7 Surprising Lessons I Learned While Writing and Launching My First Book
22 Sep 2025 #booksI have a new writing challenge: I’m writing a book. One about how to improve our coding skills.
I’ve had to change my mind about writing books. I used to think I needed a 10,000-word, fully-researched book. But reading 21 Lessons for the 21st Century showed me that a book could be a compilation of scattered ideas.
Finishing the first draft is the beginning. Designing and selling it comes with their own challenges. Here are 7 lessons I’ve learned to design and sell a book so far:
Interior design
#1. Start every new chapter on a right-hand page.
#2. You can design a book’s interior with Word or Google Docs. But Reedsy Studio automates a lot of the boring tasks.
Interestingly, Reedsy only supports writing a book in English. You can change the spellchecker language, but I couldn’t find a way to change the copyright notice and front matter. So we’re back to Word for other languages.
#3. The copyright page is boilerplate you can find online. Reedsy does it for us with a few clicks.
#4. Write your author page in the third person.
#5. Invest in a professional cover design. People do judge a book by its cover.
Promoting and selling with Amazon
#6. Amazon doesn’t require an ISBN for the Kindle and provides a free one for paperbacks. But you can’t use it elsewhere.
#7. Pricing starting points:
- $0.99 is the new free
- $2.99 for the Kindle version
- $9.98 for the paperback version
#8. To follow Amazon’s rules, you can ask for reviews inside your book. But you can’t include external links to your book page.