I spent roughly two years writing a murder mystery set inside a snowbound Benedictine monastery. ~102,000 words. Twenty-four chapters, a prologue, a coda. A detective who makes a catastrophic wrong accusation and has to live with it. A killer who has been inside the community long enough that nobody thinks to look at him.
The writing was the part I understood. I am a software engineer. I think in systems. A locked-circle mystery is, at its core, a constraint-satisfaction problem: six suspects, one body, one investigator, and a set of clues that must add up to exactly one person. I knew how to do that.
What I did not know how to do was publish a book.
This is a post about the second part.
The platform
I used Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). It is free to upload, free to publish, and it gives you access to the largest retail channel for books on earth. The royalty structure for ebooks is 70% of list price (for books priced $2.99–$9.99), and for paperbacks it is 60% of list price minus a per-book printing cost.
It sounds simple. It is not simple.
The ebook
The ebook went live on May 17. Before that, I went through several rounds of KDP’s compliance checks, a cover validation, and a manuscript audit. The ebook itself was relatively forgiving. The format is reflowable, so margin errors and page layout issues don’t apply the same way.
I enrolled in KDP Select, which means the ebook is exclusive to Amazon for 90 days. In exchange, it is available on Kindle Unlimited, which is Amazon’s subscription reading service. Readers on KU can read the whole book for free (as part of their subscription); I get paid per page read. Whether this is a good deal depends entirely on how many KU readers discover the book, which in turn depends on visibility, which in turn depends on reviews and advertising. It is turtles all the way down.
The ebook is priced at $4.99. That felt right for a debut with no existing readership.
The paperback
This is where things got interesting.
I want to be precise here, because “interesting” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Problem 1: The gutter.
A printed book has a binding edge. On right-hand (recto) pages, the binding is on the left. On left-hand (verso) pages, the binding is on the right. This means your inside margin — the one nearest the spine — needs to alternate sides depending on which page you are on. This is called mirror margins.
My original interior file did not have mirror margins. It had a fixed wide margin always on the left. Which meant that on every verso page, the binding fell on the outside margin — the narrow one — and KDP flagged insufficient gutter on every even page in the book. It also flagged “text outside the margins” on page 334, which had no actual content overflow; the problem was purely the verso gutter.
The fix was a single XML tag in word/settings.xml: <w:mirrorMargins/>. The text block width was unchanged, so there was no reflow. The book stayed at 347 pages. Both errors cleared.
I am a software engineer. I do not find it strange that fixing a layout problem required editing raw XML. I do think it is reasonable to wonder why the KDP interface does not simply check for this before you upload, rather than after.
Problem 2: Recto chapter starts.
Standard practice in printed books is for chapters to begin on a right-hand page. If the previous chapter ends on a right-hand page, a blank verso is inserted before the new chapter: a page with nothing on it, which exists purely to push the next chapter to the correct side.
My original interior had standard page breaks between chapters. I needed odd-page section breaks — a specific Word/XML construct that tells the typesetter to continue on the next odd-numbered page.
I converted all twenty-six section breaks (prologue, twenty-four chapters, coda). The page count rose from 347 to 361. Fourteen blank pages, one per chapter that needed the push. This is normal. This is what published books do.
The part that cost me an hour of confusion: LibreOffice, which is what I was using to edit the file, does not render odd-page breaks correctly. It flattens them back to regular page breaks and shows you a 347-page document, not a 361-page one. The blank versos only appear in KDP’s own previewer, or in Microsoft Word. So I was editing a file that looked wrong locally but was correct in the system that mattered.
Problem 3: The table of contents.
Learn about Medium’s values
After the recto conversion, every chapter had shifted by a different number of pages — some shifted by two pages, some by more, depending on how many blank versos had been inserted before them. The cached page numbers in my table of contents were now wrong.
In Word’s TOC system, the visible page numbers are cached field values — stored digits that were accurate at the time of generation but do not automatically update when pagination changes. I updated them manually to the new KDP pagination. No reflow, still 361 pages. This was the final interior version: V10.
Problem 4: The cover.
A paperback wrap cover — the full cover that wraps around front, spine, and back — has to be sized exactly to the finished book. The spine width is calculated from the page count, the paper type, and the paper weight. KDP has a cover calculator for this.
For 347 pages: spine 0.868 inches, full cover 13.117 × 9.25 inches. For 361 pages: spine 0.902 inches, full cover 13.153 × 9.25 inches.
That is a 0.034-inch difference. It matters. A cover built for 347 pages will be flagged as incorrect for a 361-page book because the spine is the wrong width.
I had to rebuild the wrap cover. I preserved the front and back panels pixel-for-pixel, widened only the spine by 11 pixels (at 300 DPI, 0.034" = 10.2px), re-centered the spine text, and redrew the amber edge lines on either side of the spine. The artwork did not change. The file did.
The royalties
At $13.99 list price for the paperback, with a printing cost of $5.33 per book (361 pages, B&W interior, cream paper, 6×9), the royalty on Amazon.com is approximately $3.06 per copy sold.
That is not a lot. On the other hand, the alternative for a debut novelist with no agent and no prior publishing credits is not a better royalty somewhere else. The alternative is the book not existing in print at all.
I find $3.06 acceptable.
The proof copy question
KDP allows you to order proof copies before you publish — physical books sent to you, so you can verify the printed result before making it available to readers. You pay print cost plus shipping. A sensible system.
I am in India. KDP has no print facility in India. Amazon.in is not in this book’s distribution. The proof copy, if I order one, ships internationally. Whether it can actually be delivered to my address is unknown until I reach the checkout screen — KDP notifies you there if it cannot ship to your location, and nothing is charged until you pay.
I am writing this without yet knowing whether the proof will ship. The file has been verified in the KDP digital previewer. The margins are correct, the recto starts are correct, the TOC is correct, the cover is the right size. At some point, verified is enough and you publish.
That point is coming soon.
What I would tell someone starting now
One: The ebook is the easier part. Do it first, get it live, let it exist in the world while you sort out the paperback.
Two: If you are producing the interior yourself, do it in a tool that renders correctly — ideally Word, or something that exports to DOCX with accurate section break handling. Do not discover in the KDP previewer that your chapter starts are wrong.
Three: Mirror margins are not optional. They are not a detail. Enable them before you do anything else.
Four: Build your cover after you know your final page count. Not before. If your page count changes, your spine width changes, and your cover is wrong.
Five: The royalties are modest. Publish anyway. The goal in the first year is not income. It is existence, visibility, and the beginning of a readership. Those things compound. Income is a later problem.
The book
The Probationers is a closed-circle mystery set across seven snowbound days in a Benedictine enclosure in the Umbrian hills. A priest is found dead at the base of the bell tower. A canon lawyer is sent from Rome to find out what happened before the civil authorities arrive. She has seven days, and six novices.
It is available on Amazon as an ebook ($4.99) and shortly as a paperback ($13.99): The Probationers.
If you read it, I hope the ending earns itself.