Use the Covid lockdown to write & release a book on KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). Follow my tips & get productive during the Covid crisis.

 

In this KDP & Covid Lockdown article, you will find advice in these areas:

  • Allow thinking time and use your daily exercise to think over your ideas, meaning you will be prepared for your writing slot that day,
  • Timetable your writing day and add structure to your writing process, so you can treat writing like a regular working day,
  • Hotseat your characters and ‘talk to them’. This means you can learn about their family and background – excellent detail for your book,
  • Build settings during lockdown and use tools like Google Earth and Street View. This means you can literally walk in the characters’ footsteps – delivering excellent description,
  • Research KDP and other publication methods so you can be fully aware of what is ahead. Understanding the pros and cons will be worth it and save stress when publishing, either traditionally or on KDP.
Read the rest of the KDP & Covid Lockdown article to learn how you can be in the best shape possible online, post Covid-19.

 

Use the Covid lockdown to write and release the book you’ve always wanted to on KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). There is no doubting that the Covid lockdown has given us all a new perspective on how we live our lives. When such a mammoth and tragic event happens, it can cause us to refocus and take stock of what we have and what we want from life.

When people look back on their lives, many of us wish that we’d have written a book. For young writers, it may be hard to imagine reflecting on life in such a manner, but you can utilise this extra time to express your creative side. Whether the book is a work of fiction, a memoir, or a collection of poetry, you should use the Covid lockdown to get started on your Kindle KDP novel.

Having published my own books, I have been through the process of self-publishing from start to finish two times over. As an aspiring author, you may find your self with more time than before the pandemic. If that is the case, you could be more productive and set sights on finishing a debut novel by the time lockdown is lifted.

In this creative writing blog article, you will be presented with a number of tips to be more productive as a writer throughout lockdown. By using these tips, and reading some other hyperlinked articles, you will be in a much better place to publish you own book on KDP.

 

Allow Thinking Time During Covid Lockdown

Many of us have taken to walking or running as a means of daily exercise. If we are able to get out alone and take some time for ourselves, this is an excellent area for us to think about the characters, plot, and settings of our stories.

While the world around us has become much smaller in most cases, we are able to open up our minds into the world of the books we hope to create in the near future. If there was one piece of creative writing advice I would offer you, it would be to use those allotted daily exercise times to ponder the world and the characters you create.

While walking, you could have a conversation with a character in your mind. While sitting down to gather your breath, you could look around you to see if the natural world can offer up some setting inspiration. If you have a particularly poisonous plot point that you can’t iron out, play around with various scenarios to see whether a different route could be viable for your characters to take.

There are endless ways we can use walking to consider the areas of our stories that require further development. As far as Covid lockdown goes, you can utilise the short periods of exercise time to draw out inspiration from the depths of disaster.

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Click on the image to read the Kindle promotion blog article.

 

Timetable Your Writing Day

As a professional website and SEO copywriter, one approach I have had to take is to compartmentalise my day into areas. Working from home, is something I have got used to over the past few years but, since Covid lockdown, I have had to timetable parts of my working day for:

  • Completing website and blog copywriting work for my clients,
  • SG Fiction blogging & developing my content plan,
  • Developing my Adobe Portfolio for post-Covid pitches to clients,
  • Continuing with my fiction work in progress – a short story writing collection called, Hexingham Chronicles,
  • Interacting with fellow writers and followers on social media, and
  • Home schooling my five-year-old son, Ollie.

Being a father of two, I have a very busy home life. This means writing has to take a backseat to my other priorities.

Those of you who have families of your own will understand this and, with your children and partners at home, you will likely have a busier household. As we all have varying challenges that face us during the Covid lockdown, finishing a novel to release on KDP may well be at the bottom of our list of priorities.

If you set out a series of times to simply write and escape into the world of your story, you will:

  • Be productive,
  • Feel less stressed,
  • Allow some down time,
  • Have a greater sense of achievement, and
  • Make progress towards your goal of finishing that book.

The benefits you can take from those timetabled writing sessions will give you some much needed ‘you time’. Giving yourself some time to write will have many mental health benefits that can improve your wellbeing as well as how you interact with those around you. Set out time to write and see if you can make progress towards finishing your book.

 

Put Your Characters In The Hot Seat

As the facilitator of both e Learning courses and creative writing workshops in person, I have long emphasised the importance of getting to know a character as well as possible. As fiction authors, we should know and understand our characters as well as our friends in real life. By doing so, we will be able to understand how they would react when in trouble or face with a crucial decision.

With time on your side during lockdown, you could imagine that you have your protagonist in the room with you as you have a cup of tea or coffee. During this ten or fifteen minutes, visualise them as they sit on a spare seat and ask them questions about:

  • Their past,
  • Their family,
  • Hopes and dreams they have for the future,
  • Events in their lives that changed them for the better or worse.

The questions you can visualise asking those characters are endless. This means that you can get to the core of who they are as people, what makes them tick, and how they will interact with others. Make notes on the questions you asked and, more importantly, the answers your characters gave in their own words. It is critical that you jot notes in the words of the character as you will have an understanding of how they converse with other people and will get a taste of how they speak.

With Covid lockdown presently being exercised across much of the world, you can tap into the way your characters speak – helping you to write effective dialogue. You will also gather intricate details about the characters’ pasts, helping you to give valid, organic reasons for how they would react to others and when faced with certain decisions. This way, you will get vital background knowledge and backstories that can be used to flesh out the detail within your KDP novel.

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Build Settings During Covid Lockdown

As a science fiction author, I love to get lost within sci-fi settings that I create within my mind. As authors, we need to ensure that the settings we build for the characters within our fiction books are thoroughly mapped out with:

  • Specific places,
  • Tangible history,
  • Landmarks, and
  • Elements that are native to that city or world.

If you are creating a fantasy or science fiction world that doesn’t have specific roots, there is nothing to say you can’t use elements of the world we have here on Earth to shape the foundations of the setting in your book. You could research elements of medieval history for weapons, customs, or town structure to help forge your own town. Sci-fi authors could look to the technologies being considered for missions to Mars to develop the mechanics of space travel available in their futuristic planet Earth.

When books have realistic, modern-day settings, facilities like Google Earth and Google Street View to literally see the areas they hope to include within their KDP novel. If your novel is set in Paris, you can go to specific areas within the French capital and find the specific streets and roads required to piece together elements of your plot.

Descriptive passages can come to live with the use of such Google programmes. If you are describing the route a character takes when they make their way from their house to a cafe, you can piece together their journey and walk in their footsteps. The graphics taken from the Street View cars allow us to experience places across the world like never before.

During Covid Lockdown, you can create settings for your KDP novel like never before. With the technology available to us in these times, we can use the time available through furlough or closure of schools and colleges to build our settings from the ground up.

 

Research The Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Process

Kindle Direct Publishing, and the self-publication process is one that is not for the faint-hearted. If you are a person who takes pride in what they do, you will spend weeks piecing together the elements required to have your KDP novel just the way you want it.

It is natural for you to feel so strongly for your book. Considering many writers take years to compose and write a book from start to finish, you feel as though it is one of your children. This is why researching the KDP process can help you decide whether it is the right choice for you and your work.

Whether you decide to go through the traditional publication process, or look to publish the book yourself, it is important to know the pros and cons of both routes. The positives and negatives of each will differ from author to author and only you will be able to make those decisions for yourself.

If you decide to follow the KDP route, you will see that some thought and consideration is required to make the best of the self-publication route. To some, the KDP route is looked down upon and others view it as a free method to publish and be in charge of your eBook marketing and Kindle promotion.

As a writer, you can weigh up which process is best for you and your book. At the end of the day, you are the one who is in charge of your journey as a writer. The beauty of KDP, and other providers, is that they off you much more choice over which path to follow.

Use Covid lockdown to research the details of KDP and traditional publication. This way, you will be armed with the facts as you see them and your book release will benefit as a result.

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KDP & The Covid Lockdown: The Takeaway

The Covid lockdown has thrown billions of people around the world into the same state of flux. We are all looking out into the belly of a new reality that is being written as we speak.

None of us know what the future holds after Covid lockdown. As a writer, the only thing you can do is be prepared for whatever comes out of the fog when the world returns to some form of normality. By taking the time given to you through the pandemic, you could have made months of progress with your writing in a mater of weeks.

The times we are living in are unfortunate but, as writers, we can use the world around us to inspire boundless stories for people to read. Whether the books are released through traditional means or KDP, you can say you made the most of your Covid lockdown by giving the world a story.

Make the most of your Covid lockdown. Be productive and get writing today!

 

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