The Easy Way to Make a Paperback on Amazon & Trivia Challenge Answer #8

I recently decided to make my first paperback directly from Amazon's KDP site.  Most of the process was OK but the cover part was super annoying.  Createspace gave you more than a dozen templates for making a cover (I think "Pine" was the one I used most of the time) but Amazon only has half that.  A problem most people won't run into is my stupid Russian anti-virus program kept thinking the button to add a graphic was a text box.  I finally had to use Microsoft's browser to load the graphics for my cover.

Matte Cover Taken With My Phone's Kinda Shitty Camera

Anyway, you have to bring your own interior file even if you already made an ebook version.  The easiest way to do this is to go to Draft2Digital.  You just load your ebook file and then go to where it creates a PDF for the paperback.  They used to let you load to CreateSpace but now you can't do that but the PDF is all you need anyway.  Once you download the PDF you can unpublish your book on Draft2Digital if you want and then load the PDF onto the KDP site.  It's maybe not as pretty as I would make it but it takes only a couple of minutes instead of hours or days.  Here's what my book looks like:

Two Interior Pages and my fat hand and fingers

Interior Page & Chapter page and my fat fingers

You save hours of futzing around with headers and footers on Microsoft Word, so that's great.  I'd like drop caps and maybe bigger chapter headings and putting the chapter on a facing page, but this is decent and very low effort.  For all the paperbacks I sell that's enough.

Here's another pro tip:  you only need one book on Draft2Digital.  For instance to make that book above I just posted the file on the Draft2Digital page for Another Chance.  I didn't change the cover, just the interior and title and author.  As long as you change the name of the book to the right one it doesn't really matter.  Then you don't need to create a whole new listing for each book you want a paperback for, especially nice since D2D doesn't let you archive old books you don't care about.

The only other hitch is they don't yet let you buy proof copy books so I paid retail.  I think it counted on my sales so I get $0.26 of that back!  I think they mentioned that eventually you'll be able to buy proofs like on CreateSpace.

One other idiotic thing is despite that I made the ebook and paperback through the KDP site they still have separate listing on Amazon.  You'd think they'd make it smart enough that it could combine both editions into one page without me having to send them an email or something.  Yeah, really, get it together Amazon!

So still some bugs to work out but the end result is all right.  Thus we have the first real paperback by Eric Filler!  I have a few other ones but they're really short and I only made them because I used D2D for non-Amazon ebooks and had the PDF files so why not?  I'll probably do more in the future to squeeze a few more pennies out of the unsuspecting public.

Now then, the Trivia Challenge no one cares about1

OK, so the question was in Another Chance, con man Vince becomes a woman of what descent?

And the answer was...C, Indian.  Yes, as in from India, which is why I put Native American as well.  Vince's new name is Vinaya Gupta, who pretends to be an army lieutenant to steal some scientific secrets.  This is what she looks like, more or less:

Cindy was the only one to answer so she gets 5 more points.  I think when we get to the last question I'll have to pull a Briane Pagel and make it worth a million points to render the rest of this competition pointless.