How I Wrote & Self-Published My First Book In Only 2 Months
It turns out, it really wasn’t that difficult…
At the beginning of 2020, I worked full time in an office. Then in March of 2020, the office closed due to COVID. I then started spending a lot of time in my house. Not working. Not being as productive as I would have liked to have been. Towards the end of the year, I was really feeling like I wanted more to show for the year, and so I decided to write and self-publish a book. My goal was to have the book completely written and for sale on Amazon before the end of the year.
The first thing that I had to do was to decide what I was going to write about. I had multiple ideas, such as an independent filmmaking guidebook or a fictional novel. During this same time period, I was watching a video series on YouTube where actress and writer, Gloria Calderon Kellett, who is the co-showrunner of “One Day at a Time”, mentioned that one of the things that she did in her career was write a book of monologues. Hearing Gloria say this inspired me to do something similar. I decided that the book that I wrote would be a collection of original monologues and scenes that I would write.
For me, a book of monologues and scenes would be something that I could easily write because I have been reading, writing, and performing monologues and scenes for more than 10 years, and throughout the years some of my written material has received some really good compliments. Therefore, I was confident that this was the type of book that I could write!
I’ve always had a love for learning, and so in thinking of my love for academia, I decided to name my book “Monologues & Scenes 101”, similar to how a college might identify an introductory level class with no prerequisites that’s designed for all students as a 101 class, such as “English 101”. I wanted my book to be suitable for everyone! I also wanted to utilize the number 101 in another way, by having my book be a collection of 101 monologues & scenes! 101! That’s a lot! But, I considered it a do-able goal for me.
I started writing the monologues & scenes in mid-October and I finished writing the monologues & scenes in mid-December. After everything was written, I had to review everything, and then make edits wherever I thought some changes should be made. Then I had to decide what order I wanted everything to be organized and then format everything accordingly. I decided that I wanted to first separate the book into 2 parts; part 1 would be the monologues and part 2 would be the scenes. Then, I decided that within each part the monologues or the scenes would be in alphabetical order based on the title that I gave each monologue or scene.
The actual publishing process on Amazon was very easy! All I had to do was upload my book file from my laptop onto their website, and then create the book cover through their easy to navigate program to create the cover, add in a picture of myself, a short bio of myself, and a short synopsis of the book. I also had to choose the price that I wanted to sell the book for. Amazon handled creating an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) number for the book, and anything else that the book may have needed to be ready for sale, all of this was at no cost to me. Everything that I needed to do to publish on Amazon did not take long to do. However, I did need to do everything twice. Since I wanted both an e-book and a paperback book, each of those books needed to be created separately on their website.
My goal was to have my first book for sale before the end of 2020, and with the official publication date of my e-book December 23, 2020 and the official publication date of my paperback book December 24, 2020, my goal had been reached!
My advice for anyone who is considering writing a book and self-publishing a book is to do it. It turns out that the process isn’t very difficult, and it’s fun to have a book that you wrote that you can share with your family, friends, and everyone else in the world!
