The Part People Don’t Really See
By Natasha C Akinfolarin #DislexicPoet
People see the finished book.
The polished cover.
The “Now Available on Amazon” post.
The neat little photo beside a coffee cup.
What they don’t see
Is the chaos behind it.
Indie publishing is not just writing poems and pressing upload.
It’s hours of editing, re-editing, fixing spacing, changing fonts, checking page numbers, resizing covers, converting files, correcting tiny mistakes that suddenly look massive at 2am.
Writing the poems?
That’s the easy part for me.
That part feels alive.
Natural.
Like breathing out something that’s been trapped inside too long.
But editing?
That’s where the real battle starts.
You start noticing everything.
A missed comma.
A strange line break.
A title too close to the edge of the page.
One poem suddenly in different spacing from the others.
A page number sitting in the wrong place like it’s mocking you.
Then comes the manuscript formatting.
The copyright page.
The dedication.
The chapter pages.
The table of contents.
The front matter.
The back matter.
Checking if the PDF actually uploaded correctly.
Checking if the Kindle version still looks right after conversion.
And somehow, every time you fix one thing,
Another thing moves.
That’s the part people don’t talk about enough.
Indie writers don’t just create the work —
We become editors, formatters, designers, marketers, promoters, and tech support at the same time.
You learn things you never expected to learn.
Trim sizes.
Margins.
Bleed settings.
Page counts.
Metadata.
SEO.
File conversions.
KDP errors that make absolutely no sense.
At one point, you can genuinely end up staring at a screen wondering why moving one paragraph somehow destroyed three pages after it.
And still —
You keep going. 💪
Me? I keep going for myself — for all the times I was told I wasn’t enough, or that I’d never amount to anything. For my brother, who believed in me even when I lost faith in myself. And for all the other people out there who’ve been told to disappear.
Because there’s something powerful about holding your own book in your hands knowing you built it yourself.
Not backed by a huge publisher.
Not handed opportunities.
Not polished by a giant team.
Just you.
Your work.
Your persistence.
Your vision.
That’s why indie writers deserve more respect than they get.
People see a finished book and think it appeared overnight.
What they don’t see is the hundreds of tiny decisions behind every single page.
The emotional exhaustion.
The self-doubt.
The excitement.
The moments where you nearly give up.
Then the moment where you realise:
Wait… I actually did this.
I’m not an expert.
But I’ve learned a little through doing it myself.
And honestly?
It’s messy.
Stressful.
Time-consuming.
But it’s also one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.
Especially when the words inside the book are real.
When they came from somewhere honest.
That’s the thing about indie publishing —
You’re not just building a book.
You’re building proof
That your voice deserved to exist in the world at all.
Thank you for reading
Your DislexicPoet 🖤