My manuscript and cover are now submitted to KDP with a publishing date of November 1st. It was a bit of a challenge because KDP has a large tome's worth of information and advice in its pages. Maybe three tomes, because there's so much information in any section of the site that they have to use small print. This is good, because there's so much to know -- ISBN, copyright, bleed, royalties and the like. It would have been wise of me to heed that email that mentioned a Jumpstart link.
I made my cover myself and uploaded it -- and revised it, and uploaded it again, and revised it again because I didn't make the spine big enough despite having one of KDP's cover templates. I could have used their cover maker, but I liked the challenge of making my own (that college design class comes in handy now and again).
The manuscript for the print book had its challenges, but these were overcome by compiling the manuscript in normal manuscript format using Scrivener (my book writing software of choice), then feeding it into the 5x8 template they provided, which took care of margins and numbering and the like. I need to look at the proof copy later to make sure fonts and pagination are not in error.
The manuscript for the e-copy was easier to handle, as KDP has an app called Kindle Create for that. You import that same manuscript as mentioned above, and set drop caps for each chapter, and that populates the table of contents. I believe there are other options if you don't like drop caps, but I love drop caps.
I worked hard yesterday, but I am satisfied with what I've done. The book will go live November 1st, and it's all ready for that date.
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