10 Steps in a self-publishing workflow: nonfiction
This is how to write and publish a book. I have made more than $5, but so far not much. Don't expect to make a lot of money writing a book. The beauty of Kindle Direct is it costs you nothing.
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1. Determine your angle or focus
It helps to have 2 filters to focus your thinking
2. Create a General Outline
This will change
3. Determine your workflow for writing and publishing: what is your target?
I have committed to Kindle Direct publishing for the time being. They have desktop apps to build and preview your publishing files.
Use a text editor to write and organize your material. I think that Obsidian is the best writing platform: it is based on Markdown files. For some of my previous books I used VS Code:
https://notepd.com/idea/10-reasons-to-use-a-code-editor-to-write-books-xuobw
4. Write with very little filtering
If Appropriate, utilize ChatGPT or similar
5. Write in relatively small chapters: one idea at a time
6. pick a better organizational structure
After you have some material down you will have outgrown your original outline
7. Test your workflow as you go
I made this mistake early on: I got locked into a bad choice for writing and had to struggle through it. I don't recommend using Word or Pages. The files that they generate are extremely large. One of my finished books was 200 MB. I recommend using Obsidian. It is a great balance of text and formatting, and it includes images. There might be a bit of a learning curve for more of these features if you are not a technical person, but you could certainly write with it just by typing.
For books that are highly formatted and might include diagrams, code or images you usually want to generate a PDF so you have control over how it looks.
You'll find that as you're writing you may have to modify your book to work better with tools like automatic table of contents creation.
8. Publish
Do this when you are 80% finished: your book will never be perfect. You can update your files later if you want to edit.
9. Serialize your book
Publish a chapter at a time on linked in or Substack or both. Put backlinks to your book.
10. Make YouTube Videos about each chapter in your book.
Put backlinks to your book.
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