How to publish an eBook in 60 minutes

I published an eBook on Amazon. It takes an hour if you have the content ready.

STEP 1 (10 min): Set up a Kindle Direct Publishing account with your address, bank details, and tax info.

STEP 2 (15 min): Export my London 2000 blog archive and convert to Markdown.

STEP 3 (10 min): Reformat the Markdown by writing a script in Cursor. Here’s the prompt:

Write a Python script that reads *.md including the YAML frontmatter, adds the YAML title as H1, date (yyyy-mm-dd) like Sun, 01 Jan 2000 in a new para after the frontmatter and before the content.

STEP 4 (15 min): Convert it to an ePub using pandoc.

pandoc *.md -o book.epub --toc \
  --metadata title="An LBS Exchange Program" \
  --metadata author="Anand S" \
  --metadata language=en \
  --metadata date="31 Mar 2025"

STEP 5 (10 min): Generated a cover page with ChatGPT (5 min) and compressed it into JPEG via Squoosh.

Draw a comic-style book cover page that covers the experiences of an Indian exchange student (picture attached) from IIM Bangalore at London Business School and exploring London. The book title is “An LBS Exchange Program”.

STEP 6 (10 min): Publish the book on KDP. It’s priced at $0.99 / ₹49 because Kindle doesn’t allow free downloads.

The three things that made publishing in 1 hour possible are:

1. Amazon’s publishing process is simple.
2. Open-source tooling (WordPress, Markdown, ePub, pandoc) has built a big part of the infrastructure.
3. LLMs make the rest (figuring out the steps, generating the cover) very easy.

(The book is currently under review and will be released in 72 hours, by 2 Apr 2025.)