How I write, edit & release books

Occasionally I get messages asking me how I write, or edit, or how I go about releasing ebooks. I’m always happy to give advice, though I always remind them that I’m only a beginner myself, relatively speaking! I shared an earlier version of this guide with someone midway through last year; I’ve updated it so it’s more in-line with how things work (for me) in 2025.

With the proviso that I’m no expert, here’s how I approach it…

I don’t typically start with mood boards or anything like that – I tend to focus on emotional reactions to people/situations/etc. rather than physical attributes. Honestly, most of the time I don’t even start out with a comprehensive mental image of what the characters look like.

I’ve found, over the years, that different readers can have wildly different visions of each character physically (whether that’s appearance or endowment) and so I try to avoid being too prescriptive there. That way, readers can project what they’d prefer into the story. If there’s a detail that’s pivotal, of course, I’ll include it.

Often, the seed of a story for me is just a snippet of a scene, or a phrase someone might say. That gets lodged in my brain, and before I know it I’m creating characters to act that out for me.

I’m a non-sequential writer: I don’t sit down and work my way from start to end in one continuous run. I’ll jump ahead to write scenes as they come to me, leave gaps for me to join up later on, and generally let my brain do whatever it’s in the mood for at the time. My first drafts are generally pretty solid in terms of typos/spelling/grammar, as I usually do a fair degree of editing as I go.

I edit my own writing, partly for budget reasons, and partly for time reasons. I’d love to be able to outsource it to an actual editor, but they’re generally more expensive than I can afford, and I don’t necessarily want to wait as long as their schedule demands.

What I usually do is, once I’ve finished my first draft, read it over to get a relatively high-level perspective on whether there are plot holes, obvious goofs or mistakes, etc. That usually kicks off several rounds of edits, rewrites, and typo-fixing. Then I set it aside for a while (preferably a couple of weeks) before making an ePub copy and loading that onto my phone. I’ll re-read the whole thing, highlighting sections that need changing/fixing, with a few notes jotted down in my ereader app.

However, I don’t actually change anything until I’m done reading. That way, I don’t get sucked into a purely editing mindset, which I find is usually the case if I have the actual, changeable document open in front of me.

I make my own covers, again, primarily for budget and timing considerations. I work with stock images, usually from Depositphotos, and try to capture some of the mood of the book as best I can. I made the decision early on to stick to a general theme – so that hopefully you’d look at a cover and think “oh, that’s an Alex Pendragon story” – rather than try something new each time. That also makes creating the covers easier. I use Affinity Photo, which has a lot of the tools that Photoshop offers, but without a monthly subscription.

Could my covers be better? Could a good editor improve things? Yes and yes, I’m sure! I think I get close enough to what’s necessary, however, and one good thing about reasonably-amateur cover art is that nobody is going to accuse me of using AI!

My advice would be, try doing it yourself and get a (trusted, and brutally honest) beta reader to look at the result. Someone who’ll tell you “this is fine” or “this was full of errors.” Because having stories professionally edited can get expensive, especially if it’s an early stage draft and you’re still figuring things out.

For sales, after Gumroad imploded, I’ve been publishing on Amazon KDP directly (using their free Kindle Create tool to make the ebook file from a .DOC that I’ve pre-formatted into chapters), using Draft2Digital to publish to Smashwords, Kobo, Apple Books, etc., and selling directly on itch.io (with ePub and PDF files). There’s a learning curve with each, but the trickiest part I’ve found has been figuring out search keyword terms. Honestly, I’m still trying to improve there!

Every self-publisher has to make the choice between releasing ‘wide’ (i.e. across as many platforms as possible) versus going ‘exclusive’ (committing to a single store, usually Amazon). If you want to have your book in Kindle Unlimited (aka Kindle Select; subscribers can borrow the ebook like a library, and you get paid a small amount per-page they read) then Amazon demands exclusivity. You can’t offer the ebook anywhere else, including free versions, while it’s enrolled in Kindle Select.

There’s no cut-and-dry right/wrong answer as to whether that’s a good decision for a writer or not, though I will say that I’ve noticed an increasing desire among readers to shift their purchases away from Amazon generally.

To try to guide readers to books, regardless of store, I have product pages for each of my stories on my site. I use the free books2read universal link tool: those links automatically take into account the location of a reader and their localized store, so a reader in the UK gets taken to Amazon UK, for example.

The only big “don’t do this” I would flag is AI. There are some writers who seem to think it’s okay – and not cheating their readers – if they have tools like ChatGPT write parts of their story for them. I don’t think that’s okay. Similarly, I don’t recommend using AI to create cover art. Even if you’re not swayed by the ethical concerns (which I think are considerable) around AI, the backlash among writers and reviewers (and many readers) means authors that rely on it can end up blacklisted: no sharing on social media, no reviews, etc. It’s a good way to instantly burn any goodwill among your fellow creatives!

If you’ve read this far, I hope there’s been at least something of use! Really, though, the big thing is “just start writing.” We all have stories inside us, after all, and even if you don’t end up releasing them as ebooks, it can be rewarding simply putting them down on the page. Good luck!