IF YOU’VE ever thought about writing a non-fiction book, now is the time as it has never been easier. When I started writing current affairs books about 20 years ago, you either had to find a publisher who would take your book or, if you wanted to self-publish, you’d have to spend hundreds of pounds having the book produced and printed and then have somewhere to stock the copies while you tried to sell them. But now with Amazon Kindle you can get your book published free of charge as both a paperback and an ebook.
For paperbacks, Amazon Kindle operate a system called Print on Demand (PoD). This means they print a copy of your book only when there is a paid sale, so there’s no need to take the risk of printing hundreds of copies which may or may not sell. Amazon take a percentage of the sale price when a paperback or ebook is sold. There are other advantages of self-publishing through Amazon. Typically a traditional publisher will take up to six months to publish your book. With Amazon it can go on sale within a couple of days of being finished.
When I started writing, I would typically spend two to three months doing research before starting to write. These months were spent reading huge numbers of reports by government bodies, think tanks and other sources trying to find the facts and figures I needed to prove my case. Now this research time is largely unnecessary. Whatever you want to know from who was in the football team which won the 1992 Premier League to the gestation period for a rhino to the average daily consumption of water in Ghana – all the information is instantly available on Google. Moreover, when you type your question into Google, you’ll get a lot of ancillary information which you can use to add breadth to your text. As for getting figures, there are some brilliant free-to-use websites such as UK Public Spending and Our World in Data which can provide almost any figures you could possibly want.
I was forced to self-publish my latest book There Is No Climate Crisis because my literary agent said that no British publisher would dare to be connected with a book which debunked the man-made global warming scare for fear of attack from the cyber-pitchfork-wielding social media mobs. Similarly, no bookshop would dare stock it.
Once you’ve written your book, you need to get it professionally laid out. For this you can use a website such as PeoplePerHour to find a freelance book designer who will provide files which are ready to be uploaded to Amazon for the paperback and ebook versions of your book. This may cost a couple of hundred pounds. As for the cover, Amazon offer a free design service with a limited range of options. But you’re probably better off using PeoplePerHour or similar websites to find an expert to design your book cover. I found a brilliant artist to do the cover of There Is No Climate Crisis for, if I remember correctly, about £100.
So writing and producing your book is easy. What is somewhat more challenging is selling copies. I use YouTube videos. YouTube has a free-to-use video program which allows even a technical incompetent like myself to produce a basic three-minute video in just a couple of hours. My preference is to base my videos around a well-known song where I rewrite the words to promote my book. For example, in the video for There Is No Climate Crisis, I rewrote Bob Dylan’s ‘The times they are a-changing’ converting it into ‘The climate they say it’s changing’. You can buy the karaoke instrumental soundtrack for most songs for about £1.50 on Internet karaoke websites and, as I can’t sing, I use PeoplePerHour to find a professional singer with their own recording equipment to produce the soundtrack to my videos for under £100.
The other method I use to sell books is writing a regular blog on my snouts-in-the-trough.com website. I did think about advertising There Is No Climate Crisis onGB News or Talk TV and produced a 30-second TV ad from my YouTube video about the book. But both companies rejected my ad as they claimed it breached Advertising Standards Authority rules. Apparently, by debunking the climate catastrophists’ nonsense about mankind’s doom due to what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calls ‘Global Boiling’, I was spreading misinformation. Anyway, you’ll probably have other ideas for marketing your masterpiece when you’ve written and placed it on Amazon. So far, I’ve managed to sell just over 4,800 copies of There Is No Climate Crisis in the two years since it was published which is quite respectable for a self-published book. I’m hoping to get to 5,000 copies by the end of this year.
So, what are you waiting for? If you’ve ever thought about writing a book, now is the time to do it.