I\u2019ve spent some time this past weekend setting up my account on Amazon\u2019s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) preparatory to self-publishing \u2018The Plains of Kallanash\u2019 this autumn. I didn\u2019t actually intend to do more than input a few basic details, but Amazon makes it incredibly easy to go on from there. So I entered my bank details ready for all those royalty payments (ha!), confirmed that I\u2019m a non-US citizen for tax purposes and amused myself by generating a very bad cover from the built-in cover art creator.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s possible to go through the entire process of uploading the book, cover art, the whole kit and caboodle to KDP (and to CreateSpace if you plan a printed version), see what everything looks like and generally get things in place ahead of time. CreateSpace helpfully reformatted everything for me and told me how many pages there were (over 600 at font size 12 \u2013 eek!). KDP found 17 spelling mistakes, of which one was in fact an actual, genuine spelling mistake. It\u2019s all very helpful. And at the end of it, the famous \u2018Save and Publish\u2019 button. One click, and there you go, your book for sale on Amazon.<\/p>\n
Obviously, I\u2019m not ready for that yet. There were sections that I\u2019ll need to come back to later, to make sure I\u2019ve got them right: the tax bits, for one thing, and the keywords to describe the book, which I know are vitally important for getting the book to pop up in front of likely readers. But on the whole, everything was reassuringly straightforward.<\/p>\n
Then I came to the question: do you want to have DRM on your book? DRM is Digital Rights Management, a system of encrypting content so that, in theory at least, it can\u2019t be pirated. In practice, of course, the software to crack DRM is widely available, so it\u2019s no deterrent to pirates or anyone else. The effects of DRM \u00a0are felt by legitimate purchasers who find that the book they\u2019ve paid good money for can\u2019t be backed up or read on a different device without jumping through hoops.<\/p>\n
As a reader, I hate DRM on books. It ties me to a specific ereader, and if I actually strip off the DRM in order to make a backup or sideload to a different device (both perfectly normal requirements), I\u2019m made to feel like a criminal. My daughter, who is an avid video games player, tells of instances where the DRM actually made the game unplayable. Legitimate purchasers kept the shrink-wrapped game on the shelf, and downloaded the cracked version to play. There may be benefits for Amazon in using DRM on ebooks (it locks in customers to Kindles quite effectively), but for users it\u2019s hard to see any benefits at all.<\/p>\n
So although the question took me by surprise, I didn\u2019t have to think very hard about which way to jump. I\u2019ll be publishing without DRM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve spent some time this past weekend setting up my account on Amazon\u2019s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) preparatory to self-publishing \u2018The Plains of Kallanash\u2019 this autumn. I didn\u2019t actually intend to do more than input a few basic details, but Amazon makes it incredibly easy to go on from there. So I entered my bank details ready for all those royalty payments (ha!), confirmed that I\u2019m a non-US citizen for tax purposes and amused myself by generating a very bad cover from the built-in cover art creator. It\u2019s possible to go through the entire process of uploading the book, cover art, the whole kit and caboodle to KDP (and to CreateSpace if you plan a printed version), see what everything looks like and generally get things in place ahead of time. CreateSpace helpfully reformatted everything for me and told me how many pages there were (over 600 at font size […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":603,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions\/603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}