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My experience of self-publishing - One year on

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For those of you that are thinking of self-publishing your own books, I thought that this update on my first year of self-publishing my poetry books may be helpful.  In the Summer of 2021, I completed my first book of landscape paintings and poetry "Colliding Contrasts". At that time I decided to have it printed myself by Inky Little Fingers and to sell it on my own website, at craft fairs and in local gift shops. I didn't choose Amazon KDP at that time as I was unsure of the colour print quality and wanted my artwork colours to display correctly. Since then, my book has sold consistently well, with local galleries selling it on an almost daily basis.  Late this Summer I published "Distraction in the minutiae" which is in black and white. As this was a short chapbook with no colour, I decided to give Amazon KDP a go. It was a very easy process to upload your book on the KDP site. I also opted to use KDP's cover creator, which was easy to use but has limited

Self-publishing my second book of poetry using Amazon KDP and Canva

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When I published my first book of poetry "Colliding Contrasts" in the Summer of 2021, I decided not to use Amazon KDP as I wanted the images of my painting to be true to the colours of my artworks and for the book to have a quality finish. However, my second book is all in black and white, so I thought that I would give KDP a go to reach a wider audience with my poetry. As someone who was completely new to self-publishing on KDP, I have been very happy with how easy the process was. I created the layout for my book using Canva and saved it as a PDF which was then uploaded to KDP, a very quick and easy process. I then created the cover using the cover creator provided by KDP. The paperbacks are of nice quality, indeed much better than I anticipated. I wouldn't hesitate to use KDP again, I may even create another full-colour book.  I have a recently uploaded YouTube video where I talk about this process and where I also read out a couple of my favourite poems from my new bo