WordProcess

About WordProcess

WordProcess is a free guide for people writing a book and planning to publish it themselves.

It exists because the advice a first-time author needs is scattered across three worlds that rarely talk to each other. Craft advice lives in workshops and MFA programmes. Publishing advice lives in platform documentation and forum threads. Marketing advice mostly lives in courses that cost money. If you are writing your first novel and also have to work out Amazon KDP and also have to find readers, you end up assembling a picture from a dozen half-relevant sources.

These guides try to be the thing that covers all three, in plain English, for free.

Who this is for

We write for one person: someone working on their first book who intends to publish it themselves. That's deliberately narrow — writing for everyone would make every guide vaguer.

So you'll find guides on outlining a novel, building characters, entering short story competitions, using Amazon KDP, and marketing a book on no budget. You won't find guidance on academic writing, business copywriting, or breaking into screenwriting as a career. Not because those don't matter, but because serving them would mean serving the indie author worse.

If that's you, start with the guides.

What you can expect from a guide here

  • Something you can act on today. Most guides carry a table, a checklist or a copy-paste template. If a guide leaves you with a general feeling rather than a next step, it hasn't done its job.
  • Plain English. No jargon where an ordinary word works, and no padding to reach a word count.
  • Nothing invented. We do not make up statistics, prices, deadlines or examples. Where a guide cites a figure — a competition's word limit, a prize amount, a royalty rate — it comes from that organisation's own page and links there so you can check it.
  • Figures that change are labelled as such. Entry fees, deadlines and platform terms move. Where a guide quotes one, it says so and tells you to verify at source. We would rather admit a number has a shelf life than let you plan around a stale one.
  • Corrections, not quiet edits. If something here is wrong, we want to fix it properly. Tell us.

Who writes these

Guides are published under the WordProcess name rather than an individual byline, and researched against primary sources — publisher documentation, competition organisers' own terms, and the platforms themselves — rather than recycled from other blogs.

That choice has a trade-off worth being upfront about. A named author with a publishing track record would carry more authority than a brand name does. What we offer instead is verifiable sourcing: where a claim matters, the guide links to where you can confirm it yourself. You should.

What this site doesn't do

WordProcess is a guide, not a service. We don't offer editing, ghostwriting, coaching, manuscript assessment or publishing services, and we don't sell a course. There is nothing to buy here.

An earlier version of this page, inherited from the site's previous incarnation, advertised a writing-services agency. That was never what this site is, and it has been removed.

Where to start