Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen

E-Book Publishing: From Research to Reunions

• Kathleen Brandt • Episode 2537

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Unlock the secrets of turning your family's rich history into a dynamic digital treasure trove with the help of Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. Discover how digital publishing not only facilitates easy distribution but also creates a lasting resource for family reunions.

1. Prepare Your Book for Publishing
2. Publish via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)
3. Choose Distribution Settings
4. Set Your Pricing
5. Share the Book with Your Family
6. Gifting Copies

  • order copies of your book at the author's cost (for print books) 
  • send gift copies of the Kindle version

For Document conversions:
Website: https://calibre-ebook.com/

Related Blogs:
"Reads over Royalties"
"EPUB with InDesign, Page Breaks"
"Secrets with the Trees" by John A Brandt



Be sure to bookmark linktr.ee/hittinthebricks for your one stop access to Kathleen Brandt, the host of Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen. And, visit us on YouTube: Off the Wall with Kathleen John and Chewey video recorded specials.

Hittin' the Bricks is produced through the not-for-profit, 501c3 TracingAncestors.org.

John:

Ladies and gentlemen from the depths of flyover country in the heartland of America, the Kansas City, on the other side of Mighty Mo, home of the four-time AFC champions, kansas City Chiefs, welcome to Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen, the do-it-yourself genealogy podcast that features your questions and her answers. I am John, your humble hubby host, and today we'll be talking about publishing your research on Amazon for family, friends and fun. So let's start hitting the bricks. Hey, baby.

Kathleen:

Hey baby, really, really Sean, really.

John:

Sean.

Kathleen:

Hi Hi.

John:

So today we're talking about publishing your research on Amazon. Is that right I?

Kathleen:

think that's what we're talking about?

John:

Is that what we're talking about?

Kathleen:

That's what we're talking about today. So what happened was you, of course, published a novelette and you used it as an e-book recently. Yes, I did an e-pub. And I love the book.

John:

It's a quick read.

Kathleen:

It is. It's a quick read. It's only 33 pages, but it tells a full story. It's low fantasy. I really enjoyed it. Secrets with the Trees.

John:

Just thought I'd give you that little plug. There's my shameless plug. Now I'm going to start doing my shameless plugs and then I actually have a blog now that I can plug to, just like A3 Genealogy has their blog. Now I've got mine.

Kathleen:

Blogs have great value, john, and that is why we're doing this podcast, because not only did I read a blog that you posted called Reads Over Royalties and my brain just kept going of how can I apply this to genealogy? Oh, my goodness, everybody wants to publish their family trees but then I even got calls and texts I got comments on. John has put up such a great blog because he's taken out some of the fear, and it's all called Reads Over Royalties. It talks about the lessons you've learned with your first publishing using Amazon Kindle eBooks. Is that correct?

John:

Yeah, and where is that blog that you read?

Kathleen:

Oh great John, that was smooth, my man Very smooth Now where can people find this?

Kathleen:

It's on mixesworldwordpresscom, and the particular article I was looking at was your January 19th post, and that brought in a lot of different questions, and so our listeners also want to know how can they use this information, and you, it seems, had already brainstormed some ideas. So, because of that, we're going to kind of change a little bit today, because I have questions for you, okay, and I want you to do most of talking instead of me being the babble mouth.

John:

The babble mouth. Okay, I will put on my babble mouth hat and see what I can come up with here. So are you going to start with questions?

Kathleen:

I have a question just from the very basics. Let's start with a big overview. You mentioned to me that genealogists and family historians can also use this to their advantage. Reunions are coming up in six months. You know reunion season starts end of May. You know reunion season starts end of May and I wanted to make sure we give our listeners time to implement something that you might say that interests them.

Kathleen:

How is it that a family historian can promote their family reunion, their family books, their family information using Kindle publishing and this entire system? And please start with what is KDP.

John:

Okay, so you're Kindle Direct Publishing, which some people might be familiar with. We've had a couple of guests who use KDP for books on research and books on history. Generally, when people are talking about KDP, it's a way for anybody to directly publish their work and have it findable through Amazon.

John:

What I had thought is that it's a great way to be able to if you have a volume of work done and you want to get it to your family members. A lot of times one of the prohibited costs in that are printing and then shipping. And if you have a book, it doesn't seem like much maybe 25 pages, maybe you're sending that out, but you still have to deal with the printing cost, maybe the binding costs, or you're putting it on jump drives or you're burning into cds. There's a whole bunch of things that we do like that that maybe could be done a little bit easier and also you'd have your book up there for an extended amount of time and I like that idea.

John:

Even if somebody stumbles across it that maybe just found out through DNA that they're related to you, all of a sudden they have access to another resource that tells them about another side of their family. I do want to talk a little bit about how to get it up there. Yes, Generally, that's kind of where my head was after going through this process with Secrets of the Trees. I thought, well, this would be a really cool way to put things up there and distribute them without having to pay that cost up front or to ship it or to worry about hard copies, CDs, jump drives and all that foolishness at a family reunion.

Kathleen:

So are you saying that people can actually print it out themselves if they download the Kindle app? This is the first time with your book that I've ever even downloaded the Kindle app. I didn't even know what it was.

John:

There is a piece of hardware that's a Kindle reader, but you don't need that. You can have the Kindle app, and that's free, on your phone or on your PC, on your computer or on your Mac, it doesn't matter. So you can get the reader app. That's not an issue. It solves a distribution problem if it's an EPUB, which is just an electronic publication. So if we have an electronic publication and you're not interested in printing it, then really, once you upload it, you can make that available to family members, right then.

Kathleen:

So you're saying they will you put it up there as an e-book, then an electronic book. And what are listeners to know, john, that you made me buy your book for $4.99 so I could have a reader experience?

John:

I'm going to take $4.99 out of your hide, I figured. Once I get the royalty then I'll back pay you for the purchase of the book and then I only have the other 86 cents to work off by maybe doing kitchen work or something.

Kathleen:

But with that $4.99 purchase, what I did is I did download the app, I did go to Amazon and found the book. Of course it's on social media also, but this ticked me right there and it had the name of the book. The Secret with the Trees is by John A Brandt, so I know I have the right one. So as I was reading it, I found that very easy. You're just kind of flipping through this book like you would on any library ebook, so I found that that part was very easy. I found paying for it was easy. But are you telling me that all the family historians have to put this $4.99 type price on there?

John:

So let's say you put the book up there for 99 cents because there are download fees, you can post it for 99 cents. I think the trick would be, if you have a lot of family members that you think use Kindle or Kindle Unlimited, then you can put it in for 90 days for absolutely free to Kindle Unlimited users or subscribers.

Kathleen:

So in the end they can put it up. People accessing it can get it for 99 cents. That's much cheaper than shipping, that's much cheaper than printing, and everybody, or every household, can print their own book or use a Kindle app.

John:

If it's a print book, that's a little bit different conversation than if we're talking about an EPUB. Right now we're talking about an EPUB. Right now we're just talking about EPUBs.

Kathleen:

Well, kind of, because my question is what if you have a great big family book like one with 200 pages? Can I offer it both as EPUB and you can offer it as both.

John:

That's not a problem. There's some differences in formatting between an EPUB and a print book and I'm not going to go heavily into how to format or anything like that, because that's a completely different conversation, and in some cases you might use just a PDF and upload a PDF through KDP that has your images locked in and it doesn't have the experience of an e-book. At that point You're not able to use all the features of an e-publication if you do it as a PDF. But the PDF allows you to set up your formatting and know that your formatting is going to hold once you've uploaded it.

Kathleen:

So, john, I'm going to stop you there because I'm wondering in my head, and I'm sure my listeners are also is this a difficult process to take my Word file, or my Word text that's on my computer, and to upload this entire booklet, whether it's 30 pages or 300 pages? Is this a difficult task?

John:

I'm going to say no, it's not difficult, but there can be some things that you need to be familiar with the environment and you need to be familiar with formats, and by formats I mean like, if you're working with a Word document, is it a docx or is it a doc or an odt?

John:

You have to be familiar with what format you're working in in your word processor, because things will work differently, and in some cases you lay out everything in Microsoft Word and then think you're going to get this perfect replication.

John:

When you get it up to KDP, you might be a little bit disappointed, especially if you're very, very sure about how you want the page laid out, and that's one of those circumstances that you're probably going to want to go with a PDF, because e-publications one of the features of them is being able to have wrappable text, and that means that while you're reading, if you resize it, it resizes the text and rewraps it. Pdfs are not able to do that, and so you might be able to zoom in to a certain degree, but you're not going to have that functionality of like wrappable text. It fundamentally changes your layout. If you've ever worked with HTML where it has to work on a big screen, it has to work on a phone screen with responsive design. Then you know HTML is a little bit weird because it wants that flexibility of changing size when you change your screen size or change your window size. Is that too often the weeds?

Kathleen:

So what I'm envisioning is that, as we get closer to our reunions, is that the person who's organizing, or the group of people who are organizing a reunion, in their correspondence, after the book has been up there, they can put in emails, or however they correspond with their people they could put in there. Oh and, by the way, the reunion book is here.

John:

Yes, or the family book is here. The family book is here. That's, I think, one of the things that I thought was so neat about it. You could just send out to your family email list the direct link to it, got it, and that's one email. And then here's the link, and they can go to the book and either pay the 99 cents and that's something that I do want to touch on, the idea of a free book or a 99 cent book. It works to a certain degree, but, depending on the size of it, there are download fees that you have to pay, so you need to decide how much you're going to charge for the book, and if the book is very large, they charge, I think, 10 cents per megabyte or something like that.

Kathleen:

So one of the things that is also a burden on reunion organizers, as they're organizing it, is the finances. Organizers, as they're organizing it is the finances. Could they be using this booklet some way as a fundraiser, or can they actually increase from 99 cents to everyone who buys a book is $5, $4 of that, minus all the expenses of Amazon, goes to the reunion.

John:

Well, I think there's probably some ways to streamline that process, even in that you could even use the purchase of the book as registration.

Kathleen:

Oh, that's really interesting, john.

John:

The problem is that would have to be very specific to funds that the family was spending and how much they were charging, and also there's a turnaround time. There's about a 90-day turnaround time for paying for a book and for the person to actually receive it, who's posted it. So you don't get that money on a weekly basis, your royalties or whatever's coming in got it, it'd be a reimbursement, and that's why you know, uh, if your book is in paperback and somebody wants it, you have to.

John:

They have to pay for the printing fees. Does that make sense? So that's either coming from the author or that's coming from the, the download the buyer, yeah, the buyer.

John:

One way or the other, you have to cover those fees. So that does kind of indicate what the cheapest way to go is, of course, an epub. But in that epub okay, since we're on that, if you didn't want to tie the book price or anything to registration, then what you could very easily do is, on the EPUB, if that was your gateway, have everything about your reunion in the front end of that. Then you could always put in. You know how easy a QR code is. Throw a QR code in the front and then jump to a link tree that has everything that you need to know about where, what, when, how, and then that could be your link to say registration.

Kathleen:

So, as usual, business got in the way of my life in the early 2000s and I know that in 2005, I wrote the Family Reunion booklet and I'm looking at it now. It's 41 pages. It doesn't have a QR code and I've never updated it since. I do have a larger book that has been in progress since 2005, and where it takes the different, you know, family units. So I'm looking at this one and I'm seeing where it's not really readable the way I would like it to be online. I posted it there but you'd have to really work with the blog posts and so forth and I'm thinking about putting it on this Amazon Kindle ebook. What would I start with? Because right now it's in a PDF file. It looks like that I uploaded. Start with, because right now it's in a PDF file it looks like that I uploaded, so it's not really easy to read because I can't just flip through it. I'm manhandling it.

John:

Yeah, the first thing if you've got something in format like a PDF.

Kathleen:

Yes.

John:

And now you want to turn that into an EPUB. It's not exactly straight through and I'll give you the information, but this is like what happens before the next disaster, because usually what happens is when you do a conversion, it's not going to convert it and know what you mean, it's just going to convert it. But there is a free program to do that and that's Calibre or Calibre how do you spell that? It's C-A-L-I-B-R-E.

Kathleen:

And it comes with the Amazon, the Kindle book.

John:

No, no, no, it's a Calibre C-A-L-I-B-R-E hyphen ebookcom.

Kathleen:

Okay, so it's independent of all of this yes. And it's doing some sort of a translation from my work to.

John:

It will turn a PDF into an EPUB or a MOBI, which is just another format of electronic book.

Kathleen:

I know my family is from Rutherford, north Carolina right. And I would like those libraries there to have copies of this book on their Libby or something like that on their electronics. Do they get to go to Amazon and also buy it? How can I get it so that it's in a local area, not just in Coldwater, Kansas, which is where my family was also settled, or in Cocke County, Tennessee? I would like all those libraries to have a copy of this history of my particular African-American free colored family.

John:

Yeah, I have a feeling you think I should have the answer to that. Okay, I did find something on, I think, through Libby. It might take a little bit of time for your book to pop up on it. I believe you can recommend a purchase to a specific library.

Kathleen:

Oh, wow.

John:

So, like on your Libby app, I think you can select the book and if it has an ISBN, which it should that was another thing about using KDP is your book automatically gets an ISBN.

Kathleen:

Is that expensive?

John:

No, it doesn't cost anything.

Kathleen:

on KDP so if you're using an ISBN from Kindle, who owns the book?

John:

Okay, so it would be what you do.

Kathleen:

Who's the publisher?

John:

Okay, so you put in your publisher. That can be you or self or any company name you want to put in there. As far as the publisher goes, okay, I mean in my case I got the ISBNbns um through a3 publishing right because I I knew somebody there and so I got my a3 publishing. Yeah, I got my 10 and 13 by sneaking into your office and stealing two isbns from uh, your list of books and just put in the front of my book it's a3 publishing um so you're racking up the cost so far.

Kathleen:

You're racking up how much you owe me. So one of the things you have in there is how gift copies work. I wanted you mentioned this a couple of times to me, because I did something wrong and I'm not sure what I did. So can you explain what a gift copy is on Amazon?

John:

Okay, so there's a couple of ways to do it. Now. You could buy a bulk of books for the author and what that does is it's specified for the author. You buy 10 books. You can distribute them through links, if they're EPUBs, however you see fit. That doesn't go against how many you've sold or anything like that. It's basically one person purchasing.

Kathleen:

So I don't get my royalties.

John:

No, this is not a way to run up your royalty fees or your reads number of reads. It doesn't work that way. Another way to do it is to give it as a gift, and when you go to the product page on Amazon, you can do buy as buy for others or give as gift, and you'll pay the current price. And then you'll send them again a link, an individualized link that's specific to that person. And now that's another way to look at, maybe, registrations, because just that person who you send that to is going to be able to use that link and it's a one-time link.

Kathleen:

So I have another question because it just came to my mind. I know we're talking a lot about reunions, but one of the things we do when we take DNA is we meet a lot of cousins we've never heard of before or know Some of them as close as second cousins heard of before or know Some of them as close as second cousins. And let's say I want to introduce myself to some cousins that I've met that I see that were matching DNA. But they live overseas. They live in the country of origin for my family Scotland, Ireland, germany, wherever. Can I get that book to them?

John:

Oh yeah, all of this is worldwide. Amazon's everywhere and Kindle is everywhere, and that's one of the things that you'd have to do. On the pricing, that's a chunk of the many, many pages of data that you're going to have to fill out is on your pricing and it'll show you what your pricing is in every different country that it's actually going to be available in. But we're not really into that. I don't think. As far as family history books go, or in this circumstance, we're not really into let's make lots of money off of this. This is more about distribution.

Kathleen:

That's why I love your title reads over royalties. But I did see because, as you know, I look at the numbers, I look at stats and I can see where you're getting royalties. But I also saw something this is what made me think about this that said Germany that you are getting two cents from a download. I was very proud of you, honey, that someone in Germany is going to download two cents for your low fantasy.

John:

My international reach, you know, as far as that goes, not bringing in the concept of language as a barrier or anything, because it's far less of a barrier, I think overseas. Obviously, translation is its own issue, but I did not set up any translations of my book. So if they're reading it there, then they're reading it in what I put it up in, and that's in English, because I didn't do any sort of translation.

Kathleen:

What would you say was the biggest headache of you publishing on Kindle?

John:

You know, the first time you do anything it's kind of nerve wracking. I'm always afraid of the first mistake and then after you make it and you realize that everything's a train wreck, you just kind of go oh yay, this is fun. The most difficult part was really formatting. For me, that was a part that I had to spend and there's a couple other blogs on that that I wrote about on formatting for an EPUB. I mean, it's a lot of fun because it's one of my previous lives being a graphic designer and I enjoyed getting back into at least for a while using InDesign to lay out my book. The most difficult part was getting the book up the way it should and the page breaks. More than anything else, it's understanding EPUB page breaks.

Kathleen:

Which, first of all, I have to say, just went to your webpage while you were saying that. I didn't know you had this many blog posts on your webpage, so congrats. Where was I? But what if I want to add, change and modify this EPUB?

John:

Some stuff you can change and modify. I would approach it to be honest with you trying to nickel and dime changes, put up a change here and a change there, or correct this or correct that. Nickel and dime changes put up a change here and a change there, or correct this or correct that. That gets really, really janky with, I think, also the concept of additions, and so I think you want to approach it as be really sure that you're going to be comfortable with what you put up for a period of time. You can change things like covers, that's some of the exterior information and some of the about information, so when's and where's and you know dates and things like that you can change because that's front matter.

Kathleen:

So let's say, I'm writing, I've written three generations. Now I've researched and I've written two more generations. Are you telling me maybe I should do just a different edition or a different version? I mean, what do I do?

John:

Yeah, If you've substantially changed what's added to let's say yeah, let's say you add two more chapters, but not like short chapters in a book, but these are whole family branches that you've added.

John:

Right. I think what you want to look at is are you ready for another edition where maybe you would even pull the first one? You would do a second edition that would include the other families, and that's another approach. You would leave both of them up there and maybe different pricing on each, or the idea might be, do all of them as a serial, so instead of doing each. You know, compiling each family group into separate chapters is that each chapter becomes its own book.

Kathleen:

Got it.

John:

But that's an organizational thing. I think you have to make that choice on your own.

Kathleen:

But I do have options as well. When I was trying to figure out.

John:

Yeah, yeah, and one of the things I think you can always pull it down, you know you can always remove it. That's one of the things to remember is that you're not doing anything irrevocable here. So if there are mistakes in it, then you can fix those. There's always a way to do that.

Kathleen:

John, who knew you've been writing since November 4th on this blog.

John:

Oh.

Kathleen:

Really, really listeners. We are married and we do live in the same house.

John:

You occasionally pass in the hallway and say have you fed the dog? That's pretty much what our conversations are these days. Did you feed him or do I need to feed him?

Kathleen:

John, I think your idea is excellent and since you're into writing these blogs, if you don't mind can you write one that directs right to the family historian and the family genealogist? So that it's kind of outside what I blog about.

John:

But I'm going to say, why don't you write that blog? What we could do is always in the show notes, like I say, is we can put some of these steps on, just you know, kind of the bulletized text of what you should do and what things are there and some links like Calibri.

Kathleen:

I just wanted to say thanks, john, for sharing with the genealogy community your experience in the Kindle, because I haven't seen how others have done it and that it hasn't been really approached in the same way. So thank you.

John:

Oh, you're very welcome. It's been my pleasure and also a great opportunity to plug my book Secrets with the Trees, my novelette Secrets with the Trees, a story about magical realism and empowering women.

Kathleen:

Wow, or empowered women. Which one Are you empowering, or are they already empowered? I?

John:

think it's empowered. I had nothing to do with this, I just wrote the story. They were powerful when I got there. Well, congratulations, you made it to the end of another episode. Thanks so much for staying. Thanks to Chewy Chewbacca Brandt, our part-time sleepy nummy buddy, and our full-time possum deterrent system, for his unwavering lack of interest in anything we're doing. The theme song for Hittin' the Bricks was written and performed by Tony Fisknuckle and the Romulans Watch for their next appearance at the Wiener Schnitzel on 8th Street. You can find us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Do you have a genealogical question for Kathleen? Drop us a line at hittingthebricks at gmailcom and let us know.

People on this episode

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Kathleen Brandt

Host
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John Brandt

Co-host