Self-Publishing: How to Publish a Hindi Book on Kindle

A friend of mine, Rohan, had a spiral notebook of Hindi poetry sitting in a drawer since roughly 2017. He wrote it during a rough patch after a breakup, never showed it to anyone properly, and mentioned it once, almost as a joke, at a dinner in March.

I asked to read three poems. Two weeks later, it was live on Kindle. This is that process, not mine this time, watched from close enough to get all the details right.

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Turning a notebook into something Amazon would accept

Thirty-one poems existed on paper. Some were four lines. One ran almost two pages. Rohan typed all of it into a Word document over what he said was "one very long, very caffeinated Saturday."

He picked 22 of them for the actual collection, cutting the ones that felt too raw or, in his words, "too much like reading someone's diary out loud at a party." Fair enough.

The font issue came up almost immediately. He'd typed everything in a font called Kruti Dev, an old-school Hindi font a lot of people still default to out of habit. Kindle's converter mangled it completely, turned half the vowel marks into gibberish. Switching to Mangal fixed it, though it took an evening of confused googling to figure out why the preview looked broken in the first place.

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The cover took longer than the poems, weirdly

Canva's free version again, no surprise there. Rohan picked a monsoon photograph off Unsplash, checked the license was fine for commercial use, and layered the Hindi title over it.

First version had the text sitting right across the busiest part of the cloud pattern in the photo. Genuinely unreadable at thumbnail size, the size it actually needs to work at on a phone screen. Second attempt used a photo with a plain, dark sky and the title popped immediately. About 70 minutes total, most of it spent on that first failed version.

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Submitting through KDP

Setting up the KDP account needed PAN details and bank information for royalty payments, standard stuff. The manuscript upload went through Amazon's built-in converter, which turns a Word file into the ebook format automatically.

First rejection: a stray page break inside what should have been one continuous poem, splitting a four-line piece across two screens on some devices. Fixed it, resubmitted, approved the second time.

Price got set at Rs 249, deliberately inside the $2.99 to $9.99 window that qualifies for the 70% royalty tier rather than the lower 35% tier below it.

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What happened in the first week, told honestly

Nothing for the first two days. Rohan checked his KDP dashboard roughly every four hours, which he later admitted was "unhealthy behaviour, genuinely."

Day three: one sale. He was almost certain it was his sister. Day five: three more, and at least one of those buyers he genuinely didn't recognize from anywhere.

That third day sale, the one from someone unrelated to him entirely, apparently made him call me at 11pm just to say "someone I've never met bought my poems." Small thing, but it clearly mattered more than the money did at that point.

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The actual numbers, month by month

Month one: 19 copies, working out to roughly Rs 3,002 after Amazon's cut. Month two dropped to 8 copies, the initial curiosity from friends-of-friends had worn off by then.

Something shifted in month three. He posted one poem as an Instagram caption, tagged the book, nothing fancy. That single post pulled 16 copies that month alone, more than doubling the previous month.

Across five months total: 61 copies, somewhere around Rs 9,660 in royalties. Not a living. But for a notebook that spent nine years doing nothing in a drawer, it's a strange kind of vindication.

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What he'd do differently next time

He assumed good poetry sells itself. It doesn't, or at least it didn't here. Every single sales bump traced back to him actively posting something, not the book existing quietly and waiting to be discovered.

The title was also too vague on the first attempt, something generic translating to just "Feelings" in English. He's already planned the next collection around a specific, narrower theme instead, something about his grandfather's village, he mentioned.

He'd also ask readers directly for reviews. The book has three reviews across 61 copies sold, and he never once asked anyone to leave one. Simple thing to fix, honestly, and he knows it now.

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Rohan's already twelve poems into a second collection, and he texted me last week asking whether a two-language edition, Hindi and English side by side, sounds like a good or terrible idea...