So, I told you the other day I was getting ready to write and publish a series of small books. Maybe we'll talk about that today. Welcome to The Daily Grateful. I am Michael Kroos, and I am grateful to be here.
I am grateful about starting this new adventure. Yeah, I am starting a new adventure. It's kind of cool. I'm going to be publishing a series of books.
I think I'm going to do a couple of different series, but I'm going to start with something I'm very familiar with. And I'm going to publish a series of gardening books for Florida. Short, 80 to 100 page gardening books. Okay, that's what I'm going to do.
Short, 80 to 100 page, easy to read, easy to get through, Florida gardening books. Now, let's talk about this, and I'll tell you. The one, for instance, will be lawns, or lawn care. I haven't decided yet.
I've done the outline for it, or started to do the outline for it. But it's going to be compact. Just say you're moving to Florida from Oklahoma, and you know nothing about grass. That's going to be the go-to book, because it's going to be simple.
It's going to talk about the different grasses that are available in Florida, how you should select the grass, because there's a bunch of questions to ask you. All kinds of things like that. And then the illustrations, I've made the decision, are not going to be color photographs. They're going to be line drawings.
There will be color photographs on the back cover and on the front cover, where I show the different grasses and this type of thing. But inside the book will be line drawings. And that's going to be it. We're going to get in.
We're going to get busy. We're going to give you the direct information that you need, and then that will be done. And then there will be other series to go on with that, such as how to select shrubbery. You know, this type of, there will be one on vegetable gardening in Florida.
All of that. All of these are going to be 100 page or less books that I will publish on Amazon KDP. And they will be on Amazon Dubai. That's as simple as it's going to be.
But it's not really that simple because I spent all day yesterday or most of yesterday and a lot of today doing research. Not so much on my topics, but on the actual how do I get this done and make a little bit of money off of it. And that's the important thing that, you know, you have to do research. I had to go see what 80 to 100 page books, paperback books, were selling for.
And it all depends. Like if it's a little storybook, it's going to sell for between 9 and 10 bucks. If it is a book full of information, they're going to go from 12 to $14. And then, you know, you figure out what your percentage is and all of that type of stuff.
I also had to determine how I'm going to get my covers designed. I had to determine how I'm going to get my layout done. I had to determine what size font I was going to use and what kind of font I was going to use. What kind of font was most pleasing to the eye?
So if you want to get started in any kind of business, and this is just something relatively new for me. I mean, you know, I published books on KDP in the past. As a matter of fact, is there one up here? Yeah, there's one up here.
Let me grab it. Let me grab it. I'm grabbing it. If I grab it.
Yeah, here it is. It's a planner. It's planning your podcast. 52 episode podcasting log and journal by Michael Kroos.
It's available on KDP. I have no idea what it sells for, but I wrote this a couple of years ago and I sold some copyright 2020. So yeah, just before the pandemic. Well, what a wonderful thing that was to do.
And it is basically a journal, but it has different things for you to fill out. You know, name of the show, production date, host, guest, email, in studio, remote, via, you know, scheduled runtime, all the stuff I put into this thing. And believe it or not, when it came out, I didn't do a lot to publicize it. I really didn't.
But I don't know. And I wasn't as serious about this as I needed to be, but I came out with that and I made dozens of dollars, literally dozens of dollars. But I learned how to do a lot of things. But here's the other fun thing about that is that now it's all different.
The way that I did things in 2020 compared to 2024, there's a lot of differences, a lot of different steps that you've got to take. So I had to research all of that today. I need an illustrator. I think I found one.
I've done a little research on that. You can go to something like Fiverr or Upwork and find an illustrator. But I think I found somebody here locally who does a lot of really cool line drawings. And I think that if I give her pictures of what I want done, she can make really cool original line drawings off of it.
So when somebody tells you, you know, you can't do something, figure out a way to do it. This has always been my philosophy. Figure out a way to get it done. And I'm excited about this.
I'm excited about this series. I'm not sure how many books, different books will be in the series. The other thing that I'm working on very seriously is how to market it, how to market these books and to get them out there. And I've got a lot of ideas on that.
I think I'm going to be making a bunch of TikTok videos. And I think I'm going to be making some YouTube videos. And I might even make a Florida gardening podcast. I don't know yet.
But I'm serious about getting these books out there and getting those done. The next series that I want to do will be a fiction series. 8,200 page short stories, very short stories, very to the point stories, stories that make a lot of sense that come out of, you know, my past, not so much my past, but some of my friends past. And I'm going to be interviewing these people on a podcast and I will be, you know, I will take all of that information and turn those into little tiny fiction books because I'm not going to use their names, but I'm going to make fiction books out of them.
And it should be fun. So, you know, just set yourself up for success and determine what you want to do. So far, everything that I wanted to do with this, I started on this little book and I woke up in the middle of the night with this idea at three o'clock in the morning and I wrote it on a little journal that's on the side of my bed that has a pen attached to it. I've since moved that to a yellow pad.
And so far, I have free assignments on that pad. When those are done, I'll make three more. But I'm serious about this. I'm going to get started with this.
So join me. You know, you might enjoy it. Who knows? Maybe you can get with me and tell me what you've done with publishing.
I'd be interested in knowing. We'll see you tomorrow.