P.J. Murphy's Writer Site

I finished the last blog promising an update on the cover art for Troubleshot. Well, it’s still a work in progress and I think on reflection it would be best to talk about it when I have a final image to share – hopefully not too far from now.

So instead, I’m going to tell you about how I’m becoming a slave to Amazon.

The image accompanying this post is the tamest of pictures you get if you do a Google search for Amazon tattoo (for the record, I don’t recommend doing a search for anything involving the words ‘tattoo’ or ‘piercing’ on a full stomach). I intended to do a joke about how I was getting branded by Amazon, but it’s been foiled by the sheer number of stick-on tattoos that they sell.

Amazon has some AMAZING resources for self-publishing. Just take a look at Kindle Direct Publishing (kdp.amazon.com). You can basically publish your book for free, set up print-on demand paperback (and now hardback) versions and do all the setup that comes with selling on Amazon.

It’s quite overwhelming – just the amount of information to get through and advice for each step. So, I’ve been taking it piece by piece over the past few weeks. I’ve formatted the book and prepared the various blurb needed for the cover and internal pages – and I spent a lot of time researching Amazon categories and keywords; the end result being me selecting pretty much the same words as I would have entered in the first place. Oh, well.

The main thing remaining now is the cover art. And that will be my next post, I promise (again).