Create and Publish Your First eBook With Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)! | Teagan Johnson | Skillshare
Search

Playback Speed


  • 0.5x
  • 1x (Normal)
  • 1.25x
  • 1.5x
  • 2x

Create and Publish Your First eBook With Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)!

teacher avatar Teagan Johnson, Young Entrepreneur & Productivity Guru

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction!

      1:15

    • 2.

      Brainstorming Ideas for an eBook!

      1:20

    • 3.

      Writing & Formatting the Interior of the eBook!

      8:17

    • 4.

      Making a Professional Cover!

      3:48

    • 5.

      Uploading the eBook onto Amazon!

      5:54

    • 6.

      Final Thoughts and Project!

      1:00

  • --
  • Beginner level
  • Intermediate level
  • Advanced level
  • All levels

Community Generated

The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.

324

Students

4

Projects

About This Class

Creating and Publishing eBooks is a great way to teach people stuff that you have knowledge in! There are so many benefits of creating eBooks rather than actual books, such as not having to worry about writing as much, and not worrying about a lot more pesky formatting that comes along with book publishing.

With Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, (KDP), self publishing has never been so easy! I use KDP for this because it is the best way to connect your next student to you!

With all of my experience, I am going to teach all the tips and tricks you need to know, and life hacks to making publishing on this platform as smooth as possible.

In this video, I am going to teach you:

  • Finding ideas for eBooks
  • Writing the inside of the eBook
  • Formatting the eBook using Kindle Create
  • Creating a Professional Cover using Canva
  • Creating your account on KDP
  • Uploading, and, finally publishing your book onto Amazon!

I look forward to seeing you inside!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Teagan Johnson

Young Entrepreneur & Productivity Guru

Teacher

I have always had an obsession with becoming the best possible version of myself in every aspect: from my schooling, to my family, and social life. My goal with the videos I upload onto here are simple. Teach you guys something new in a short time frame, and help you guys improve in some way. I hope to fulfill this with you! 

See full profile

Level: All Levels

Class Ratings

Expectations Met?
    Exceeded!
  • 0%
  • Yes
  • 0%
  • Somewhat
  • 0%
  • Not really
  • 0%

Why Join Skillshare?

Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes

Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects

Your membership supports Skillshare teachers

Learn From Anywhere

Take classes on the go with the Skillshare app. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best.

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.