First published on medium 10/24/2022

“The Man in the Bathroom,” a collection of my poetry, is now available on Amazon. I managed to self-publish it completely for free.

My very own self-designed book cover. I used Canva and DALL-E-2 to facilitate the process (DALL-E-2 to create AI art variations of my original work. DALL-E-2 allows commercial use of such content).

I’ve seen other writers have success with Amazon Direct Publishing, so I gave it a try.

Here’s the link to my ebook on the kindle store.

My one goal was to be able to create and self-publish my book with only free tools and methods. No outsourcing the work or paying for nifty software.

I already had the original drafts of the content (30 poems) published here on Medium, so I thought I could quickly assemble the work into a .doc file and publish it as an ebook.

I thought. It ended up taking about 3 full days to get it right.

I had to figure out how to operate Kindle Direct Publishing’s interface, Kindle Create, the extra software services I needed, how to make an original design for the book cover with Canva, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Kindle categories, navigating different types of files and lots of other stuff.

I’m mostly happy that I managed to get it all done for free.

If you’d like for me to make a How-To article breaking down the process, let me know with a comment. I’m also open to criticism/advice on this topic, I’m a novice and a half.

But for now, I just wanted to share this achievement, however small.

Thanks for reading!