How to Self-Publish Your Book on Amazon

1. Introduction: Hey, this is Richard Blazevic, author of Interview Prep Playbook and today I'm going to show you how to self publish a book using Amazon service called Kindle Direct Publishing. Now Kindle Direct Publishing, also known as Katie P, is a really, really easy way to publish a book published four books on it, and everyone has been super simple. Here's an example of one of the books this one's called Interview Prep Playbook, College Student Edition. And as you can see, it's a really nice quality cover. The spine is done really while, and the book is printed just absolutely flawlessly. So I would highly recommend the service. I'll walk you through how to do it. One quick thing before I put the book away is I want to show you a nice feature is in the back of the book. It tells you the date the book was printed. What Amazon does is they actually print on demand. That means when somebody orders your book, they will print it and they will ship it out. If that person's on Amazon prime, they'll receive the book within two days, so it's amazing they can do that so quickly. I would highly recommend KDP. Now let's get started on how to use it 2. Create Your KDP Account: in this video, I'm going to show you how toe publish your book in two formats. One is the Kindle electronic book format, and the 2nd 1 is a paperback format. I'm not going to show you in this video how to publish an audiobook that's not available on Katie P. At least not yet. Amazon does have a separate site where you can publish an audiobook, and that's called a C X. I'll do a separate video showing you how to publish an audiobook. To publish your book, you will need a few things. First of all, you'll need a book I wrote mining in Microsoft Word format, so I'll show you how to upload it. If your books in that format you don't actually need a book cover, I'll show you how to use KDP's automatic book cover generating feature. But if you do have your own book cover, you can upload that as well. And then to create your account, you will need bank account information so they know how to pay you. And you also need to input your tax information because at the end of the year you'll get a 10 99 for all of your earnings. First, you'll need to go to the Kindle Direct Publishing website, where you can sign up for an account to create your account. Just enter in your name, and then you'll also need to enter in your email address and your password. Once you've done that, you can hit create your KDP account that will bring you to the agreement. So go ahead and just read through the agreement and click. Agree, and then you get taken to your bookshelf. This is the main place where you'll be able to publish books. It's also the page where you can see all of the books that you've published since this is a new account. I don't have any books on this. The site is asking me to put in some additional information, So let me click on the update now. And when I do that, it tells me it wants to know what country I live in. And then how I want to get paid. So type in United States go in, enter a little bit more information about myself and then the getting paid. That's where they want to know my bank account information. So my bank is in the United States. I type in the account number, the routing number, and then it can make direct deposits for my royalties into my account. It's also gonna want to know some tax information. That's so that it can send you a 10 99 form at the end of the year. And the I. R s is going know how much income you make from your book royalties. 3. Publish Your eBook: so after I better that I go back to my dashboard and let's start by creating a Kindle e book. This is the basic information about the book. So I type in my book title. My book has a subtitle, Soul type that in this well, and then I don't have a Siri's so I'm not gonna enter in the Siri's. I'm not gonna enter in the addition number, but I will enter in the author That's my name. So type in your name where it says author, And then if you have any people who have helped you with it, if you have a co author, you can enter that in there. I don't. So I'm gonna just move on to the description section. I do have the publishing rights. And then here is where I enter key words. You can enter up to seven key words or key phrases so wouldn't fill that in. Now I'm going to update the categories that I want my book shown in. So choose the categories that are most relevant for your book content. That way, when people are browsing through these categories, they will find your book. Now you can choose to choices. I'm gonna choose careers, job hunting in careers, General, because I want people searching in those categories to find my book. There's also a section for age and grade range. I don't have a specific age range, so I'm gonna leave that blank. You can also set up your book to be pre ordered. If you're not ready to publish it yet, my book is ready to be published, so I'm gonna click on that. And then the next section that it wants you to go to is the actual content for the book. So you entered the details that are going to describe the book? This is where you upload the files. First I'm gonna up upload the actual book. This is the Microsoft Word document that contains the inside content of the book. Once I've done that, I'm going to go ahead and upload a cover. I have two choices. I can use the cover generator feature, which I'll click on now, or I can upload a cover which I'll show you how to do here in just a minute. So when you go into the cover generator program, you have a few options. I'm going to say skip this step and go straight into the covers. Amazon has a pretty good variety of covers, so let's pick one here. This looks like a nice, bright, cheerful color. So we'll do the bright red cover and all select that the title, the subtitle and the author name look good. So make any changes there. You can edit that content if you want. Now I'm gonna back out and go into uploading my own cover. So you just click on that, find the cover that you have, you just need a J peg image. So it doesn't have to be a fancy file. That's a cover that I had somebody on freelancer dot com create for me. So it just uploaded that Now I can preview the Kindle book. So now that the files are uploaded, I'm previewing it. It shows you what it looks like on a device. So there's my cover. There's my copyright page acknowledgements, content introduction. Everything looks good. So if everything looks great that I'm gonna go ahead and publish it if I have any issues, if I see anything I don't like that. I can just go back into the word document, make my changes and then we upload it. Okay, so now I've uploaded the cover. I've uploaded the book, and I have previewed the book, so now I'm going to save it, And the last step is I need to decide what my pricing is going to be. So I go into the pricing section and there's several different options. There's KDP Select. We'll cover that in a separate video. There's royalty and pricing information that one will go ahead and do. Now you've got two choices for royalties. I choose the 70% royalty. There's information in here if you want to know what the difference is in the royalty, but I won't go into that now. I like getting the higher royalty rate, and when you enter in the price that you're offering for your book, it automatically calculates the royalty, so I'll make $2.74. It also shows you how much you make for people buying it in other countries so you can see all of the different denominations there. Amazon does automatically do the conversions in tow other monetary form, so it's pricing your book in a comparable price for each country. There's some more choices here. They have a feature called Matchbook, where people can get the Kindle at a discounted price. If they've also bought the paperback version. And then there's a book lending feature. I recommend you read through those and decide which of those features air right for you. So go ahead and click on all of these useful little links that they have that tell you more details about these features. And now that I've gotten the book pricing done and I'm ready to publish, so I go in and I published. That's the Kindle version. It's that easy to publish. 4. Publish Your Paperback Book: now I'm gonna go into the paperback version and published this book in paperback. All enter in the title. The subtitle, As you'll see it's very similar to publish the paperback book as it was to publish the Kindle version, The fields are almost identical, so you enter in your book title. Then I skipped past the Siris in addition number. But I do put in the author again. That's me. I put in a very brief description. I'll go back and fill in Mawr later. Publishing rights. I own the publishing rights all enter in the keywords and does ask for the categories again . So I'll go ahead and click the same categories, which is career job hunting in general, and then it doesn't have any adult content. So I'll click the No adult content box. And then the second step is to upload the informations. Before I upload the content, I'm going to create an I s bien number. Every paperback book has a unique I ESPN. It's kind of like every product in the store has a unique you PC. So go ahead and create that. Select the date that you're publishing the book now. Here you have some options here. You can choose what type of paper do you want? Cream Color Paper. Do you want white paper, or do you want a printing color? So I like the white paper. To me, it's crisper. It feels more modern, the six by nine inches, the standard size that seems to be a good size on the bleed setting. That's just whether or not you want things to bleed off the edge of the page. I don't so I say no bleed and then choose what type of finish you want on your cover. You can have matte or glossy. I like glossy for my books. They're a little more contemporary looking a little more up to date. If you want something that looks a little more old fashioned, you might want to choose matte finish. The manuscript is next. Now you upload the content that's actually inside the book, so click on the file you want to upload. And now, just like you did with your Kindle book, you can either use one of the standard covers. So let's take a look see if we confined to cover that similar to the Kindle one we picked Let's cool off to the right. See if there any other options. There it is. The Red Book. So if we wanted to go with the standardized cover, we could go here and check the title. The author name the subtitle. Everything looks good. This has back panel Copy on it. So you can type in what you want to appear on the back. A panel of your book. It also has a section for the author information and the author photo. I'm just going to delete that for now, but I'll go ahead and show you how toe insert a picture of the author photo. So is choose a photo of myself and then I do the preview. See what I think of that cover. And there it is. Doesn't look bad for a standard cover. I'm gonna go ahead and cancel out of this one, though, and I'll use a cover that I have already created again. I had a freelancer created cover for me, so I go into uploaded cover. You already have. I picked the cover that someone created for me and that is going toe upload. So now I've got the manuscript updated The cover updated. So I go down to now I seem to be running into an air. It's not letting me Priebe read the book. The reason it's not letting me preview it is I actually skipped the I S P N step. So I'll go back up to the top of the screen and do what I was supposed to do, which was actually created by ESPN number. I skipped that step earlier. So now that I've created it, I can go back down to the pre viewer and it lets me preview. So here is the preview of my book. You can see the cover there and then you go inside and you can see everything That was in the word document that I created. And it looks good. The table contents looks good. The introduction go into the chapters, I would recommend clicking through the entire book, making sure your formatting looks good and everything looks like it is working. So now that I've previewed the book, it is time for me to go in, set my pricing. So I saved all the content. Now I go in and I look at the pricing. It tells me that the minimum price for my book of the length of my book is is $5.62. If I enter that price, I will make $0 in royalty. That means Amazon will use up all of the cost for they're printing and shipping. Let's try $50 if I under $50 great and make $26 in royalties, but nobody will buy the book since it's so expensive. What I'll do now is just go in and set a reasonable price. So if I set 9 88 you can see what my royalties will be. Click over here and you can see what my royalties are in each country when people buy the books in other monetary units. So that's it Now. I published my paperback book. After You Wait a couple of days, you can go into Amazon and search for your name and book, and it will pull up the book that you published. So you just click on the book and this is what it looks like. You go in there and there's the title. There's my author name. This book's been up for a little while, so it has some reviews, and it has a Kindle version, a paperback version. There's actually an audio version of this. I did go into a C X, and I uploaded the audio file, so this particular book has all three versions. If you scroll down a little bit, you can see the description on the book, and it's always fun to go in and check on your reviews. This one is doing pretty well. I've got five reviews, so I like reading through what people have said about the book. 5. Conclusion: Amazon also lets you create an author page once you've published a book, so you can go into Author Central. You can put links into all your books. You can put in videos, photos, and it shows all the books that you have published. So there you can see the list of books that I've got. It's always fun just to keep track of what content you're putting out there for the world to see. Now that we've got the author Central, let's go back to Katie P and go into the bookshelf and look at all these features. Amazon lets you go back in and edit any of the content that you've put up. It also lets you do special promotions. So KDP Select is a promotion that you can do to offer your book at discounted prices. Another feature is you can go into reports and report shows you how many copies of your books you've been selling. So let's set this for the last 90 days. This is how many books have sold, and you can see that big spike there. When I sold a bunch of books was when I was doing a presentation and the people after the presentation bought copies the books you can then scroll down and see the royalties. There's the royalties I've made and you will get addicted. Once you have books up on Amazon, you'll be checking this reports. I check it every day just to see if anybody's bought a copy. So it is extremely fun publishing books and extremely fun seeing if anyone is purchasing your books. So that's all it takes to become a self published author using Amazon's KDP platform. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you know somebody who wants to be a self published author, please share this video with them. Thanks, and I'll see you in my next video.