UK Amazon Kindle Forum discussion

No its not me.

My oldest niece has written a book and has been bombarding me with questions which I can't answer, so I am hoping that you kind people on here will be able to sort her out.


She will be along shortly to ask her questions.

Cool!

Welcome Louise!

I'll pop a link to this thread into our morning thread to be sure more people see it.

In the meantime, have a look through the group.

You can search for stuff in the search box over on the right. There's lots of good info in our group.

With regard to self employment, remember you can be an employee and self-employed at the same time (My mother was for over fifty years that I could swear to :-) )

you don't need to be a business to start selling the book, a lot depends on how much you earn. It's more a case of getting something sorted during the right tax year.
Do you know any accountants?
At some point you might have to talk to one, but avoid large firms etc.
Somebody who knows more ought to come along at this point :-)

Jim wrote: ".Do you know any accountants?
At some point you might have to talk to one.."

I will be talking there this weekend, and will try to help as much as I am able,🤔 I'm hoping that you authory types can set her on the right track about publishing and selling your books, and give her the benefit of your experiences.

For more information about her book she has a blog.

https://mindfulmillieweb.wordpress.com

This thread will benefit lots of authors. I'm really pleased about it.

I'm sorry I can't help with the formatting. I format my books in Word but there are no illustrations. You would need specialist knowledge for that. I can recommend ALLI - the Alliance of Independent Authors which is a wonderful resource of information and advice from fellow writers. The annual fee to join is £75 for the year. https://www.allianceindependentauthor...
You do need to inform the tax people that you will be earning money from self-employment. They ask various questions, as I dimly recall (!) and send you the appropriate tax form at the end of the tax year. Depending on how much you earn, the form to start with is quite straightforward but you must keep track of all your receipts and expenditure.
You need a different ISBN for each edition of your work and for each format: ebook, print etc though if you only publish as an ebook you can choose to use for example, an Amazon number, though buying your own ISBNs is considered good practice. I imagine two different language versions would need different numbers. Nielsen is the organisation from whom to buy them and has all the information. http://www.nielsenbookdata.co.uk/cont...
I hope some of this is helpful!?!

I also use word to format my books, and have included some monotone images. Any program that can be saved to PDF format should retain any design elements that are incorporated.

As Kathy says, it's worth registering as self employed straight away, even if you are below the tax threshold, as you can offset any outgoings against profit, such as the illustrations if you paid for them. It can be put forward to the following tax year if your profits are low in the first one: I did this with my new computer.

Any book that has a difference needs a new isbn number.

Once registered with HRMC let Amazon and other sites you publish through know, so that you only pay tax in the UK.

Our Rosen and Katie Stewart have done illustrated books. Janet can show you how to get in touch with them in messages.
They're lovely and would be happy to offer advice, I expect.

You would be registering with HMRC as a 'sole trader' https://www.gov.uk/set-up-sole-trader. You then need to decide if you are going to do traditional accounts or cash basis. Cash basis may sound superficially simpler but if you do that, you can't set any losses from business expenses against your other income, e.g. what you get from paid employment. Traditional accounts aren't that hard - keep a spreadsheet and copies of the invoices in a ring binder or whatever, the difference being that you go by the date you are invoiced or when you invoice the other party, not by the date when you pay money out or it comes in. See https://www.gov.uk/self-employed-records.

I've been learning how to format books this year but they are plain text, no illustrations. The process I use is a) save from Word as filtered HTML, b) clean up the HTML in a third party HTML editor and create a proper CSS (style) file c) create an epub version from the HTML file in Calibre (free program) which picks out where Word has created stupid styles and go back and fix those in the HTML, d) import the cleaned up HTML into another free program, Sigil, and use that to create the table of contents etc.

There are going to be special considerations with illustrated books though so you need advice from someone who specifically has done those. Also if you are printing as well, the colour values are different between screen and print - RGB for screen, CMYK for print

You would need a different ISBN for the English and Welsh editions, yes. However, you might want to consider putting both texts in one bilingual edition? Depending on the amount of text, it could even be an educational resource for children learning Welsh, which could go very well for you given the recent initiative launched by the Welsh Assembly?

I don't know much about formatting (as the discord group can attest), but I use word going into filtered HTML for the kindle books and I do a pdf for the printed books (which I only do through lulu.com). The best (in fact one of the few) good things about pdf is that the way it looks is the way it comes out.

I am one of those people who is employed and self-employed at the same time. One day, maybe I'll earn enough to just be the latter, but I'm not counting on it. If you're earning enough, then you can write off things like new laptops (*cough*) against the tax on the self-employed side. Filling out one tax form a year (online) is no big hardship as long as you keep a track of what money comes in and goes out each year. I would keep a separate account in order to make life easier for yourself.

Hi Louise,

The site www.thecreativepenn.com will give you a huge amount of free information, videos, contacts etc regarding different services and marketing and promotion.

I found my development and copy editors and formatter through that site.

Keep on asking any questions you have.

You'll have to get a tax exemption from IRS if you sell ANYTHING through the US Kindle site. I think now you can use your NI number and you will be at 0 withholding. It's not as complicated as it used to be.

Formatting - there are some useful (and cheap) courses on formatting on Udemy.com, and you-tube. I am not sure with images though.

I only just saw this thread. Is there anything I can do to help?

Rosen wrote: "I only just saw this thread. Is there anything I can do to help?"

Thanks for the offer Rosen.

She has her first book in print and just uploaded it to kindle a couple of weeks ago. Busy with the second book now! It is a children's book to help with mindfulness and I'm sure that any advice that you can give her would be very helpful.

Wow. Can you post a link, please?

Rosen wrote: "Wow. Can you post a link, please?"

Her blog is https://mindfulmillieweb.wordpress.com/

and the book is Mindful Millie

Oh my God - the cover is stunning!

Just had a peak inside on Amazon. It looks like a delightful book.