How to use Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing to Keep Your IRL Book in Print

Tonight in Wicker Park the artist Lajuana Lampkins is publishing The Collected Works of Prince Akbar aka Jus Rhymz, which she edited. I helped Lajuana produce the book and I want to share specifics about how we got it done.

There’s nothing better than buying a book directly from the creator in real life, but sometimes that’s not possible. It’s also a financial burden for self-publishers to keep copies of their book in stock, waiting to be sold. Print on demand technology has changed those dynamics.

Over the years I have experimented with a number of print on demand services, including Lulu (good integration with Shopify) , Blurb (an early leader that showed me what was possible) , blog2print (able to format an RSS feed into a book easily), and Presto Photo (where I publish & print publicly available documents):

Screenshot of Presto Photo dashboard with a number of titles available.

My current hotness, however, is Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. I have a number of titles available there:

Screenshot of Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing bookshelf page with CUTGroup and Arte Agora listed.
Screenshot of Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing bookshelf page with Paul Jacoulet: Outsider Artist listed.

It was astonishingly easy to set up Lajuana with an Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing account and to prepare her book for publication on Amazon.

She used her own phone to first obtain an Amazon user account.


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