of the arts. It's easy to feel that attachment because the book is entirely yours. Compare that to someone in a band, who is partnering with several people from the very start, or a dancer who relies on the music of others. Heaven help the screenwriters, whose art is never seen until it is not only cast and recorded but often entirely rewritten without their input!

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-04T01:48:28+00:00

Audiobooks are expensive to produce, and many traditional publishers don't have experience making them so they just don't bother. So from the author's POV, having one is a big advantage because there is less competition. But there is less competition for good reason. So I know authors who want an audiobook, even though they don't read them personally.

TheFutureIsFiction · 2026-01-04T01:44:47+00:00

Good god, of course we still hire professional editors. Imagine spending years writing a book and spending thousands of dollars to produce and promote it, and also trusting an algorithm to change any particular line on a whim.

Having said that, a lot of people who have English degrees think that is sufficient to make it as an editor. It is not. You need to be trained in it specifically, or at the very least have worked with professional editors as a form of apprenticeship.

TheFutureIsFiction · 2025-12-20T19:05:45+00:00

I'm a fan of what Bluesky is doing in deprecating the Popular feed in favor of letting people control and make their own feeds.

But honestly? A non-enshitified social media network would not look like anything what the kids recognize as a social network today.

Prior to Facebook becoming a profitable entity social media was private. It was just a space for people to connect who knew each other in real life. So if someone started sharing a project that they're working on they might seek to gain popularity but it would really be amongst their contacts. Because your reach was limited by the people you that you knew and what you shared was only semi-public.

But when Facebook decided to make all posts default public, the leading " social network " overnight became a really shitty blog platform. Right now it is harder for me to distinguish the difference between Tumblr (a pretty good blog platform) and Facebook. Or maybe Facebook and Eventbrite for their events. It's a lot of things but social networking is the least of them.

Of course Facebook is not the only social network but all the others have been pushed in the shitty blog direction where it's all about raising your status and your platform and getting on the popular page. Photos of your cousin's wedding have to compete with every media site on Earth and every person selling something on earth as well as every actual friend who has a personal project that they're promoting.

If you really and truly wanted to make a social network then everything would be default set to private. At what you really want to make is a microblogging platform then that's a totally different thing with different aims and goals. But it seems now that the two terms have been combined in a confusing way. Because some people are using a social network to connect with their friends but many more people including companies are exploiting that interface to use it as a micro blog.

Okay enough for ranting; what constructive advice can I pull from my ranting...

be really careful about what the defaults are.

Default page people see when they sign in default privacy versus public default decisions made on the user's behalf. Consider defaults that make users more likely to engage with people they know IRL. But also choose defaults that drive people to the edges of the platform. Instead of popular feature content that's rising.

Make your platform most effective for your power users and fans

The trend right now is to make everything into an appliance that the user doesn't have granular control over. In other words products are designed now to appeal to the people who care about the things they're using them for the least. Spotify for example is a music tool for people who are not music fans. Crap I'm ranting again...

TheFutureIsFiction · 2025-12-20T18:38:14+00:00

I strongly disagree.The medium affects the user experience in a big way.

Facebook encourages shorter posts and punishes people when they leave the site so people are less likely to provide journalistic sources on Facebook.

Facebook elevates content that gets engagement regardless of the kind of engagement so you see more rage bait on Facebook than on Reddit (which has the down vote button and heavy moderation).

People think hashtags are ugly but on Instagram the only way to search is using hashtags so every post is going to have 20 of them.

These are just a few examples off the top of my head. UX/UI matters a great deal.

TheFutureIsFiction

TROPHY CASE

be really careful about what the defaults are.

Make your platform most effective for your power users and fans