A Lesson From 100 Little Life Lessons

One Way to Turn Your Medium Posts into an E-Book

Well, it’s done and I have done it. I have published 100 Little Life Lessons on Amazon as a Kindle e-book and I am in the process of preparing the paperback version.

Preparing the e-book was relatively easy. I downloaded the 100 stories I wrote for 100 Naked Words here on Medium, converted them from pdf to a doc file, reformatted the Word document according to the KDP Guidelines, did some editing of the photos and copy, prepared a cover and the front and back matter, prepared the table of contents, then tested and fine-tuned the whole thing. Hours later it was live on Amazon.

I already received two five star reviews — and, if you have the time and inclination, I invite you to post yours— good or bad! You don’t have to buy the book (although that would be nice, too!), since you may have already read some of the stories if you follow 100 Naked Words. But you can just “Look Inside” or order a sample. The number of chapters available free is quite generous and they give a good idea of the content.

The preparation of the paperback of 100 Little Life Lessons is not going as smoothly. For the e-book I had excellent guidance from Tom Corson-Knowles on YouTube. He has a series of free videos, E-book Publishing School, that spell out just about everything.

For the print version, I am attempting to follow KDP guidelines, but I have problems formatting MS Word correctly. I am slowly working things out by going to the MS help desk.

My biggest error was not having hi-res versions of the 100+ photos in the book organized and on hand. I originally prepared all the photos according to Medium guidelines, which worked out fine for my stories online and in the e-book.

However, the print version has to have the photos at a minimum of 300 dpi. I have them, of course. All the original photos are somewhere in my huge digital library — but I have to locate them one by one and save them in hi-res, then replace all the lo-res photos in my mms. If I had known this, I would have archived two versions of each photo and saved a lot of time and effort. One hundred plus photos are a lot of photos!

In a nutshell, this is the process I used. There may be others that are easier, but since I couldn’t find any, this is what I came up with:

1. On my profile page on Medium I went to Settings (by choosing my photo). I scrolled down to Export Content and chose it. Medium sent an email with a link to download the .zip file.
2. On my Mac, I opened the .zip file.
3. I assigned tags in the Finder for the stories I wanted to include: in this case all my numbered 100 Naked Stories.(I also tagged fiction, essays and poetry for later use.)
4. I saved the 100 stories to a separate folder. (Medium sends you EVERYTHING you ever posted to the site, so for me it was easier to start by tagging only the ones I wanted.)
5. I created a document in Word for the whole e-book. I then opened each pdf from inside Word — each opens in a separate document. I then copied each one in order and pasted it into my master document, separated by a page break. I removed the extra headers. I ended up with a single Word file with all 100 stories.
6. For the photos to work, you can’t use the ones that came from the pdf. You have to “Insert Photo from File” in Word for Mac. I had a separate numbered file for the 100+ photos, so I inserted each one, replacing the ones from the pdf. I formatted the titles Headine 1 and the photo caption Heading 2. All the rest of the copy as Normal.
7. On a Mac, you can generate a table of contents automatically if they are all Heading 1, but for it to work (so the reader can jump to any chosen story) you have to link the items by highlighting the chapter name, “Insert hyperlink,” and scrolling to the correct page. This was easier than it sounds and easier than I expected.
8. Most of the rest of the process is spelled out on the Guidelines or the video. Basically, you open a KDP account on Amazon and follow the step by step instructions. In fact, the video was so clear, I had few problems, and I am a bit of a digital klutz.
9. The cover, BTW, is a completely separate file — not part of the Word file. KDP has a cover creator app right on the site that works for me.
10. The great thing about doing this is that you can start all over from any point until you get things the way you want. Even after the book is live, you can go back and revise and repost it.

So, if you are considering publishing your Medium work on Amazon and didn’t have a clue on how to do it, I hope now you have a general idea. If you plan a print version and find a good reference, let me know. I think I will have the print version ready soon, but it has been a challenge.

If you have any questions or suggestions, I’ll be glad to TRY to answer them — and I will certainly consider all suggestions. Just heart this story and write a comment below.

Ah: Here is the blurb about 100 Little Life Lessons:

“This e-book is a lavishly illustrated collection of one hundred little life lessons. Rather than just a prescription on how to live a full and happy life, it is a series of stories that aim to both entertain and edify.

Dr. Ronald C. Flores-Gunkle draws upon his more than 50 years as a university professor, fiction and non-fiction writer, editor, husband, father, and grandfather for experiences that shine light on the human condition.

“In a style that is informal, never didactic, often funny and always positive, he applies his iconoclastic views, his benevolent skepticism and his humanistic point of view to the large and small issues of everyday life.

Each story is ‘tethered’ to an original photograph by the author. ‘I have selective vision. I see only what I choose to see, just as I try to write only what I really feel. Sometimes the photo shouts and I whisper; rarely the words alone are loud enough to be heard.’ What is unique in this book is his careful, complementary juxtaposition of words and pictures.”