I think book writing has always been in my genes. I always wrote too much for essays, or described things in so much detail that I needed extra space to express it, and even then, I felt like I wasn’t explaining all of its depth. Perhaps it’s just been that I’ve always been that detailed-oriented person, or that I just like to blab about meanings and literary devices. In any fashion, I think the writing skills have always been there and now through experience, I’ve been able to build them to publish a book.

The full process of writing and publishing has been a long one, indeed. As briefly mentioned in my previous post, I really started to write around the time I started high school in 2016. I found poetry and it was a bit of an escape for me, and then it really blossomed after reading Milk & Honey by Rupi Kaur. I truly loved her style and structure of the poems, with a lack of punctuation that, to me, signified she was not bound by traditional writing rules. I later found out she did this because in I believe her native language, Sikh, there is no punctuation. But I like to believe she would think the same as to not being bound by rules.

After reading the wonderful collection, I started to dive deeper into poetry writing and learn more about it along the way. Before this, I had absolutely no idea how to write poetry, or even that free-verse poetry was a thing. Had no clue what I was getting myself into, or how far along it would take me. Everything I know now has been from experience. So I continued to write after exploring more poetry books, and strengthened my own poems as time went on. By the end of my junior year in high school, I had most of my poems written to be able to start looking at organizing them into a book.

For some reason in my head, I wanted my book to be 300 pages. Why, I am not sure, but I had my mind made up that it was going to be 300 pages and no less. So, I started to look into where to get a book published, because I had figured it was going to take approval by a publishing company and be a long process that could take months. Although, I got curious and asked a fellow author how she published her book, because she seemed to know what she was doing. It was author of 2am Thoughts and Nineteen, Makenzie Campbell. She had a sizable Instagram following at the time, and I figured it was worth a shot to ask her. At this point, only 2am Thoughts was published, but I knew she had researched her stuff beforehand with the way it looked. Lo and behold, she answered and told me about Amazon’s CreateSpace. CreateSpace is no longer and has updated to now be Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). This is the service for which I started to write my book.

KDP looked very scary at first, since I didn’t know too much of what I was doing, but I figured it out pretty fast. It is easy to create a new paperback book or eBook: all you have to do is choose which one you would like and you can get started. For my book, I chose a paperback book. There are several elements KDP has you choose, like the primary language, title, author, description, key words, and more. I had picked out the title Extremities for my book for awhile, so I started to input my book information and then upload my manuscript and cover. You then move onto paperback rights & pricing, and once that is all finished, all you need is to be approved by KDP for publishing.

My timeline with KDP started in March of my senior year. I had pretty much all of my poems saved in my notes app, but hadn’t put them in a book-specific format. KDP helped to provide me with a template to put those poems into. That actually started around when quarantine did here in the United States, and took me until about summer to finish. Next, before submitting the manuscript into KDP, I had to do drawings for some of the pages. So, I conducted that for maybe four months, and by the beginning of my college career, I was ready to submit that manuscript. I already picked out the cover before, so the manuscript was the last piece before I could move onto pricing and then submitting for approval. My book (Extremities) was officially published on September 24th, 2020, I think either a day or two after submitting it, and could now be sold through Amazon.

It felt awesome to finally be able to say my book was approved to be published and that I could accomplish a dream. I didn’t think in six short months from the time I started organizing the manuscript I would be able to publish. It’s brought me several opportunities thus far, and I am excited to be able to continue my writing journey with another book and this blog. This was just my personal experience with the process, but I hope it brings a bit of insight to what it is like to publish. I am hoping this also can bring some skills to the table in continuing my writing, and hoping to bring something back from the writing workshop I am attending tomorrow.

With peace and love, T