Today, we're doing a step by step tutorial on
how to publish your book on Amazon Kindle direct publishing. This is the second video in my beginner's
guide to self-publishing video series here on my YouTube channel. So if you
haven't watched the first video yet, it will be linked down below. What I
talk about today will apply to eBooks. So if you wanna publish on Kindle, it will apply to paperbacks and it will
also apply to hard covers. However, if you wanna know more
about publishing hardcovers, I do have a separate video
entirely just on that. So that will be linked down below because
hardcovers are new to Kindle direct publishing, and I'm very
excited about it. In this video, we're gonna be going over
all the information that
you need to have before you start the uploading process, and then I'll be walking you
through exactly what you're
gonna see as you upload your book yourself. Hello everyone. My name is Mandi Lynn. I'm an author book cover designer in
the creator of The Book Launch Planner. I post weekly videos on the
business of being an author. So if you enjoy this type of content,
be sure to give it a thumbs up, comment down below and subscribe.
Before we jump into the tutorial, do know you should have a document already
preprepared of everything that you're going to need that way when
you're uploading everything. You're not trying to figure out your
book, description, your keywords, your categories right then and there. Do the research beforehand so
the uploading process is simpler. So what do you need to know before
you start uploading your book? You need to know the book, title, the
book subtitle, the book's release date. If you wanna do a paid
ISBN or a free ISBN, you also wanna know what the price of
your book is gonna be. And then finally, you're gonna wanna know what categories
your books will be in the keywords your book will have. And lastly, the
age range, your book will be. So once you know all that, you can
jump into the uploading process, which I'll show you how to do right now. So here we are in Kindle
direct publishing, and this
isn't my actual account. This is the account I use to test things
out. As you can see my children's book, I was testing out over here before
it even had its official cover. So this is what it's gonna look like. Hopefully you won't have
this little message. I didn't complete my account information
cuz I don't plan on publishing anything through here, but basically,
uh, to start all you do is hit, uh, the plus sign for ebook, the plus sign for paperback or
the plus sign for hard over. They're all more or less the same. The only thing that's different
is the file requirements. But I'll talk about
that when we get there. So I'm gonna go ahead and walk you guys
through the ebook process because I feel like everyone publishes an ebook,
not always a paperback or hardcover, so just know it all should
be more or less the same. So let's click that little plus sign for
ebook and then it will load a new page. So first thing, language, what language
is the book in? That's easy English. Next thing is book title. So I'm gonna just pretend like
I'm uploading the files for newest book, Meet Me at the Summit.
So that's what I'm going to do. Then we have subtitle, which is optional. Now subtitles are a little finicky. So I always do subtitles on my
nonfiction books because you have the opportunity to put more keywords
into your description of your book. I don't always do it for my fiction books. And the reason is because Kindle
has some pretty specific rules on subtitles. But let me show you an example. So here we have my book Essence on
Amazon. As you can see the Kindle version, it has a subtitle young adult fantasy, cuz we're gonna throw in some of
those keywords that we like. However, the paperback edition does not
have a subtitle. It's just Essence. And the reason for this is that you are
required to have your subtitle on the cover of your book for the paperback
edition. So for the paperback edition, my um, fiction books
don't have a subtitle, but for my Kindle editions
they do have a subtitle. So right now we are in the Kindle version. So even though the subtitle isn't on
the cover of Meet Me at the Summit, I am gonna go ahead and add this in here. So I'm actually gonna put young adult
contemporary since we are in the ebook version, since we can get away with that. And then next we have series details. If
you're publishing a book in the series, Meet Me at the Summit is actually
book one of two in a series, but book two isn't out yet. So I haven't added any of the
series information yet. Uh, but if you do have a series, you just hit this add series details and
then it looks at the other books that you've published in your account
and you can look them up. So you, you can either start a new series
or choose from an existing series. Then we have addition
number nine times outta 10. You're probably not gonna touch this
unless you're like republishing a book, we have the author. So just put in your
name and then we have contributors. So if this is a co-written work or if
you wanna add in all this other details and information, um, I personally would only do it if you
wanna give credit to a forward or someone who illustrated the book,
if it's like a children's book, something like that. And then
this here is the description. So you know how it was mentioning all
the information you needed earlier? I want you to have it
in a separate account. I per always keep it in
a Google docs account. I actually have an entire Google
docs folder and I use all of this when I'm publishing my books. So
this is just one of many documents. So we've gotten to the point where
we need to put in our description. So I'm just gonna go ahead and copy and
paste this description because you don't want to figure out your book
description while you're uploading everything. You wanna know that ahead of time and
you can mess with the formatting if you want, it's totally up to you. Then
we get down to the publishing rights. So you just need to state whether you
own the copyright or if it's public domain, odds are it's your own copyright. And then we have your keywords. So this is just all search engine
optimization right here, the, the keywords and the categories. Now
I'm gonna suggest a tool to you guys, cuz I personally love it.
And that is Publisher Rocket. I'm a huge advocate for Publisher Rocket. If you guys want me to do a full tutorial
on it one day on how you can really make the most out of it, let me know in the comments
down below and I will do that, but you can do a lot of things in here. You can use it to come up
with ideas for keywords, but my favorite is the category search. So you kind of just look
at the big categories. So we have teens and young adults, so I'm gonna hit check it
out and then we have all of these and you can scroll
through, you can search. So if I know my book is a romance,
we have, under teen and young adult, all these different, uh,
sub genres for romance. And this is set right now for
ebook. But if I wanted to go back, you can also set it for like a
regular print book or an audible book, because categories do vary depending
on what format the book is. And then you can also go here to do
some keyword research. Like again, if I just typed in romance, we can
come up with a bunch of keywords. Uh, so there's a ton of them. However, you don't have to use Publisher Rocket
to come up with keyword ideas and for category ideas, I think of a comp title and a comp title
is just a book that similar to yours. So one comp title for Meet
Me at the Summit is this
book called mosquito land by David Arnold. And what I do
is I scroll all the way down, all past this and I go down here
to the categories and these are the categories here that this
book is ranking in right now. But I actually don't just do
this for categories, which I do. I will see these categories and
write them down in this document. But I also look to this
for ideas for keywords. So a lot of the time you may
see your book rank in a category that you didn't even assign it to. And that just happens based off
of the keywords that you use. I learned this the hard way with
one of my books, She's Not Here. It's a book about a woman
who's so paranoid about
getting Alzheimer's that she begins experimenting on someone to
find a cure, no matter what the cost. So one of my keywords that I put
in on Amazon was Alzheimer's, but that meant that it was
ranking for like non-fiction books on Alzheimer's, which obviously this is
not a non-fiction book on Alzheimer's. This is a fictional story.
But because of that, I ended up removing the keyword
Alzheimer's because it was affecting my category ranking in a bad
way. So that's what I do. I look to other people's book categories
for inspiration on what my keywords should be. And then I also do research
through Kindle publisher rocket. So basically once you come up with
that, you wanna paste all these in. So I'm just gonna go ahead and
copy and paste a few of these. So you guys get the idea, ideally
you wanna fill out all seven. I'm not gonna do that today. Cuz this
is just an example. Next is categories. So like I said, I already told you
guys how you can look up categories. You can look it up here
through publisher rocket, or you can go ahead and look at
up through Amazon by just looking at comp titles and seeing
what categories they are in. But once you know what
categories you want, you have to go ahead and
click around and find it. So you're allowed up to two
categories. So choose wisely. You can get added to more categories
if you email KDP directly, uh, it just does take some time. And basically what you do is you contact
them and you copy and paste the exact categories that you
want your book added to. So then from there you're just
gonna choose the age range. So first we have the
actual age. For teen books I like to select 12 or 13 and
then maximum would be 18 plus and then age range. Um, I think I normally select like sixth
grade and then through 12th grade, um, it's really, you gotta figure out
what your demographic of your book is. And then you decide whether you are
ready to release your book. Now, AKA, as soon as you hit the published button
or if you wanna make it available for pre-order, I recommend if you're
doing a Kindle book to do, go ahead and do that. Pre-order this is actually the
only pre-order option you have. If you publish a paperback
or hardcover through KDP, they actually don't let you do a
pre-order. Maybe someday they will. And if they do, I'll be very
happy about it. But at this time, the only pre-orders that you are
allowed to have are for eBooks. So go ahead and select whenever
you want to publish that. And it tells you, you must submit the final version of
your pre-order title before March 21st, blah, blah, blah, because I selected
March 25th as my publication day. But for the sake of this tutorial, I'm actually gonna go ahead and say
that I'm ready to release my book now. Cause I wanted to show you guys that
you can actually upload all your files. Okay, so now we're on the next page and
the next step in the uploading process, this is the thing that people
get really confused about. So we have this little thing
about digital rights management. I personally don't have
a huge opinion on this. So take what I say with a grain of
salt, but basically if you click, yes, it limits a buyer's
ability to like share the book. If that makes any sense.
So you as an author, I'm sure your first instinct is to
be like, yes, I want that enabled. I don't want people to be able to share
my, my manuscript, like, you know, us authors. We're very protective of
our work. So basically as it says here, digital rights management is intended
to inhibit unauthorize distribution of Kindle files of your book. Some authors want to encourage readers
to share their work and choose not to have DRM applied to their
book. If you choose DRM, customers will still be able to lend the
book to one another for a short period and can also purchase the book
as a gift for one another. Um, from the Kindle store important.
Once you publish your book, you cannot change these settings. Um, I, I personally recommend that
you do your own research. I don't have a huge opinion
on this. As far as I'm aware, all my books don't have digital rights
management enabled just cuz when I looked it up online, people had some pretty strong opinions
about how bad it was and I don't understand why. Um, so take my
opinion with a grain of salt, do your own research. Uh, but
basically after you figure that out, you then select upload
your ebook manuscript. So we're gonna go ahead
and we are gonna do that. So I just went ahead and I uploaded
my EUB file. If you wanna know how to, uh, format an EUB file, I will
have a tutorial linked down below. I have two different tutorials once
through a program called Kotobee author. The other is just through
Microsoft word, which works, but is much more annoying. Then we're
gonna go ahead and upload your book cover. You can either use the launch cover
creator, which I don't recommend. I think the result is always ugly. I definitely have a biased opinion
because I'm a book cover designer myself, but I will just say people
do judge a book by its cover. So I uploaded the cover that I
designed for Meet Me at the Summit. If you wanna see how I designed it,
that video will be linked down below. I show the entire illustration
process. It was very fun. All right. So that's that now before we can proceed, we have to go ahead and
hit launch previewer and it
makes sure that everything looks correct. It takes a long time
sometimes to preview an ebook. It's usually a little bit faster, but you'll notice for paperbacks or
especially for hardcovers during this stage, it takes forever
for these files to upload. And then I will noye at this time
that when you're doing these steps for hardcovers and paperbacks, uh, the interior files have
to be formatted for print. So if you don't know how to format
your book for print for Kindle direct publishing, again, links to those tutorial videos will
be down below then for the cover instead of just uploading
the cover itself, you need to upload the entire cover
wrap and that needs to be a PDF file. All right. So here we
are in the Kindle previewer. So we've got a little Kindle reader to
help us visualize. We have the cover, which is awesome. Then we turn the page, we have the copyright page
and then we turn the page. We have my also by page.
I highly recommend this. So if people read your
one book and they like it, they might wanna read
the rest of your books. Then we have have the table of contents.
And then we have this little graphic, which is a map of the road trip that
Marley the main character goes on and then the book itself, and basically you just wanna click
through and make sure that everything looks okay. Then once you do that, I click back to book details
in this upper corner. And then I scroll down and then
we're left with the next step, which is the ISBN. So ISBNs are actually optional for eBooks. So I recommend that you actually don't
get an ISBN for your eBooks because why waste one? But for paperback and hard covers
ISBNs are required and you can either choose to do a free
ISBN that KDP supplies to you. Or you can do a paid ISBN. Because I am established as
an LLC Stone Ridge Books, LLC. Um, I personally use my own ISBs
and when you use your own ISBs, you can fill this little
form out and just put in your publishing house. But because
I'm not putting one in, I'm gonna leave that blank. So then
I'm just gonna hit, save and continue. And we're gonna move on to the final
stage before publishing, which is pricing. So we have first up is KDP select. Um, I'm gonna do a video in the future on
KDP select and why I'm actually moving my book back onto KDP select
cuz I didn't enjoy my wide distribution. So basically when it
comes to your ebook distribution, you need to decide one of two things. Do you want it to be available just on
Kindle and take advantage of the KDP select program? Or do you wanna have
your ebook available everywhere? I personally for myself think that my
books will do better just on Kindle where I can take advantage of KDP select,
but you have to do that, uh, research and kind of
figuring out on your own. But for them I'm gonna enroll because
I like the KDP select program, which is known as Kindle limited to
customers. Then we have territory. Do you want it available
everywhere or just specific places? I do my books everywhere. Uh,
where is your primary marketplace? For me, I'm in the United States. So it's amazon.com and
then we have royalties. So I like to price my
eBooks at 3 99. And when I, and because I price it at
$3.99, I can select 70%. So then you can see here
what the royalty rates are. So if I selected 35%, then
I would only make$1.4. But because I selected
70%, I actually make $2.74. And then we have all the
other Amazon territories and breakdowns of all of
that. Um, which, you know, I just go by the default prices, but I have heard recommendations
that you should go ahead and price each of these individually to make sure
that they fit with other books in their market pricewise. Um,
now the only time you, I would say select 35% is when
you price your book super low, like at 99 cents. Because
if your book is 99 cents, you actually can't select
70% as your royalty rate, which you see right here.
But if we scroll down, there's a quick note that you
should know, um, is book lending. So when you select your
book to be 70% royalties, and we're gonna go back
to the $3.99 price, uh, book lend is required. Like you don't have the
option to click or unclick it. You only have this option if
you have a 35% royalty rate. So that might be your only
deciding factor when it comes to these two royalty rates, I obviously recommend 70% cuz
you make more per book sale. And then that is basically that
you can see this little, um, message here saying that it takes 72
hours for your title to be available on Amazon. I personally find it takes
less than 24 hours. So they tell you, it takes 72 hours to kind
of like cover their butts, but it really takes
way less than that. Uh, I again have this annoying
information saying that my account is incomplete because I do not
wanna publish any books here, but that is it for this video.
I hope you guys enjoyed it. Be sure to subscribe cuz in future
videos I will be reviewing other print on demand companies like Ingramspark
Draft2Digital, Barnes and noble press. And any other ones that you
guys may be curious about, if you want more exclusive content, be sure to join as a YouTube member
where you get access to exclusive emojis, posts and monthly videos where I
do goal setting and income reports, otherwise that is for today. And
I will see you guys all next week.
