It was brought to my attention recently that three of my four books are no longer available on Amazon. My first book, Autumn Colors, was published by Author House, and is still available for purchase. However, In Her Mother’s Shoes, Star Catching and The Eyes Have It were published by Dog Ear Publishing, and the company apparently went out of business without reaching out to the hundreds of authors to provide alternatives to their print-on-demand and e-book services. If you go on my author page on Amazon, all four books still show. But the Kindle option was removed from all the Dog Ear Publishing books, and the paperbacks are listed as out of stock.

This wasn’t a detour I wanted to take while trying to make progress on my new book, Armenian Dances. But I couldn’t afford to have no books on Amazon when I begin my search for a traditional publisher for the new one. I had only one choice to get them back up for sale quickly – KDP, or Kindle Direct Publishing. I put it off long enough out of fear of it being way to complicated. But a friend who had completed the process recently offered guidance and encouragement.

Authors can do either e-book publishing or paperback publishing directly on Amazon. I opted to start with Kindle, since that format isn’t shown for any of my last three books. While I did hit a couple of hurdles (my cover art wasn’t in a format that Amazon would accept, and my manuscripts needed layout work and formatting), I sought and found solutions for two covers and am in the process of reformatting the manuscripts. I’m happy to say that the process was WAY easier than I anticipated. I’ve submitted two of my three Dog Ear Publishing books. The Eyes Have It went live today. The application for In Her Mother’s Shoes was accepted and will go live sometime in the next 72 hours. I’m almost done with Star Catching, grateful to the very artistic woman who did the cover for The Eyes Have It (and reformatted it for me to get it up and running) for being able and willing to reformat the cover for Star Catching even though she wasn’t the original artist. Next I’ll contemplate what will be necessary to self-publish each book in paperback format – and hopefully it will be as easy, relatively speaking, as the e-book versions—and won’t cost a ton of money.

THEN I can get back to Armenian Dances!