Publish a book in 2024 for FREE in just 15-30 minutes (it's extremely easy!)

hey do you have a book that you'd like to publish but you don't know how or you worried it might be too expensive my sister-in-law was telling me over the holidays that she had a really cool book that she wanted to publish but naturally she figured it's probably pretty expensive and probably pretty hard and there were just a lot of other unknowns that were holding her back and so of course I was very very excited to tell her no no no it's actually possible to publish for free in as little as 15 to 30 minutes I promise you and when I boiled it all down it's really just five simple steps so Cassandra this video is for you and for anybody else who is in the same shoes and wants to know how to publish a book for free really quick let's make it easy I'm going to start by sharing number one the print on demand company that I most recommend you work with when you're starting out number two the types of files that they'll require for the inside of the book known as the interior and there are specific files for ebook versus print books actually number three we'll talk about the cover file f for your book and how you can potentially make that for yourself using canva which again is free number four is uploading your book to that print on demand company so I will show you my screen there are three sections metadata the book files and then pricing and distribution and I'll walk you through all of it and then last but not least number five is pressing publish see it's easy so let's get into it step one is to choose your print on demand company and so print on demand is exactly what it sounds like they print your book only when there is a demand So Gone are the days where you had to order a th000 copies to yourself to keep in your garage and then send them all out yourself now these companies do all of that for you they do obviously take a percentage of the profit to cover their cost but you have to do zero shipping or if it's an ebook they will deliver that to the person's email as well and just like it sounds in the name they only print books when there is a demand so you just put your book up online let your readers know it's there and as long as there's a Dem demand you can just sit back and let them do the work and make the money I'm going to pop a list of companies that I prefer on screen and walk you through it super fast KDP which is known as Kindle Direct publishing is my personal favorite but it only publishes to Amazon so just keep that in mind draft to digital is another favorite of mine they used to be ebooks only but they have recently expanded into print as well and the cool thing about them is that they publish for at least ebooks to all vendors so we're talking about not just Amazon but but also Apple Cobo Barnes & Noble Google play places like that and even some libraries Ingram spark publishes to all vendors in all formats but I would recommend caution with this because it's not quite as user friendly for beginners and I also would personally only recommend print for this because I've heard their distribution for ebooks is just not as strong before we keep going on this list just know that I have videos on all three of the companies I just mentioned so if you want help with your research I will link those videos below next we have Barnes & Noble press and they publish in all formats they have ebook paperback and hard cover but of course it is Barnes & Noble specific because it's their store and so it is also us only as well there's a company called Lulu that I wanted to give an honorable mention even though I've never used them and then for ebooks only you can go direct to Apple I think it's called Apple Books right now and you can go direct to Google Play and direct to Cobo books as well and all of these vendors reach different groups of readers in different parts of the country things like that so it can be nice to have that extra exposure if you want to but you don't have to do all of them at once you can start out on one and then add more as you feel comfortable if you want to for the sake of this video though I'm going to pretend that you chose KDP or Kindle Direct publishing because that is what I would strongly recommend to my sister-in-law and also honestly to you for step two you obviously need to have your book but more specifically your book files if you're going to be uploading those files so we're going to start with your in interior file which again just is everything beneath the cover from front to back doesn't matter what type of book it is if it's a children's book or a planner doesn't matter everything under the cover is the interior and the interior file needs to be one big file and depending on which company you work with it has to be a certain type of file as well I'm going to assume if you're here that you already have a finished book that you totally understand this is not a writing tutorial or an editing tutorial but I did want to mention that I do have playlists on both writing and editing that I'll link below if you did want help with those things for the sake of this video again I'm assuming you have a finished book which means you technically already have a book file so really this step is all about converting that file to the required file type for the print on demand company Kindle Direct publishing for example wants your ebooks to be an EB if at all possible and your print books to be a PDF file if at all possible and that's a really good thing to know just really quick is that ebooks do need a different file than print books and we'll get into that don't worry KDP does have a list of different file types that they'll allow for ebooks but the one that they most recommend that I would recommend as well is an UB file and the idea behind the UB or at least one of the reasons behind it is that people are reading on devices in all different sizes so depending on like how big the screen is or how small your page formatting is going to be completely different and the ebook has to naturally shift and fit the page depending on the size of the screen without messing up the formatting my favorite way to change my word document into an UB file is just to use a website called draft to digital it's super easy to use so you're going to have to make an account just like you did with KDP it should be pretty quick you don't actually have to sell books on here although you can as well remember we mentioned this is other ebook companies if you would like to have expanded distribution but you don't have to you don't have to do anything fancy you can just make your UB file here so I will go to my books this is what your page will look like if you've uploaded your books and you'll just click add new book start ebook you can see they have three options there now when it used to just be ebook I love that the reason you'll want to upload your cover art is because they're going to most likely include that in the ebook file itself so I'm going to go ahead and upload it super quick ignore the Apple specific cover art section it should be fine to be the exact same you're going to input The Meta data about the book but honestly if you're only using them to get the Epub file you don't have to do a lot of work with this you could just skip through it really quick or you could fill it out the way that we will be filling out the metadata for KDP a little later on in this video so you can kind of come back and compare notes you'll see that I'm doing the bare minimum I've got one keyword I've got one category and I'm going to click Start ebook cuz that's all I need I'm not actually publishing on this platform right now I'm just getting the ebook now we can upload our Word document so hit browse this is my personal ebook file for this book and then it just needs a quick second to upload the book while it's doing that you can move on to this section so again if you're not actually publishing the book on here here you can just leave that as is or you could set a future date and do a pre-order if you know you want to do that we'll talk about all of this metadata a little bit later on in the video when it comes to pre-orders and writing a description since I'm again just getting the file I'm not going to write hardly anything cuz I'm actually not using this I'm going to skip the short description cuz it says it's optional it's not a collection cuz that means multiple books I don't have any collaborators AKA co-authors to add to this project and last but not least I'm just going to click the give me a free ISBN number this is an international standard book number it's just an identification number for your book and they offer free ones so I'm going to click that and save and continue oh apparently the book description actually has to be longer now I think they must have caught on to people like me who are doing that we'll talk more about the description later on but I'm just going to go ahead and paste mine in for right now and then we're going to click save and continue if you hadn't yet added a title page or copyrights or dedication any of these things on the left side you could use draft to digital to add that but but I've already added it in my word document so I just skip the section and click save and continue and here we are this is the page where you can get your ebook so it's going to show you a page in your book I think it's really good to scroll to the front and then scroll through and make sure everything looks good you can scroll through chapters like this and go all the way to the end of your book make sure everything looks beautiful let me show you all this amazing extra formatting stuff on the right side it's right now sounds simple but you could add these cute Corner decorations this is the more really simple side if you have a specific genre you could add in like mystery and Thriller kind of Vibes or romance Vibes with a little heart I really love this fantasy one I use this a lot but I've also used the crown and I've also used the dragon and then if you wrote non-fiction or poetry they have those options as well and you can see how they add that to every single chapter header which is super fun but you might not need that that's okay if you don't need that and you can also add this drop caps which is just that very first letter being larger or you can skip it if you'd rather not do any of that once you love how this file looks you are ready to get your UB version of that file so you just scroll down to the right they actually have three different types so you can get a PDF here you can get a Mobi file but right here in the middle if I click this it's going to let me download an Epub file that looks exactly like that and that's what Amazon requires so I just download this file and then I'll bring it over to Amazon and use it there if you wanted to also publish on draft to digital you could click I have reviewed and move on I have this whole uploading video there if you want to know more about uploading to draft digital but for today we are only using it to get an EO file so that is how I do that that's how to do an ebook interior but we still need to talk about the print book interior for those of you who would like physical copies in your hands of your books it's actually not that hard it's easier than the e-b in my opinion the file type for print books that KDP most recommends is called a PDF and a lot of you are already familiar with this you might even know how to convert uh a word doc into a PDF already if you don't there are are three ways that I know of first of all apparently word itself can convert to PDF now if you have a word doc I believe it's pretty easy you might have to Google it I've actually not done this in years but I know it's possible the second option that I've seen people use and Ed myself is actually canva and we'll talk about this more in a second but I have used this for my children's books so when I was designing pictures of my dog Penny putting a filter on them putting words on them that was all in canva and then I put it all together as a PDF file and that's one of the options that canville will let you download is a PDF so that's another option not so great for novels though so the third option which is what I use is actually Adobe Acrobat and I'm sure there are other options out there as well but that has a really nice file converter from word to PDF so however you get your document from one file to another the goal is to get your word doc to be a PDF when it's for print books I'm excited for step three we're going to talk about your book's cover file so the cover itself for ebooks you obviously just need that front cover that's all people see online that's all you need but for print books you obviously need not just a front cover but also a spine and a back cover as well this is the more complicated one let's start with ebooks first you know that saying don't judge a book by its cover that is 100% false everybody judges books by their covers and in fact what I want you to do when you're thinking about your cover is put yourself in your target reader shoes picture them browsing Amazon what types of books are they looking for because if your book is isn't what they're looking for they're not even going to see it they're going to just browse right past it so a cover is extremely extremely important no pressure but it's pretty much the number one factor of whether or not they're going to buy the book in fact that's my first tip treat your cover as seriously as you treated the book itself meaning do multiple revisions don't just settle on your first cover and be like hey it's good enough good to go try to make a first draft and then tweak it and then run it by people for feedback just like you would with your book and you know fix it some more run it by more people people especially your target audience I think this will really really help you make sure that you make a really good cover number two compare it to other covers in your genre so we already talked about this I won't harp on it too much but I think it's important to see does your book look like it fits in with the other books in its genre on Amazon that's a good sign that your target reader will be like yeah I could read that book my next tip I think this is number three is to use canva to make your cover if you want to get a free cover I actually already did an entire video on that so I'm not going to like break it all down again I'll just link that below but I really think that you can do a lot of great things with canva at this point and if you have a bit of a budget for it or if you would like to put a little bit more money into and have somebody else do this but you're like I just don't really want to pay that much I'm still like on a budget you can actually get pre-made book covers from a lot of different places a lot of different cover designers have made kind of a collection of pre-made covers that they're like whoever wants it can come buy this one and it's pre-made so it's cheaper versus one that's made specifically for you in your book if that makes sense and then my last tip for this section is to use kp's cover template what is it called cover cover creator by just putting in the front cover that you making canva and then letting them create the spine and back cover because sometimes figuring out the dimensions for that although you can if you want to try doing it in canva it can get a little bit intense and a little bit confusing so it's really nice to just plop in a front cover I did this for my notebooks I had the front cover that I designed in canva then I just used the cover generator for the spine and back cover it was really handy all right my last tip for this section I don't even know what number we're on anymore is that covers are actually changeable if you feel like oh I've got an awesome cover and you upload it but then maybe a month later or a year later or two years later you're like yeah I could have done better then just change it that's totally okay I've done this myself multiple times in fact sometimes I even just change covers for fun because the book's been out for a few years and it's reached its intended audience and a new cover can breathe fresh life into the book all that to say covers are changeable oh my gosh I almost forgot forgot to mention the file type which is extremely important when it comes to uploading your file your cover file on KDP they want an ebook to have a JPEG file it's super easy to convert to that on pretty much any computer these days and probably your phone too so if you don't know how that's probably a really fast Google search but hopefully you you might even have a JPEG file already if you download it from canva as a JPEG you're good to go and then for the print book if you have the entire cover front spine and back cover they want you to have a PD PDF file which actually you can download PDF from Cano remember we talked about that but if you're using your front cover and then you're going to use a cover generator to make your entire you know print book cover with the spine and the back then you can actually just use a JPEG as well that same one that you used for your ebook cover step four we're finally here to the uploading process and this actually has three sections in a second I'm going to actually show you my screen and walk you through uploading the book in these three sections but just so you know what we're getting into the first section is is metadata which is essentially just your book's title the description everything about the book all the data the second one is book files and good news we already have those ready to go I love it and then last but not least is pricing and distribution that's exactly what it sounds like you're going to set your book's price figure out where you're going to sell it all right it's time to actually go to Kindle Direct publishing and upload your book so just in FYI before you can do the uploading process you do need to make an account it should be pretty quick we're not going to be doing that here today but I'm sure there's videos on it if you want a little walk through of that as well but today we're going to start on this bookshelf page and you can see along the top where it says create a book click that and your next option is of course going to be what format of book like we talked about you could start with ebook or paperback either way it doesn't really matter and then you can link them later but the ebook is just slightly easier so I'm going to recommend starting there so we're going to click on that it's going to bring you to this page and this is where I talked about those three sections so your book details is what's often called metadata it just means all the data about your book like the book title the description Etc then you're going to have a Content page that you'll go to next and that's where you're going to upload your files last but not least you can see that pricing page that we talked about and on this page is distribution as well if you're not writing in English you're going to want to change this to whatever language you're writing it otherwise you can just leave it alone and go straight to book title and plug in the title of your work if you want to you can put a subtitle but you can also just skip this if you don't have one that's totally okay you can also skip the series section unless your book happens to be in a series my book is in a series so I'm going to show you what this looks like now I technically already have this series on Amazon so normally I would click existing series and select that and I guess I can show you quick if you want there's the Queen's rise Series right here or if I was starting from scratch I would click new series right here and click create a series and most likely main content and then go ahead and fill in the series information there this Edition section you can ignore that this is only for if you've published the book before in the the author section you'll put your first and last name right here I will note that if you wanted to use a pen name for any reason you would put your pen name here instead and then this contributor section right here is just if there were other authors that you actually worked on with this if there were definitely include it if you have a co-author but normally you're probably just going to skip this section you'll notice there is a drop down to include other people as well like if it's a children's book and the illustrator had a really really big role you might want to include them here but typically in my experience I just skip this section then next we have description so I would recommend spending a little extra time on this if you have it and also you can fill it in but then come back and rework it later as well which I also would recommend so you could literally if you want to keep going put about the book here and then come back to it before you press publish if you wanted to but once you have a good description that you feel confident about you can paste it in like this and if you don't have it already formatted you could add formatting using these up here at the Top If you have non-fiction book you can use bullet points even but for fiction don't do that and then this next section here is the publishing rights and so unless you actually went out and like downloaded Jane Austin or something like that you should be the copyright owner so you should be clicking this button 99% of the time the primary audience section is next so if your book has any explicit images in it then you need to let them know that that needs to be very very clear on Amazon and I always click no and then this reading age right below that is technically optional so it really depends on if this would help you to Target your reader so say for example you're writing a children's book this would actually be really helpful because you could click the minimum age and then the maximum age here as well and that will actually help them help Amazon Target that age group or really technically the parents of that age group in most cases under the primary Marketplace I personally sell from amazon.com but there's this drop- down list you can see here if you were in a different country you would want to make that accurate to your country or technically it says where you expect to sell the majority of your book sales these next two sections are important so we're going to dive into this a little bit more categories is essentially if you picture a bookstore this is where a reader would be looking within a bookstore so for example if you have a self-help book but you put it over with the novels people who are browsing the self-help section are never going to look over there they're not going to find it and vice versa if you wrote a novel and you're putting it over in that self-help section that's not where people are going when they want to read a good fiction book so this is really important cuz this is like the Shelf in the book store that you're putting your book on mine is in teen and young adult Science Fiction and Fantasy you can see how it keeps having more and more subcategories sometimes called sub genres mine is fairy tales and folklore adaptations I could also click royalty or G General and you can see down here on the bottom it says there's three categories allowed so I'm going to go ahead and save my categories but I definitely would recommend that you browse and especially if you have a specific age group like I have teen and young adults or there's children as well make sure you browse that correct age group so that you're on the right shelf in the store even though it says keywords are optional I think they're really really important so I would recommend you at least feel something in here and to describe what these do this is what people are typing into the search bar when they're on Amazon so if I went to Amazon right now this is my book but if I go up to the search bar here at the top first of all you can see how I have the Kindle Store highlighted so that's going to help me not you know get really random stuff like shoes or purses I don't know when I start searching young adult say fantasy look at all these other keywords that come up and because they're more than one words they're called longtail keywords so am I writing a romance perfect am I writing a free book book no am I writing one with an academy in it what if I start typing fairy tale look at that it's right there retelling cuz that's what I'm personally writing but look how many different options there are here then you could also write other things you can Picture People typing like vill and origin story and if you're ever in doubt you can go and type it in right here a towel great that might not be the best keyword villain books okay check that out for the sake of this video I'm not going to do all but I would recommend that you do all seven it's worth it this last one is really really fun so if you want to you can just keep it at I'm ready to release now and when you get to the end of these three pages you can press publish done and your book will go into to KDP submission and as soon as they approve it you're published it's really that fast however I think it's really fun to do pre-orders cuz it kind of builds up the excitement so you can go ahead and click a calendar and you could do a pre-order at the end of the month month or two away 3 or four months away up to an entire enre year from now and here at the bottom click save and continue and you're done with page one congratulations you're a third of the way done all right so the content is like I said the book files it'll say manuscript here at the top that's your interior file so you can click upload and this is the ebook so like I talked about earlier you need an EB file I have mine right here so I'm going to double click it and it's going to upload One Mississippi okay cool that's how fast it is it is extremely fast to upload it's looking good the one thing I'm going to say about this before I move on because I personally have uploaded files and then been like you know what actually I'm going to make this one change okay I'm going to re-upload it if you do that if you decide to update your file make sure you change the name in some way shape or form otherwise Amazon's KDP will not realize that you've changed the file and they won't change anything that's why I put the date in mind so that way if I update it on you know December 2023 January 2024 I'll update my file with a new date and that will let Amazon know to change the file next we have the ebook cover cover all right so this is exciting I actually do already have a cover so say you made it in canva then you could go and grab your cover file right here and upload it and it's also going to be really really quick oh it's already done I was going to say while it's going you can also use this cover creator if for some reason your file is not working right here like for example maybe you have the wrong file type or you just it's not quite the right size for some reason you can click this cover creator on top to actually just kind of adjust and make the cover directly in KDP I think this cover creator is a little more useful when it comes to the physical books but you could potentially use it for ebooks this section is brand spanking new AI generated content hopefully hopefully you can answer no to that if for any reason you did use AI I think it's important to click yes and let them know and they're not penalizing you for anything but it's just important to be honest about that last but not least it lets you have a preview so I'm going to click that this one is slow oh just kidding it's not that slow and you can click through and see exactly what your book looks like and see if it looks good and up here on the right side you can change to what it looks like on the phone make sure everything is still formatted nicely you can switch to an Kindle e reader check that out you can even switch right here the angle that the screen is so it's really good to make sure that it looks nice before you go back and approve bit all right scrolling down we did the previewer we liked it the last section on this page is the ISBN and this stands for international standard book number you don't actually have to have one of these for Amazon because Amazon uses their own identification number called the ASI n Amazon standard identification number you can read up on it if you want to but you can actually just skip this section completely they're both optional as you can see I actually do have a Publishing Company Grace House Press so I'm going to to fill that in and click save and continue and now we're 2/3 of the way done this section is actually really really simple it's mainly just pricing so we are near the Finish Line okay this KDP select enrollment is actually the author term for Kindle unlimited so have you ever seen on Amazon where books are in the Kindle unlimited program and so essentially if you pay for that you get an unlimited number of free books or something like that yeah I think the books are free if you join that program you pay like a monthly Fe or something like that can you tell I don't use it but if you wanted to you could enroll your book in KDP select and this is ebook specific so instead of people paying to download a whole copy of your book you're going to get paid per Pages read so Amazon has a way to track that they know if people are flipping through the book and for each page you get a teeny tiny little bit of money and um I don't know much more than that but you can definitely research it if you want to and honestly it might be worth trying because you can always take your book out of the program if you want to it's not a permanent thing and you can read up more about that as well right here next is territories so this is specifically for people who have sold some of the rights to their book already like if you're a traditionally published author and they purchased your us rights but you have rights to Germany yourself then you could select that individual territory right down here but if you're an indie author like me and you have all the rights then I would select all the territories your primary Marketplace is something we already selected and now we're finally at the pricing royalty and distribution so obviously you know what pricing is about but royalties refer to basically your cut of the profit how much do you personally make whenever you sell a book if you click the 70% option here you'll see you have to price the book $2.99 to $9.99 within that range if you wanted to go cheaper than that you would have to select 35% or if you wanted to go more expensive as well obviously we want to make a higher percentage 70% royalty is a 70% cut that's a lot more and typically I put my books at $3.99 sometimes $4.99 depending on what my competitor's books are priced I think it's really smart to go on Amazon look at books in your same category and see what do they price what are their ebooks priced what are their print books priced and then try to price competitively once you plug in your listing price for the book which is what readers see on Amazon then you're going to see your royalty pop up over here on the right so if you wanted to play around and see it change you can just click boom it changes and you'll notice all of the other Amazon sites in the different countries change as well now you could go in here and actually manually change this I personally don't it's totally up to you but I like to just kind of leave it then we are at the end there's that publish button right there I'm going to be very careful to not press it because this particular book that I'm putting in to show you guys is already published if you're interested I'll link it below I just wanted to point out one last thing where it says it can take up to 72 hours for your book to be available for purchase on Amazon in other words if you have a specific date where you want your book out like I am letting the world know on Friday maybe publish the book on Tuesday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday 72 hours you should be good to go by Friday morning but if you're not super concerned it's not a big deal either and honestly in my experience I'd say 90% of the time the book is up online in about 4 hours they really really fast however when it's slower than that a lot of times for me at least it's been because there was some minor issue with the book that I needed to take a look at so it can be nice to have a little bit of buffer time too especially if you're about to start promoting the book and telling everybody and being super excited then you want the book to actually be live so it's good to give yourself some buffer time and just sneakily publish it a little bit early just in case roll you did it press publish you are at the end this step is really just here for the excitement because it's one click and you're done it's so exciting we already talked about how it might take a tiny bit of time for the book to be reviewed but pretty shortly after you press publish on KDP your book is out in the world are you excited I'm excited for you I can't wait to see your book on Amazon if this video was helpful to you give it a thumbs up and let me know in the comments does it feel easier to you now I really really hope that it does and I hope this video was helpful to you and if you liked it you can definitely subscribe for more videos like this I hope you have an amazing publishing experience and I'm wishing you the best I hope this video was super helpful and I'll talk to you again soon [Music] bye

Channel: Bethany Atazadeh - YA Fantasy Author

Views: 35,894

Keywords: how to write a novel, bethany atazadeh, self publishing, how to write a book, writing advice, authortube, authortuber, writing a fantasy novel, writing fantasy

Id: JEk1atafERY

Length: 29min 55sec (1795 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2024