Transcripts
1. Introduction!: Hello everyone. My name is Megan. Do you have a skill that you
would like to teach others? Well, today, I'm gonna
show you how to make that possible by creating your
first e-book for Amazon. Making eBooks is a great way
of applying your creativity all into a book that is
accessible from tons of devices. The great thing is
that they can be about anything from cars, planes, to even hiking. The even better thing is that eBooks can be as long
as you want them to be, which means you don't have
to spend as much time as a conventional author
creating your first e-book. If you don't want to. E-books
don't only include words, but also informational pages
with graphics and visuals. Another great thing about
creating e-books is that you do not need to be
extremely design savvy, which makes this very accessible for many different
kinds of people that I want to share
their passion with the world through
a creative outlet. I have gathered my
years of experience to make an actionable course on creativity aspect of making and formatting a book to
make it professional. Then we will make a very nice
Ebook Cover and finally, upload the full eBook on the Amazon's Kindle Direct
Publishing website. I hope you are ready. Let's get started.
2. Brainstorming Ideas for an eBook!: If you have some ideas
for an e-book that you are ready to start
pursuing, that is great. But just in case you
don't or you run out of ideas than this section of the course will
come in handy for you. The first way I like
searching for ideas to make e-books about is simply
by thinking of yourself. What kind of hobbies
do you have? For example, if you love cars, what can you tell or
teach people a bulk cars? You can get really
deep into it as well, such as narrowing it down to a certain type of car you
want to teach or talk about. An example could be
teaching people how to repair a certain car
from a certain year. Another thing that could spark ideas is what you
do for a living. If you are a nurse, you could teach
people stuff about the career or simply talk
about it in some way. This could be like how to
be a more productive nurse. Another way is thinking
about where you are from. If you're from
Italy, for example, you could teach people
about their cultures, food, or even make a travel
guide for that country. The next way you could
think of ideas is by going on to Amazon's
website and looking through their
selection of e-books and different topics to try and brainstorm some ideas
off of these that you see without directly
copying them. Once you get a couple
of ideas written down, it is now time to start
creating the book.
3. Writing & Formatting the Interior of the eBook!: For this part, we will
be using Google Docs, which will be accessible
for everyone. And we will focus on several
big goals for the e-book, which include creating
an interior cover, creating a hyperlinked
table of contents, creating About the Author
page on introduction, the information itself. And finally the
conclusion of the e-book. Let's head to Google
Docs and make a new doc. I would recommend finding a better font that is not stuck, such as this one called Georgia. You can find it in the font
section of the Google Docs, and it is a very popular
11 creating e-books. You could also go into the more fonts section and find one that you
enjoy right here. Now that we have
all the essentials, it is time to start writing. The first page will
be your cover page. You should make the title
really large like this. I used a 70 font and bolded it and made
it center aligned. Then I press two spaces down and gave you a recap of
what the book is about. Then I put one space
and put my name. After that, go to Insert and
break and press Page Break. This will throw a new
page up onto the book. Next, you can start the
table of contents page, which we will finish later. You have to have the bodies of the texts completed
and the headings made for the table of contents to refresh automatically
with the links. I would still advise you to make your own personal table of contents to follow before
you create the book. Just to give yourself an outline on what you will
talk about next. Make another page
break and that will make an About the Author page. This you can talk
about yourself and your experience with
whatever you're teaching, such as how long you've done it, notable things you've
achieved, etc. Just make sure to put
the title is a header so it gets caught by
the table of contents. This is done by underlining
the title of this page. Pressing format, then paragraph
styles, then heading one. You can also insert a photo
of yourself if you'd like. Press under the header and
press insert at the top, press image and find
an image of yourself. This may take a bit of
play and adjusting, but you can eventually
get it in a good spot. Then press on the
bottom of the page, put another page break, and it is time to make
the introduction. For the introduction,
you will talk about the ins and
outs of the eBook, including what you
will be teaching and the outcome that
the e-books should have on the reader
by the end of it. You should also mention
why you wrote this ebook, which will make your passion
for the subject shine. Here's another friendly reminder to make the title a Header. After this, we can get to
the informational chapters. This is where your bread and
butter of the e-book will be and you can make it as long
or as short as you'd like. Don't forget to
separate them into chapters with a proper heading. Some common rules of thumb
while making these is to make sure to keep the information
simple to the point. With smaller paragraphs to
keep the readers engaged. Some other things
you can do to keep the readers engaged is to put some graphics into the e-book to further show what
you are explaining. You should also
bold major points of each chapter and make subtitles which
include questions to further engage the readers. After each chapter is complete, make sure to insert
a page break and start a new one
after the next page. After you have all of
your information covered, it is time for the
conclusion of the e-book. This you will talk about
everything taught and perhaps put a call to
action on what to do next. For my create an eBook example, I might suggest to the reader to go and start through
e-book creation today. Once again, don't forget to
make the title a header. Now that we have all the
information finished, we can finish up that
table of contents. So scroll back up, press under the table of
contents text and go to Insert Table of Contents
and press this blue one. And they will all
automatically fill in with those headers that
we made for each chapter. As you can tell, if
you press on each one, it brings you automatically
to that chapter. Before we go and
download the eBook, it is always important to
grammar check your material. I use a free website
called Grammarly farthest. You can simply copy and paste all of your
text into there. And they'll give you
a grammar, spelling, and sentence grade
information to correct. Before we forget, let's add indentations to the paragraphs. So go to our main paragraphs, then press Tab on each of them. Personally, I think this
is too much indentation, so I will adjust it to
0.25 instead of 0.5. This flat horizontal knob
at the top or the ruler is. Once you have that finished, you can go to the top
where it says file, press Download, and download
it as a Doc X file. Now, we can do some
finishing touches on the formatting of the e-book in an app called Kindle create. You can Google Kindle create, press on the first result, and press Download for PC. Once it's downloaded,
you can open it and press Create New. Then press three, flowable, which can move your text around and a better
optimized away, which is what we want. Press Choose file, locate
yours, and open it. You are first created with
suggested chapter titles, which sometimes makes errors
on your ebook on accident. Manually look through those and uncheck the ones you
do not want done. Then press accept, selected or rejected null if
there are mistakes. Next, head over to the themes
over here and select one. For this one, I'm going to
click on the modern one. As you can see, there are several things you can do
with themes over here, including changing the color
of the subtitles and making the first paragraph
letter bigger things that physical books have. You can also add separators, quotes, poems, and much more. If you find a nice place
to put any of these, feel free to do so. But the two biggest things
I am going to personally do here is make sure that the
subtitles have this blue text. That the first paragraph
letter is enlarged to make it seem like a more familiar format to the readers of the e-book? This can be done by underlining which part you want changes to. Pressing the option
on the sidebar. When you are done, look through your Holy Book One more time to make sure that
your formatting looks good and press Generate at the top-right and download it. Now that we have our
interior over ebook done, it is time to make
a fantastic cover that looks great
with the e-book.
4. Making a Professional Cover!: This part is also very important as this is what
is representing the book. We will use a website
to create the book, and it's called Canva. So let's head there now. After you sign up
towards the right, there is a Create Design tab. Press on that, and
the dimensions for this image will be 1600 by 2560. These are the
recommended dimensions from Amazon's own website. After you click on that, you're introduced
to the workplace that we will be working with. On the left, you can see templates which you have the
option to use for your book. Elements, which are small images that you can use on the cover. Uploads, where you can
upload your own images, text where you can find a ton of royalty free fonts to use. And do you also have
backgrounds right here? To start, let's take
a look at some of these templates by
searching book covers. Depending on what
genre of ebook humid, you can probably
find one that would match what you're
talking about a nicely. So I'm gonna find one that suits my genre nicely and press on it. It transferred
over to the right, and now I'm ready to
customize it how I want. As you can see right now, it has a loved novel on it, but we can easily change this
text by double-clicking on it and typing what we want. By the way, when you're
modifying the text, you could also change the font, size, color, make it bold, italicized, and
underlined all up here. Or you could go to
the text section to the left and change
that part completely. Just make sure it looks
good to be on a book cover. After you change
all of the texts to better suit your e-book, it is now time to change any images or
potentially backgrounds. So I will remove this image. Find one in the
elements tab to use. Search for an e-book. And this one looks
like it can be used. So I will move this one onto
the workplace, adjust it. And this is looking great. I personally think that the green color looks
great on this cover. But if you wanted to change
your background color, you would press on it and press on this color box on the top and change it
to one of these colors. Or you could go to the
Background button on the left bar and find one of these images to use for cover. If you cannot find a
template to suit you, then he could use all of
these features that Canvas provides to make a nice-looking
book cover yourself. It is just as easy as finding a pre-made template
and modifying it. When you think you are done
and you look around Canada one more time for
any more features may be able to use
in your cover. You can download it
at the top right. The file type makes sure
to set it as a JPEG. Since that is the cover image
type that Amazon supports. Then press Download. Now that we have this finished, it is time to finally published
the e-book onto Amazon.
5. Uploading the eBook onto Amazon!: The first thing we need to do
before actually getting to uploading eBooks is
making our kVp account. So firstly, let's head to the KDE website, which
is ADP.amazon.com. If you want to use an existing
Amazon account you have, you can press sign
in or you can make a new Amazon account
with the sign-up button. If you choose to sign up, you will have to verify
your account with both an e-mail address
and a phone number. After you sign up or sign in, you'll be brought to a page like this where it will ask
for some information, such as your address and
some other personal items. This information is crucial
in order to publish with kVp. Once you have all this
information filled out, you're ready to finally
publish your first e-book. Now, go back to
the kVp main menu. Sign in with your
information one more time. After that, you will
see this section called create a new title and
press e-book from it. Now, this is the screen where we will be
uploading the e-book. For the title, this should be exactly the same title
that is on your cover. If not, then Amazon will reject this publication until you
change it to the exact title. For the subtitle, this
should briefly describe what the e-book will
be explaining and perhaps things you
will get out of it. You could always look at
other ebooks on Amazon for inspiration on
how to lay yours out. This is what I came up with. You don't need anything
for the series or addition number unless this is a continuation of another
book for the author. Put whatever name or
pen name you used for your About the Author
page in your e-book. If you have contributors that helped you
work on your book, you can put that here. Now we are at the description. This is where we can explain more details about the e-book, like how many pages, what it explains, what the reader will learn
by the end of it. This give me very similar to the introduction page
that you created. But just so you know, most descriptions have bullet
points and bolded text. This is what I came up with. In order to maximize
professionalism. You should also run this
through the grammar and spelling checker
website grammarly. For publishing rights,
press U on the copyrights. For these keywords here,
these are optional, but I always recommend
putting some n. So you can fill in these keywords
to the best of your abilities with words
that relate to your e-book. And you can put multiple
words in each box like this. You should fill in
as many boxes as possible if you
choose to do this. For the categories, try
and find to the best, relate to your e-book. If you are like me and I'm making about teaching
someone how to publish, I'm gonna do
nonfiction computers, desktop applications,
and desktop publishing. For my other one, I'm gonna do nonfiction computers,
electronic publishing. You might have to do some
searching around to find the best ones that are
relatable to your e-book. If you want to set an
age range on your book, if your book is for a
more mature audience, for example, you
could do that here, but I'm not going to set one. For this preorder section. You can select that you are
ready to release the book. Now. The next page with this
digital rights management, I will select null
as I will allow readers to share my
work with others. Drm is intended to inhibit unauthorized distribution of the Kindle file of your book. You can read more
about that right here. If you wish to select. Yes, you are free to do so. Now we can upload
the book interior, so locate your file
and upload that. After that loads go down to the Kindle e-book cover and press upload a cover
you already have, and then locate the
file and upload. After those are both loaded, you can scroll down and
press launch a viewer. This part may take awhile so you can take a quick
break if needed. Once it's loaded, you can take a look on how it
appears on a device. And while it doesn't
this look nice, everything shows up
perfectly on the screen of both the Kindle and on the phone in portrait
and landscape. Nice work. Now that this looks good, we can go back by pressing
book details at the top left and head to the next page. Scroll down and press publish your Kindle e-book. Congrats. You did it, you uploaded
your first e-book. Now it's time to
celebrate by making a project and receive some
final thoughts from me.
6. Final Thoughts and Project!: Creating and uploading eBooks can be a very big challenge. There are many small factors
that come along with making a good e-book from using the right wording
in your interior, using relevant graphics,
making a good title to even making sure
the formatting is just right and Kindle create. All of this can be
very exhausting. If you think you had
a rocky beginning making your first one, do not let that discourage you. The more you write and publish, the more you'll get
the hang of it. For this course, my goal
was to make it actionable. So you were able to make an
e-book from start to finish as we progressed
for the project, I want to see what
you guys came up with for the outside of
your ebook cover. Or if you want, you could give an excerpt
from your e-book itself. I'm super excited to see
what you all came up with. Thanks so much for watching. I hope this lead you in the
right direction for being an e-book publisher on Amazon's
Kindle Direct Publishing. I hope you have a great day.