Self-Publishing Your Paperback with Amazon KDP

1. Self-Publishing on KDP: Introduction: Hi. I'm Malory Swinski. I'm a published author. I'm an owner of an independent publishing company, a graphic designer, and mom. It's my mission to help independent authors learn the skills they need to self publish their own stories. At the end of this course, you will know how to publish a paperback listing through Amazon KDP. Together, we're going to cover your various options for self publishing platforms and why KDP might be the right choice for you. We're also going to cover a crucial information like ISBNs copyright information, and how do positively affect SEO through categories, your book definition, and keywords. We're going to go step by step through the KDP listing process, and at the end of this class, you will be a published author of your very own paperback. Okay. I design this course for independent writers who are ready to publish, who are sick of waiting on literary agents or big traditional publishing houses to tell them that they're enough. You are. Upon the conclusion of this course, your class project will consist of a few screenshots showing your listing in its various stages or a link to your finished published listing. Let's learn some new skills and get your book published. Let's dive in. 2. Before you Publish: Okay. Let's talk about what you need before you consider your publishing on Amazon KTPpRely any platform. Apart from a book, You need something intangible. You need support. It's best if you can find your cheer squad before you even considered writing a book. But if this is where you're starting off, you're jumping off point, that's totally fine. There's a huge community on line for India authors and publishers across social media, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, read it. We're all over the place, ideally, we're all supporting each other all over the place. You need to find your people. You need to find those people, whether or not they're writers who will shout about your work as loudly as you will, maybe even louder. Who will, you know, post about it, talk about it, recommend it to friends and family, leave reviews for you. So you need to find those people because that is your crew, and you also need to reciprocate. That's super important. So find your crew. If you don't have social media, I'm sorry. You're going to need one as an independently published author. It'll come in handy. I promise some point, you have to sit back and say, Okay, my book is finished, I'm ready to go to print. That being said, in this tutorial, I'm not going to be discussing editing of any kind, I'm not going to be discussing formatting that should have been taken care of. If you still need help with formatting, I've got a great tutorial that leads right into this one. Definitely recommend checking that out. If you have self formatted already, I would still recommend that you visit the tutorial for formatting your book for Amazon KDP because it's just going to cover things you might have missed. What I will be talking about in this tutorial is how to publish your existing formatted PDF of your manuscript into a paperback through Amazon KDP. All the lessons that I'm going to give about launching an Amazon listing through KDP do apply to non fiction, but if you hear me talk about fiction based things when we get to categories and keywords and that stuff. Just stick with me and help you out. You must be at least 18 years old to launch an Amazon KDP book listing, but you can have parent or legal guardian sign for you. That's totally fine. The next thing you need is a book cover. Now, there's a little bit of wiggle room that we can play with here. You don't have to have your book cover finished when you start your listing, but you should have an idea and generally, some kind of PDF to upload as a placeholder if your cover isn't ready. Chances are it's not because you might not even know the page count until you create the listing. We'll talk about that in detail. Don't sweat that, but something to think about. Now, something else that you need. But again, you can revisit, but it's better if we can just have all of our ingredients and bring them together. You need your book blurb and your elevator pitch. Okay. The book blurb that you put in your listing can be identical to what you're going to put on the back of your book. The blurb should give a hint of what happens in your book, but not give anything away. You're not writing to a literary agent who wants to know what happens in your book. They're not like, Oh, I'm interested and they want to know exactly what happens. You blurb on the back of your book should be like an amuse bouche to draw everyone in. Blurs are tricky because they seem simple to write. You just wrote a whole book, Wiser so scary. There are actual jobs for book blurb writers. They're on upwork and fiber. You could go that direction if you want, but I really feel like this is somewhere that you can save money in the self publishing process. But think about your book blurb before we move forward because you're going to you're going to need it shortly anyway. Take some time and consider what you're going to say to entice your readers. We're going to talk more about that, y. Okay. Your elevator pitch. If you haven't heard the term before, I do have a video in my free video library about constructing your elevator pitch has a little formula in there. If you want to follow that. But essentially, your elevator pitch is what you would say in one or two sentences to convince an agent to pick up your book or a reader to read your book if you only had span of time that took to write an elevator with them. Okay. Definitely watch the video. If you're following along with the PDF with me, there's a link right to the elevator pitch video that I made. Easy piece you can pause me here. Go watch that and come back. To recap to move forward with this tutorial. Here's what you need. I'll put a list on the screen for you. You need an edited formatted manuscript PDF in the proper size. You need full wrap cover image PDF in the proper size. Knowing that we can play with this a little bit, especially after we have your real page count. You need a blurb and an idea of genre and your comparative titles. We'll talk about that a little bit more. And you must be over the age of 18 or have a legal guardian and who's cool with you, setting up a book list. 3. Know Your Self-publishing Options: Okay. Let's talk about KDP versus ngram Spark. There are options when it comes to self publishing and you should consider them before you commit, right? Do your due diligence and the two major options are Amazon KDP and ngram Spark. Okay. Also, for erotica authors, just as an aside, you may want to consider something called smashwords if you haven't heard of that yet. It has a wider net of what they'll consider acceptable topics. We can talk in depth about Amazon thoughts on Erotica. I will be talking about the leader. If you don't rent Erotica, you can skip that one, you should read it anyway, just to increase your knowledge base. There are a lot of reasons that authors, publishers and bookstores don't care for books that are published through Amazon. I get it. I still published through Amazon, but I've done my research. I'm going to share that with you here, my thing. It begins with their reputation. Big Bad, Amazon. Some people just have beef with it in general, based on principles. I totally get it. Jaffe Bezos has a lot of money. He has a lot of my money. I'm not going to argue that using Amazon perpetuates the cycle. You need to decide if that's something you're okay with. Another reason is store inventory accessibility. Most brick and mortar stores like your local independent bookstores, so on and so forth, they order through a company, most likely they do a company through Ingram. There's another one called Baker and Taylor, but most bookstores order through Ang. Ngram is overwhelmingly the major warehouse for suppliers for bookstores. The back cover of your book once you publish through Amazon, even apart from the Amazon given ISBN and we're going to talk about that in detail. The back of your book will show sellers that your book was printed on Amazon. That might be enough for bookstores to turn up their noses at you. Even if you choose the option at the end of this process where you want to be included in expanded distribution, which means your book will be available to order by Brick and Mater Bookstores or like Barnes Noble, Walmart, stuff like that. It sounds great. However, they don't Amazon doesn't place you with Ingram. They place you with something called Lightning source. Um, this is a part of Ingram, but there's a lot of differences and it makes Amazon your middleman. Furthermore, placing your book in expanded distribution, so it is available to other stores beyond an Amazon listing. It doesn't offer the bookseller bookstore as much of a discount as publishing on Ingram. Okay. So they won't get as much off to resell for more profit. They also won't be able to return unsold stock, which is a pretty industry standard inclusion in most contracts. So that's just something to think about. And if you publish on Ingham Spark, your book also gets listed on Amazon. It's not like it's never on there, but there's a lot of behind the scenes, things to think about. Okay. All right. So what he choose Amazon KDP then? All right. I did. Why? Okay. Okay. Even knowing all of that, KDP has suited me. I'm making this tutorial because it will probably suit you too. Using KDP is free. It has a well developed user friendly dashboard to track your sales and metrics after publishing. Not to mention this tutorial, we're going to go through. Once you get the hang of it. It's easy to manipulate, go into your listing, and fix things. You give Amazon a good share of your royalties, but they cover all the upfront costs, and that is desirable to me. In all pragmatic likelihood, you're not going to make thousands and thousands of dollars on your first book. I am a helper. I am a real person in the real world, and there are so many Internet gurus and life coaches and all of these people who will get you all worked up. I want you to get worked up and I'm going to be your biggest cheerleader, but I'm also going to have a level head about it and I want to tell you don't quit your day job on your first book. Yes. Some people write a book during Nano Rimo and it becomes a national best seller and that's freaking awesome. Maybe it'll happen to you. But let's move forward like you're going to be part of the majority who sells books and they're reviewed well and you make money, but it's not enough to quit your day job. I want to be real about this and keep you level headed. Because when you're level headed, you're going to make better choices for you and your family, for your budget, and you're also not going to quit because you're going to go in with good expectations, ones that match that you will probably exceed. Be excited to publish. Just know that Amazon KDP is free. They are just taking a share of some of your royalties, but you don't have to pay anything. A quick note about vanity presses, and I didn't touch on this in the PDF, but if you ever come across an ID publisher who wants you to pay Okay. Anything before you see a cent of royalties, you're dealing with what's called a vanity publisher? Okay. Okay. In my publishing company, the authors that'll be included in our anthologies never pay for anything. Sometimes the call is paid. They get paid for their story. Sometimes it's not, but they never pay anything. So something to watch out for if someone wants to charge you for publishing services. You may want to do a Google search on them, see what other people are saying about them. Saying all of this, I know that Ingram Spark sounds like a good idea. And it is, for some people, everyone's different. There's so many different kinds of independent authors in the world, but I would just say this it costs $50 to publish on Ingram Spark. Okay. Plus 125 for ISBN purchased through back publishing services. And you need a different ISBN for your paperback, your book, and your hardcover, if you want to do all of those. Plus, it costs about $60 to register your copy right for your book, if that's something you want to do, we're going to talk about what that entails, what you get with that. So in the g. If you publish with Ingram Spark, you could be spending Okay. Anywhere from at least 200 to $250. Okay. These numbers might change over the years they add deals and whatever maybe this information gets outdated, I'll need to update it but for right now. Okay. Amazon KDP is looking pretty good to me. Another reason that I like Amazon KDP is it makes it super easy to publish your title in various formats, paperback hardcover, and book. Most readers who read books read on Amazon Kindle. Like I said, once you get the hang in and you have someone who knows what they're talking about. Walking through this tutorial, to give you a guide for best practices and really detailed advice and specific experiences that I've had doing it so many times. It's it's fairly simple to use pretty much. You can always refer back to these tutorials or message me. Another reason is if you publish with Amazon, you can still go in to local bookstores and offer them direct distribution. There's a few ways you can do it. You can offer them stock of your book directly through you. I always have every authors a few copies of my own books. If I want to log them around, sign them and I can do that. Another option. If you publish your books on Amazon KDP, you can sell your books on consignment, which is an agreement that you bring copies of your book for them to sell. If they sell, you get a percentage of that sale and if they don't sell, you buy them back. Um, so it's kind of like they're on loan, and it's a lot of work, but that's the way to have your Amazon printed books on a physical bookshelf. Another reason is books from Amazon are well crafted. They're beautiful. You know, they might not be these big hard covered dust jacketed raised guilt edges hard covers. But we're indi publisher, I would hope that you would be grateful for, you know, get a beautiful book cover artist, to, you know, get your a book cover beautiful and Amazon does the Amazon machines do a good job putting together a beautiful book. It's good paper quality, in quality. You know, I've never had any complaints on that frame. You know, I've been okay directing most of my readers to Amazon listings. Um, I will probably branch out to Ingram Spark in the near future, but Amazon has been good to me, and it's been really good learning grounds, and I think it will be for you to, hence this tutorial. I think it's a great place to start. But in the end, it is your book, it is your choice. You make the decision that's best for you based on what you just learned about your options. So we're going to move forward as if you are confident choosing Amazon KDP, and we're going to go through that and by the end of this tutorial, you will have published a paperback book. So very exciting. Okay. 4. Paperback Details Part 1: Paperback details part one. This tutorial is following the Companion PDF that I mentioned before. It was available under lesson two in the description area. If you want to follow that along with me, you can, or if you want to go to your Amazon KDP dashboard and literally follow the guidelines there, I will be showing screenshots, as I mentioned specific pages on KDP. You can follow either that you want, but I'd recommend you get the PDF to refer back to later. But you can do whichever you want. Whichever is going to help you better. Okay. So a helpful note before we begin, and I mentioned this earlier, There are certain components of your listing that you can change even after your book listing is posted, and some you cannot change that are set in stone as soon as you hit publish. What would be smart is to look at what you cannot change. But we will tackle each of these as we hit them. We're going to go in chronological order of the listing. Once you hit publish, you cannot change the language, the book title, the subtitle, the addition number, the primary author, low content categorization. The mean journals and stuff like that. Publication and release dates, ink and paper type and size of book. Just make sure that you are set on all of the details in these sections before you hit publish and you should be just fine. Everything else, including the manuscript itself can be modified even after your book is live. Okay. So if you followed my formatting tutorial, which I hope that you did, because then we'll be exactly on the same page. You should have an account set up with Amazon KDP. If you're coming into this tutorial having done your own formatting, again, please check out my formatting tutorial. It's super detailed and should be helpful for you. But you need an Amazon KDP account. It's pretty straightforward. So just log into Amazon, find the KDP and you're going to just sign up through your regular Amazon account. Okay. Okay. So you're going to navigate to your KDP dashboard and then to your bookshelf, which is one of my favorite pages, and this is where all of your published works will be listed, whether they're in draft stage or if they're alive and you're already selling them. So here's the big moment. You're ready? You're going to click the big beautiful yellow create plus button. We're going to get started. Okay. At this point, you will see all your book options. Book, card cover, et cetera. This tutorial, we're doing paperback. Click that. Get your first glimpse behind the listing curtain, so to speak. There are three tabs at the top of a listing screen. Each is important, but they're different from one another. You there's different information that finds a home in each of these tabs. They're a little daunting, but we're going to tackle literally every last piece, by the end of this tutorial, you'll be a pro, you'll know everything. You're smart. You can handle this. You have to work in order, which works for me anyway, so we're going to start with the first paperback details. Okay. Then it's just a matter of understanding each section and what they want, what they mean and inputting your details there. Let's start with book title. If you don't have one yet, that's fine. Just put anything in. Just make sure you go back and change it before you publish. Because like I said, this is one of those sections that you cannot change once it's live. It's self explanatory. This is the title of your book. But just make sure you spell everything correctly. There's a few recommended rules of thumb. Non fiction titles are typically five words or less. Okay. For books in a series, you can add the series title in parentheses here after the title of your book. Just remember you can't change the title, so be solid that you're actually going to write a series before you put that in your book title? There's a section four series later, but I have found and even when I'm searching if there's a seven book series that I want. I don't know the exact name, but I want book two in whatever series. It's very helpful if it's in that first listing lines. So Okay. Something I just want to mention so I can't help myself. This is a total personal opinion that no one asked for. If you are writing fantasy book, may I just say that titles with words, leg, art, blood, wings, Ember, ashes, blade, Shadow. I just getting to be a bit too much. Just you know, put a lot of thought into your title. You want you want to make sure if it's abbreviated that it doesn't spell anything, you know, too bad. You know, Anna's shadow serpent. That might not work out if that's what you're looking for. So my personal opinion on your book title. Okay. Moving on, subtitle, you don't need a subtitle. Don't feel like you need to add one just because it's there. I definitely felt like that on my first book, and then the book sold better once my subtitle got removed. A little fun fact for you there. If you do put in a subtitle, it should be three to seven words, nothing more. But the Google search engine, the most important search on the planet will only show 50 characters in results. A good role ofthumbs you want to avoid the d the ellipsis after about 7:13 words. That's including spaces. Just think about that. Shorten your title doesn't need to say the entire book. You can give a. Okay. Series. We talked about that before. If your book is going to be part of a series, you can could denote that here. Putting that here. We'll create a totally separate page that we gather all the books in the series on all the book listings for a particular series will show up on one page. Addition number, you can probably just ignore this section. If this is the first time you're publishing your book, if this is a re release and you've made significant changes, you can add that here. Author, it's you. The author. Very cool. You can also put a pen name. So my only advice is if you have already published something or been included in an anthology, and you want it to sync up, match the name, make sure your names if you always put your middle initial, put your middle initial. Um, if I ever shortened, I won't, but if I shorten Mallory to ML, you want to be consistent contributors. Here is where you can list up to ten contributors to your listing. They can be editors, other authors, translators, illustrators. If you are publishing a collection of stories, an anthology and not all the stories are your own, you'll only be able to enter ten names on this page. Then any authors who are left out will feel left out. They can manually add themselves after the listing goes live. A word of caution. Again, this is a personal opinion. You don't have to, but to avoid hurt feelings unless you can get all of your contributors listed, don't list them. They will add themselves if they want to, they could figure that out or you could help them figure that part out. Okay. But that is the best course for a good Juju. It's trust. Okay. 5. Paperback Details Part 2: Paperback details part two. So we have arrived at the description section. Super Duper important, pay attention. This section is where you are actively convincing the SEO bots to index your listing and show it to people. Okay. What this SEO mean? SEE. SEO means search engine optimization. It's not even necessarily just on Amazon searches. If you're listing your book on Amazon, which you are through KDP, but Amazon listings show up on Google. Google is the most powerful search engine in the world. It's like 99% of people use Google. It's desirable for your book to show up when people search keywords in your genre. You want to be in people's spaces. No one's going to just randomly know that your book is out, it has to show up in searches and people are looking for books like yours. This is not to say. Here is what SEO is not. It is not writing the same keywords over and over and over and over. For example, if you're a horror author, You should absolutely say the word horror once or twice in your in your description, right? But adding 16 times at the bottom of your blur that's not going to get to the results that you want. In the meantime, you're going to confuse and probably annoy potential readers who are trying to read your blurb and the Luis. Something to remember too, because even if you are trained in SEO and you have pristine content writing skills and you have reels on Instagram that instantly hit thousands. Amazon isn't really going to feature your book until you have at least 50 reviews on it. Cover a brief overview of book promotions at the end of the course. But for now, it's important for you to focus on a strong blurb with a hook that naturally uses the vernacular of your genre. But you want it all peppered in in a genuine way. If you write horror, some vernacular, you want maybe write fear or scared or dark. You just some general words. You want to make sure that they work in a natural flow and you're not trying to squeeze too many in just for the sake of SEO. We're all getting SEO wise, so are the bots. Be smart about it. Okay. Something you cannot do. Don't do this paying attention. Do not put language best selling best selling. Number one, new, whatever. It's not yet, you're just making the listing. And you cannot in the same vein, you cannot offer any kind of promotion in your description. You cannot say free book with purchase of paperback from this listing, stuff like that. Okay. It can get you banned from selling on Amazon. You do not want that. Okay. If you need to, if you want to go and order with me through this tutorial, feel free to pause. I'm not going anywhere. Pause be thoughtful, brainstorm about what you want in your blur. Plus here and write it and you can always go back and change it even after your book is live. Don't rush this part just to get through this tutorial, pause whenever you need, revisit. I'll give you a nice pause phase. Okay. That probably wasn't very nice at all. Okay. Moving on, we are hitting the publishing section. I certainly hope that you're selecting on the copyright for this section. This tutorial is about publishing your own work. I think with copyright. A little gray area. So you automatically have implied copyright as soon as you write something. However, as a writer and author who's trying to sell their work, it's in your best interest to officially register your manuscript for a copyright. Okay. I'm including the link in the PDF here. Having an official copyright registration allows you legal rights to file an infringement suit if you ever need it. Um, And just a quick note on publishing and copyright and other people's works. Like if you are doing an anthology, I do it, it's a great way to build community and offer space to new writers. If you plan on registering for copyright for their story, and you're publishing other people's work, you have to register the copyright in their name, not yours. Okay? Like even if you are the one going to fill out the copyright information, you are getting a copyright for their work. Primary audience. Let's talk about this, okay? This section is of particular concern to romance and Erotica authors. Sometimes horror authors too. But the gray area here is mostly involving spicy books, books that have explicit sexual content. So read the yes or no prompt carefully. Only click Yes, if there are graphic photos of nudity, anywhere in your book, including the title, but inside two photos. Or if the title, not the book interior itself has explicit language. If genitals are mentioned, come sex ******* we're talking like explicit graphic language. If that is in your title, you have to click, yes, but if it's not your title, even if it's inside in the interior part of your story. Click no. Without following this advice, paired with the advice I'm going to give you regarding keywords and category selection in an upcoming lesson. A few minutes from now. You may land in the horribly unfortunate spot of being trapped in the Amazon adult dungeon. Okay? It's not nearly as fun as it sounds. To have an entire tutorial or course about the Amazon adult dungeon and publishing spicy work, if you were publishing something spicy with this tutorial, I would highly suggest that you watch my course on publishing Erotica and the tricky territory that comes along with that because there are so many details. I make it a little bit more complicated and appropriate than an average fiction story. Okay? The below the checkmark area here, um When it comes to reading age settings, this is where you should give age appropriate nod. If you have any adult content in your book, it hit the 18 plus. You're not going to get in trouble or that's the right thing to do. If your story isn't like a romance erotica, that doesn't apply to you has no spice, but it does have adult themes, choose 18 plus. If your story could be considered A, you want to choose A through adult, choose 12 as your minimum age. Beyond that, just use common sense and just cast as wide a net as possible. Okay. 6. Avoiding the Amazon Adult Dungeon: Attention Spicy authors, avoid the Amazon adult Dungeon. This is my true stories from a Djeon survivor lesson. Even if you don't write the spicy literature, this is just something good to know. I'll try to keep it quick. I had the unfortunate experience of landing the original cover of 12 months of smut in the adult on. Oops. You know, it's an anthology. I had 12 other authors counting on me I trusted me to get this out. And I was just I was sitting there thinking, man, what did I have miss Cue? You know, was it cover to overtly sexual? What a ride? This is the book in question. This is 12 months of smut. This is a spicy spicy spicy meatball. Lots of delightful things in there. Definitely adults only. What is the dungeon? What's the Amazon adult dungeon? Well, I a book is put into the Amazon adult dungeon, the title will not appear in search results because it's been flagged as very strictly adults only, very strictly. And of course we don't want our smut books ending up in the wrong hands. But we need to show up in search results. If your book is dungeon, it will only be accessible through a direct link. Meaning that if a complete stranger doesn't doesn't follow you on social media or doesn't have access to that link. It's very unlikely that they would be able to locate your book and purchase it, even if they wanted to, even with their settings turned on to see adult content. Um, in their search results. It is hard enough to be seen by potential readers. Being dungeoned makes it almost impossible. First of all, how did I even know my book was dungeoned to use publisher slang? Because Amazon doesn't tell you directly. You get the e mail and they say, Oh, your book is live. I'm like, great, got to click on it. I'm like, great. I can see it because the link that's in the e mail will work. It's a direct link. Well, I had scheduled the book for a set release date 12924 is when our 12 months anthologies came out. On that day, I set my alarm and I woke up just after midnight to check if the books showed up because I am a type a obsessive publisher and I wanted to make sure my writers were squared for their publication day, right? I was excited. It was my responsibility, so I wanted to make sure that they were okay. So the other book that we had launched that same day, 12 months of horror popped up immediately. I put in my name and 12 and there's 12 months of horror. Also, what showed up was the discrete cover of 12 months of smut which doesn't say the word smut anywhere on the cover. It's a great option if you don't want people to know what you're reading. But what I did not see is the original matching cover of 12 months of smut. Okay. Suspiciously absent. Uh, right. So the only way that I could access the listing to 12 months of smut was from the direct link in the e mail that Amazon had sent me telling me my book was lid. It wasn't even showing up on my Amazon author page. And that is a huge red flag, especially given the nature of what is in this book, right, knowing it's actually adult content in there. So I made my way to a book dungeon check website. I am linking this here in the PDF, and I will link it in my Erotica publishing course as well. You can put in your ASIN which is like an ISBN to check if your book has been put into ton. I put in my ASAN, which was in my Amazon e mail red bar and the little sad dragon I said, Oh, no, this book is in the dungeon. I was like, no, I panicked. I panicked. If it was just me, if it was just my book, I'd be like, Oh, man, but knowing I had authors counting on me for this, I was, I need to fix this immediately. Whatever the opposite of a procrastinator is is what I am. I immediately went to my dashboard, my KDP dashboard, the listening, and I made some changes to the keywords because I was convinced that was my culprit. I'll talk about keywords next here and next lesson, but more specifically, I had noticed that I had checked yes to the adult option. For this version, and no to the adult option for this version. This one was not dungeon and this one was, serves me right. I was trying to be upstanding. I thought the word smut was enough to trigger the adult filter for that. Trying to do the right thing. I unchecked the yes and I chose no rightfully so because the title and the cover while it's spicy is not overtly sexual, and it's within the parameters of acceptable boundaries. Okay. So I resubmitted the book. I sent it off to see if Amazon would approve it, right? Because obviously, it was fine in formatting, it was fine. All the sizing and everything was fine. Six, very nervous hours later. After e mailing my mouth and saying, I'm handling it. I'm taking care of it. Don't worry. Here's the link, put the direct link everywhere. Okay. I received an e mail that the updates were approved. So I I was like, through whatever I was doing ran back to the dungeon check website and it was still showing up as dungeon, and I was like, No. My next step was sending a very polite e mail to the Amazon Help Desk. And I just succinctly pleaded my case. I was super polite. I just said I'd made the necessary changes to be dungeon. Can you please reconsider? So they never responded to my e mail several hours after I had gotten the approval e mail for my revisions. Okay. I noticed that the book was showing up in Sargals this copy. It was suddenly showing up it was dngon So I went back to the website and still show that I was in the dungeon. I could clearly not because I could search for on Amazon and it would show up. Undoubtedly, it's easier to avoid the dungeon altogether. So In addition to the adult checkbox, be mindful of the keywords that you choose. There are several that seem to result in an instant dungeoning important to SEO and connecting your book to the target audience. But in Erotica, there are plenty of pitfalls to avoid. So just take caution. I am linking a helpful article I found. I just want to note that I didn't write it and I don't know this person, and I don't endorse everything that they say in the article or on their website, but the list is the most extensive Um, list that I found for potentially offensive words for the Amazon Dungeoning sir sure. If you're a master rodica author, just be cautious and put some serious thoughts into your options in the adult section, your description, and your keywords, and your categories or your sales will be shot in the foot before it even has a chance to fly. Okay. So see my course for tips and tricks on self publishing rodicaF 7. Paperback Details Part 3: Paperback details Part three. So we get to start with an easy one, primary marketplace. Yeah. So just choose the Amazon domain that is for your home country. Done, PCPs on that one. All right. The next category is categories. All right. So you can choose three categories for your book listing. And while it might seem pretty straightforward, there's an art to this. You want to choose categories for your book with the mindset of big fish in a small pond. Okay? So they have to be categories related to your book, that your book fits in this description, but you want to dig down and find at least two out of the three categories where maybe there's not as much competition because if you do that and you rank higher, you could potentially get a number one new release, which is awesome. Even new authors and self published authors can get number one new release, and that puts a little flag on your book listing, which I'll draw even more attention for potential shoppers, potential readers. You're only considered a new release for 30 days from your publication date. You have 30 days to climb that ladder of new releases. There's always category rankings even after the 30 days, obviously. But books that have been released in the past 30 days have a special different ranking system of new releases. If you look in the pull down menu, you choose a main category. It's usually fiction and literature, and then you dig down through there, there's romance. You can go further into erotica, there's different kinds of erotica, LGBTQ or there's paranormal, or I forget what else in there. S. It's it's crazy. How many categories there are to choose from. Just remember your ranking numbers will probably be the highest in the first one or two days after your book release because your friends and family are going to run to support you ideally and buy your book. You'll rank a little higher. But try that to get swept up in the ranking numbers. It's so easy to do that. I'm talking to myself on that too because I'm the one who's refresh refresh. Where are we now. But a lot of that is going to come later down the road. It doesn't have to be within day one. There's a program that can help you choose your categories. It was previously called KDP Rocket. They renamed it recently. It's called Publisher Rocket. It is a paid program at a one time fee of around $100 or so you get a 30 day money back guarantee. But you can through this program see exactly how many copies of your book you would have to sell in each category. To snag that number one new release flag that I was talking about. So it's less of a guess and C and more of a direct metrics. If you sell five books in parental romance, you will rank at this. So then you know exactly how you're doing instead of kind of like a I'm going to put this in and we'll see how this goes and then it doesn't go great. I'm going to change it a little bit. If you make changes to your category, it won't be instant when you hit save. It's one of the sections in the listing that you can change even after your book is live. If you go in and change your category because maybe you're not ranking so well, I say you write fantasy and you write high fantasy with fairies. Okay. And you're trying to get your book to compete with Sara J Mass. Good luck with that. So while your book is technically in the same category, you're going to want to do yourself a favor and try and find some that fit but maybe aren't as broad and full of such stout competition. Publish a rocket. Super helpful if that's something you want to do or if you're a little more down the road and that's financially something that's not a big deal to you. Okay. Our next section is keywords. This is another section of the listing that is super important for the SEO bots and for your rankings, you have seven slots to fill in that are more opportunities for you to sync your book up with potential readers. This is a chance for you to connect with your target audience, who you wrote the book for. You want to use this opportunity to match some of the phrases that someone who would enjoy your book is going to type in to look for their next read. If you purchase publisher Rocket, As you use for the categories, you can use it for keyword help too. It'll help you find the keywords that could do the trick for you. If you didn't purchase a publisher rocket, you can totally put in your keywords manually. There's a sneaky way to test out keywords. It includes using auto complete in the search bar. You can go into the Amazon search bar and see what auto completes. Because that's going to show you like, Oh, this is what a lot of other people are searching for. However, to use this, you need to search on incognito mode. Otherwise, your recent purchases and your personal recent searches will color the search because your recent searches have changed the algorithm for your profile. You also need to make sure that you choose the books category. Otherwise, you'll find T shirts and gifts and things that'll pop up. If your book, for example, is like a paranormal romance, you might type in paranormal and you don't click search. But when you type paranormal, the hover menu will appear and it'll show you options just like on Google, when you start to type for something, it'll autoclete Maybe you could pick a few from the hover menu that appears that fit your book and you know that other people are already searching that term, that keyword, that phrase. You can also use the keyword section to put in tropes that are in your book. There's nothing wrong with having some tropes in your book. Most writers have a trope or two, even if it makes you want to gag to think, this is an enemies to lovers or Okay. You know, I like writing found family. I like reading found family. I do occasionally type that into my Amazon search bar. That's something to consider if you're stuck thinking what keywords would be best. You can also consider putting your setting or geographic location into keywords. You can potentially put in character qualities, if you have a strong female lead. If you have a cinnamon bun character. Sometimes some of us like a cinnamon bun. So those are other things you can put in, but you only have seven. This is a section that you can change in your book listing, so don't sweat it too much. If something occurs to you later on, you can go back and change it and put it in and that's fine. One thing you do want to avoid all over the place in your description in your blurb in your keywords is don't put any language that says anything like best selling or number one. Even if you've done the work to find a comparative title or author, don't put that in here. You can get banned for doing that. You don't want to U name anyone or make any claims like that. The same rules for keywords in the Amazon adult Dungeon from the last section apply here. All of those words for title and description things that would flag you to be dungeon count for keywords. Just remember that refer back to that list if your book contains spicy scenes and you want romance readers, try to find a way without using the band words. Next section is the publication date and the release date. This section had recent updates in the chef's kiss. They made me so happy. I used to be back in my day. Okay. You had to finish your listing, get everything, your ducks all in a row, then you had to hit publish my book on the last step around three days before when you told everyone when it would be available. And just hope that it passed inspection and Amazon would actually release it by that date. Nowadays, You can choose a day five to 90 days in advance that you want your book to be released a note on Amazon DP, you can only do pre orders for books. You cannot do pre orders for paperbacks or hard covers, and you can do the preorders for books up to a year in advance, but this is a paperback tutorial. But that's just a little information for you. What I usually do is I choose a date about a month out after the listing has been approved. I know that the listing is good and it will come out on that date. Because I don't want to let my readers down or if anyone's excited about the book, I don't want to have to go on my socials and be like, I made a mistake or something wasn't approved. Changing dates around, you might lose someone who's on the fence about reading your book. If I might just might leave a bad taste in their mouth. So I like to leave myself enough time to play around with it, really think of good keywords, make sure my description is what I want, but that I know that the book will come out. Just to note about publication dates, Amazon will lock your listing for any further changes five days before your release date, cannot make edits like 20 minutes before midnight on the day of your release. And there's a big timer that pops up on the top of your bookshelf. You'll see it as soon as you click that you want to schedule a release in advance, they'll give you a timer and you can work off of that. Okay. 8. Course KDP, Paperback Content: Okay. Paperback content. If you're good with what you put in on the paperback details page, knowing that you can return and tweak it as much as you want before you hit publish, you can go ahead and save and continue, and then that will bring up the next tab, which is paperback content. The first selection on this page is about the books ISBN number. If you took my formatting tutorial, yes, I'm mentioning it again because there's a ton of good information in it. Okay. You'll remember that I talked a little bit about using Amazon's free ISBN, pros and cons of it. The ISBN number is something that you will need to secure. And it's a reason that I use Amazon KDP. You have the option to let Amazon assign your manuscript a free ISBN before you upload your document. So your ISBN is a unique identifier number that will make your book instantly findable in a C of published works, right? It's something that you will have to secure one way or another before you self publish. Now, I use Amazon KDP and I use their free ISBN program. However, if you want to publish your book elsewhere, you need to think about your ISBN choice. If you downloaded which you should have, the PDF that is a companion guide to this course, you will see a table on there, comparing the various options, requirements, imprints that comes along with using Amazon to acquire your ISBN number. Um, Just a few fine points. I suggest you read over that. But if you use the Amazon free ISBN, it's free. You can only publish using that ISBN with KDP. If you decide later to go and you're like, you know what? I want to do Ingham Spark with this book, you have to take that ISBN off and you would have to pay and register for that ISBN, so you could publish. You can't just move it over and use the one that Amazon gave you. When you use the Amazon free ISBN, it will show independently published under the publisher line, which is fine, but you can't change that. And they will also register it for you. So you don't have to go through the trouble of, you know, importing your ISBN number to the Boger catalog, which is where ISBNs are registered in the United States. If you decide to use Amazon's free, ISBN. You just have to go back into your formatted PDF at this point and include it on the copyright page. There'll be a place for it already. If there's not, put it in in your copyright material, say ISPN number, so on and so forth. That number has to match the one that is going to be on the back cover. They will put the bar code with the ISPN on your book. You don't have to worry about that. They will print it through the bookmaking process. Okay. Okay. Moving on, print options. Our first selection is ink and paper type. This is cool because you start thinking about the actual book coming together, the tangible choices. Ink and paper type, pretty straightforward, we choose your ink and paper. Just to note most fiction books are black and white on cream paper. White paper is usually for non fiction books. But it's a personal preference, there's no industry standard on that. Just color ink will increase your printing costs. Trim size at this point, you should know your trim size because you've already formatted your document to be the size book that you want. If it's not. Go back into my formatting tutorial. That should have been chosen at this point. Next category is bleed settings. You want to select bleed PDF only. You should be prepared to upload a PDF document. This is going to print best. This will make sure your book looks how you mean for it to look. Okay paperback cover finish. You can choose Matt or glossy here. My only recommendation is that if your cover design has a lot of dark or a lot of light, choose glossy. Because if it's very dark, the glossy will really enhance the dark tones and you can see the difference if there's different variations like black and gray or dark brown. If your book is white, glossy will help fingerprints, because Matt is susceptible to staining. It looks nice and this takes better photos for Bookstogram and book talk because you're not catching the light. Okay. See I'm catching the light and maybe it might block. I can see my ring light on that. But for the actual reading experience, this will save fingerprints. We're at the manuscript stage. It's getting real. I'm excited for you. I really am. Go ahead and upload your manuscript. Make sure you choose the right one if you had a lot of different iterations. I always have rough rough two final one final 14. Just choose the right one. You paying attention? What cover. Series. Are you paying attention? This is important. Do not use Amazon KDP cover creator. Please. Please. It's very, very sad in there. Just don't do it if you want to laugh. If you want to Gable how bad of a book cover I could have. Don't do that. Um, you know, like it or hate it, but you know as well as I do that we do in fact judge books by their covers, especially nowadays with social media, it should be professional and it should be striking. There are so many options at so many different price points for you to put together a beautiful book cover. Even if you do it yourself, there's so many editing programs. There's so many stock images you can use. You have to at this point. If you're this enmeshed in social media and books and book talk, there has to be someone that you know or me to make a beautiful book. I just don't use coverage creator. Pink you promise me. Pink promise. I need be, for now, just use a placeholder PDF. Throw something out real quick just so we can move forward. Because when we continue to the previewer, we'll show you everything how the book layout is going to look. That will give you your final page count and the page count of your book with the manuscript through the KDP engine, not just what your Microsoft Word says the page count is because remember, If you remember back to my formatting tutorial, page one didn't start till ten or 11 pages in. If you've worked on a book cover file, it's probably within the range of what you mean. But putting your manuscript together, it will give you an exact dimensions of what the book cover PDF file should be. Okay. If your book has more pages, the spine is going to widen. It's not just a matter of cropping in and out, it changes everything it's like a wide book. If I add more pages, this part is going to get bigger, your PDF is going to it's the whole it's a big rectangle. I may do a book cover tutorial, but for right now, what you need to know is that the number of pages will affect the dimensions of your book. And a super helpful tool. I use it all the time. In the book cover section text. If you click the cover calculator and you fill in those props to get the exact dimensions, you can download a template to work from. It will tell you the spine is here, and this is the front cover and these are the bleed. It's awesome. They make it so easy for you to create a beautiful book. Moving on, AI generated content Okay. Yeah, I really hope you're choosing no here. Yes, I'm judging you. The next section is our book previewer. This is really cool, and I think you're going to enjoy this part. This is an awesome tool that Amazon KDP gives you and it's going to show you the spread of your book. It's also going to show you where you probably need to make some changes. The most common errors that are going to pop up when you hit launch previewer. And our font embedding in the document. Again, sorry, but if you go back to my formatting your manuscript, I cover how to address that and some different troubleshooting with font embedding. The second most common error are cover dimensions and making sure that your image goes right to the end of the page and your dimensions are correct. Once you've corrected all those errors, and there will be some. It's okay if it takes a lot of back and forth with you you know ing out of the preview or fixing what they wanted you, re uploading and there's other stuff and you have to fix. It's okay. If it takes a while, no one's timing you. Don't put that pressure on yourself. That is why I choose a release date that's a little ways out. I give myself that time to make sure that it's going to be approved and can be released on that date. But at some point, fix all the errors, and it's going to say, are you ready to approve and you can hit and approved Okay. So if you're stuck fixing things, at this point, pause this tutorial here. Wait till you've fixed everything. Refer to my formatting tutorial, get your issues fixed. You can pause here and return when you're ready to hit approved. So once you've corrected all the errors, hit that approved button. The approved button is not the published button. Okay. You have plenty of time. You can still go back and fix everything. The published button literally says publish. So this is you're moving through the sections still when you hit approved. So when you hit that, it will return you back to that paperback content screen, the second tab in our set of three tabs, and you'll now see that your printing cost will show at the bottom, because you've made all your selections, the manuscript is approved so they could calculate that for you. This number is important because this is the cost that you will pay for your author's copies, plus shipping. And this is the amount against which you will earn profit for sales of your book, you know, less royalties that you're paying to Amazon for doing it for you. So we're going to talk a little bit more about that number and pricing on the next page. So at this point, hit Save and continue, and we're going to move on to the third tab. Okay. 9. Pricing Your Book: Pricing. Let's go through this pricing tab, and then by the end of this tab, we might be ready to hit publish. Almost there. The first section is territory rights. In all likelihood, you're going to choose worldwide rights. My gosh, say that ten times fast. Unless you want your book to specifically not be available in a particular geographic marketplace, you have some special situation in which you don't have rights in a particular territory. This is very unlikely, so I'm not even going to spend any more time on it. Primary marketplace is the next section. You already selected this on the first tab. They're just showing it to you again here. Here's the big one. Pricing, royalty, and distribution. Let's slow down and let's talk about this section. This is obviously a very important step in the process of the listing of your book. As much as we authors are so pleased and grateful for our readers. It's important that we value our work and ourselves, and set a fair price. Now, I also made a free video about impostor syndrome and, you know, charging what were worth. And I would suggest that before you choose the price of your book, you watch that free video. I'm going to talk about it a little bit here too because it is so important. But I think that we undervalue our work if we enjoy it. If we enjoy our work and most writers do, if you're going through all of the trouble of self publishing your book and learning how to self publish and working through this tutorial, adding to your skill set the things I am teaching you. You enjoy your work. Sometimes because we enjoy our work, we charge less for it. It sounds like this. It sounds like, Oh, it's okay. I love doing it. It's fine. You don't have to e. Okay. Hello. If you enjoy your work, you should charge more for it. If we love our work, we are going to bring such enthusiasm and attention to it because we care about it. When you really care and enjoy something, you're going to spend your off time thinking about how to improve it? How do we do it better? Oh, that's a good idea. I should add that to it. When we love something and we give it our full attention, that should not be undervalued. I'm not saying go out there and charge $55 for your 200 word paperback that we're making. I'm just saying don't undervalue yourself compared to market value. For your book in your genre, comparable pricing because you're new or you just really enjoy it, you just want people to read it, and it's okay. No, you deserve to be paid what you are worth. And I think we see the pricing thing and some of us might freeze up. Maybe it makes us feel a little uncomfortable. You know, check in with yourself. Did it make you a little uncomfortable when you got to the stage? Okay. And maybe it's a little like, Oh, I have to try to charge people. Not all of us are natural salespeople, and you don't have to be. You just have to base what you charge on market value and don't ding it just because of who you are or how uncomfortable it makes you. You're worth it. Don't let impostor syndrome smack you around. I got a beef with impostor syndrome, get rid of that thought. Let's move on. Okay. So have you acknowledged that elephant in the room, let's be reasonable about pricing your book. Let's tie into all these columns mean on the screen here. For example, I created this fictitious book. The cost of printing is $4.18. That's pretty normal. That's a pretty standard price for printing a black and white cream paper five eight. That's a number I see all the time, four 18, it's within a certain range of pages. If you look at the top portion of the pricing table, Okay. You primary marketplace is going to be up top in that list price section. Changing the list price here will automatically change it in all the other regions that your book will be available. So I am publishing this book on amazon.com, which is the USA territory for Amazon, right? I put in a price of 14 99 based on comparative titles, you have the option. We talked a little bit about expanded distribution before. But you can choose to receive either 60% of retail royalties or you can select expanded distribution and receive 40%. Let's just look at the numbers, these fake numbers, assuming we're publishing only to Amazon, not expanded distribution. If I put in the book price and I want to charge my readers 14 99 for my book, Okay. And my printing cost is four 18. Okay. That means the royalties that I will get when I sell one copy of this book, I will get $4.81. Amazon gets $6, okay? Which is not allowed to ask if you consider that you don't have to buy a printing press. You don't have to buy the ink for your paper. Like they're covering all the upfront costs. I personally don't mind paying Amazon six bucks. That's fine. I think that works fine. Most new authors will choose the 60% royalty option just based on the numbers, the metrics. Why would you choose the 40%? We talked a little bit about this before. We're going to talk a little bit more about it right now. So downgrading in quotes to 40% means that your book will be eligible for expanded distribution. That means that other online retailers, also libraries, and universities will be able to order your book. Okay. Now, if you remember my lesson from earlier, Their availability to your book in their warehouse through Amazon KDP will not be the same terms that they get from books that are published through Ingram Spark. What do I do? I'm an independent publisher, I make these decisions a lot. What do I do? I will usually for a new release, I will choose the 60%. I will opt out of expanded distribution to start and I will keep it that way for six months because the first six months, like I said, it's usually the first two months, but I'll keep it to six when you get your most sales. After sales slow a little bit. I I have before switched to expanded distribution, and then I will do the footwork to visit bookstores or e mail, a lot of contacts who may want to carry my book. That's what I do. Again, that's just a personal preference as an independent publisher. But I think that's a pretty good setup unless a particular store has expressed interest in acquiring a large amount of your new release. Let's talk about authors copies versus proof copies because they're very different. Okay. Before you hit the published button, you have the option to order proof copies. Many authors and independent publishers, myself included, we'll order a proof copy before I hit the published button. Um, I find and a lot of professional editors find that editing a paper copy of a book. You will catch so many more errors than if you just do all your editing on screen. I think it's really smart to get your eyes on a physical copy of your book. A proof copy is identical to the book that you will publish on the inside on the outside. It will come with a line wrapped around the outside that just says not for resale. You have to request from Amazon, and then within 2 hours, they'll send you a link and you have to order it within 24 hours. Authors copies, you can only order after you've published and your listing is approved. The author copies do not have this is the smut not the ho, but the author copies are the same book, the same book that's available on your listing, but you only pay the printing costs. That gives you the opportunity to up sell that copy at a profit. So if you want to sell signed copies on EtS or through your social media or at a book vending event, you would order author copies, and then you could sell you could sell at the Amazon rate, whatever the listing is. But I would highly suggest not let impostor syndrome guide your hand and I would upcharge for the signed copy. You know, if I sell a book for 14 on Amazon, I may sell the signed copy for anywhere 20-25. I might start it at 25 and then run some sales sometimes that brings it down to 20. Just remember, authors copies are not eligible for prime shipping and they also take forever what feels like forever. The time that it takes to ship them lessons a little bit once the book is available to the public. But if you're ordering author copies after your book is approved, but before your publication date when the book is live to other people, oh, my gosh, it can take up to two weeks for the book to arrive. That's painful. Something to think about factor in, you may or may not have your author's copies handy on the day your book is released. We're getting so close. Terms and conditions, don't skip this part. You are acting professionally. This is important and you need to pay attention here. Don't just skip ahead and go, okay, okay, okay. Allow all cookies. No, stop. This is legal mumbo jumbo, and you need to pay attention. It's responsible to read this part because you are entering into a contract with Amazon. If you aren't ready to deal with the stuff, you aren't ready to publish take a breather. This is up to you, your self publishing, so you can do this on your schedule, don't rush yourself, don't let anyone else rush you. Take the time to read the contract. At any point in this process, you can choose Save as draft. All of your progress will be saved and it will live there on your bookshelf, on your Amazon dashboard, and you can return to it whenever you want. If you're ready to publish, congratulations. That's so amazing. I'm so proud of you. If you take a minute before you publish and look back all of the work you have done to get to this point. Okay. Okay. You came up with an idea for a book. You wrote the damn thing. Then you had to edit it. You might have had to rewrite some parts. Then you had to format it with me hollering at you for what? Almost 2 hours. Then you had to find someone to do book cover design. You had to write the description and the blurb, figure out SEO stuff, figure out how to use a new listing, make all these choices and decisions about how you want your book presented to the world, and all of it has brought you to this point. That is so awesome. I wish I could jump through the screen and give you a hug. You really should be proud of yourself. If you sell one copy, it's awesome. I mean that. I know that it doesn't feel like it's awesome. But a lot of people in the world have a book inside them, and it just stays there. You took the steps to pull it out and make it real. I'm getting emotional because it's such a big deal and you really should just be so proud of yourself. I think self published authors are really special people. Okay. Enough of that. I'll get a grip. But if you're ready, go ahead and click that gorgeous publish your paperback book button. Take a well earned sip coffee or something stronger. All right. And just bask in the moment. Now, you remember your book will not be available for sale immediately. Even if it was cleared in the previewer, the Amazon engines plus a few humans will review all the final details and they'll e mail you when it's ready. Okay? Okay. If you chose to publish immediately, the next thing you hear from Amazon will be an e mail saying that your book is live. If you pre selected a published date, you may you'll get an e mail saying your listing was approved, but you will see the listing go live probably like a few hours before midnight on the day you selected. So if you chose March 8 on March 7, around 10:00 P.M. It might just show up on Amazon, kind of quietly sneaking on. Creeping in. Keep in mind because when I first saw some listings come together, I was like, panic. I'm like, what is that? Where's this and that? It takes a few days for all the details to come in. They come in in bits and pieces. Don't start emailing or panicking when sections are missing or half your description is gone. It takes a little bit for it all to funnel together. It also takes a little bit for different formats of your book. If you are doing simultaneous paperback in book, I know this is just for paperback, but I'm just saying so you have it in your brain. If you already have an e book out and now you're doing the paperback, it might take a little bit for them to find each other and sync up, but they will. You don't have to do anything, just breathe. I know you're so used to doing everything, doing doing doing, but chill, let the engines work their magic F after three days, things aren't syncing up, you can start to contact people. They'll sync up eventually. The same goes for the SEO engines. It might take a few days for the search engines to index your new listing that you just created and find it and show it in a search result. But for right now, let's go to the next lesson, which is about pub day. 10. Happy Pub Day!: I wish I had a little firework set off. I should have gotten a little popper, but happy pub day. Oh, my gosh. Pub day or a book birthday, publication day, whatever you want to call it. Oh, it's such a big deal. Like I said in the last lesson, I know I got a little sappy, but I mean it, no matter how many books you publish. Each pub day is special. Don't worry about the numbers. Don't worry about the sales. Take some time and be proud of yourselves. People who will self publish are probably some of the people who are so hard on themselves. And I speak from experience. This is your first book. That is really special. You are officially a published author. I don't care if you did it yourself, your book is available, and I'm sure it's beautiful and people can read it. They can order and read it and you might make your first dollars off of your writing today. If it's $4, awesome. Just remember the day, write it down, put in your phone calendar and celebrate your first Think of a year from now, what you will have done and make sure you celebrate your book birthday next year. You've done so much work and even if you're mildly terrified, this moment, it deserves recognition. Realistically, initially, you'll probably see a surge of sales from supportive friends and family that crew. Remember we said talked about finding your people, ideally, they're excited for it, it's your pub day and they'll buy your book and maybe they'll post about it, it'll be this surge of sales, depending on the categories and the success of your keywords and those initial sales, you might see your book flying up the new release category rankings, which is super exciting to watch. Having that new release flag on your book is so such a special feeling. But if you can Okay. Anywhere close. If you get top 100. Enjoy that. Celebrate every movement of your book and don't let shifts bum you out because it could be a lot of people's pub day. But your pub day is special to you because it's yours. Okay? So set aside the shyness, shout it from the rooftops that your book is out and available for sale, let people know that it's there. Congratulations. Very exciting. Okay. 11. An Overview of Promotion Tactics: Okay. Okay. So your books out now. Now, hopefully, before Pub day, you were talking about your book talking it up and getting people excited for it. Book marketing is a huge topic, and it's definitely more than one lesson within another tutorial, but we can do a brief overview of some good practices, some things that are worth your time to get people talking about your book and start to watch those sales numbers once your friends and families have bought their copies. Because there's always that initial push and then it's like, Okay, but I need people who don't know me personally to want to buy the book. Now, every time you open social media, Okay. You are going to see ad after ad promotional bundles and professional marketers and hey, marketer, Hey, new authors and you know what, for the low low price of all of your royalties from the book that you're promoting. Maybe they'll help you. But I mean, you know, some are worth it. So aren't just like I said at the beginning of the self publishing process, try and keep a level head. I know you're excited. I know you want your book to do well, but do your due diligence and just find testimonials or the community that knows this person before you pay any of your hard earned money to anyone. Okay? Here are some free or mostly free and fun and easy marketing tactics. This is a buckshot, just some quick. I'm just going to go down the line. Any of these topics could be their own tutorial. Here's just an overview of things that I do and best practices. So have you haven't already get the social media accounts rolling. If you think you've posted too much about your new book, you haven't. You can write or e mail local newspapers and magazines and straight up ask if they will feature you as a local author, if they will feature your new book in an article. Like, 50% of them said yes, to me, and I was like, Really? You never know, but I definitely wouldn't have been in those magazines if I didn't e mail them as a small independent author. That is one of those creating opportunities for yourself moments. Have a free video about that as well, suggest you watch that. But some opportunities will not happen to you. You need to make them happen. This is one of those. Along the same vein, feel free, contact local bookstores. That are your favorite bars and restaurants and say, Hey, find a manager, e mail them or contact the DMM on social media and say, hey, I'm at your restaurant every weekend, I love your special pizza on Friday. I'm a local author. Would you ever want to collab and do an event? I'll come in and run a table on the side on a weeknight and see if we can generate some interest. Someone will be like, Yeah, that sounds fun. A lot of especially bars if there's alcohol flowing and there's music going. If that's your personality, that's something you can consider doing. Book vending events can be incredibly lucrative. That's a mention fun and community building. Um, one of the number one recommendations I see from pretty much everyone across the board, including really successful New York Times selling author friends that I have or get an e mail list Because while it might seem like everyone's on social media, they're not. There are tons of people who do not have social media but who read avidly. Firing of an email list, it's a whole project getting people signed up for it. But once you do that is a direct advertisement that you can think of how many ads you get in your e mail every day. You can be one of them. You can give free sneak peeks at your book. You can record yourself reading a portion of it. This isn't always free. But something like mail chimp is a great way to connect with readers who don't engage on social media. As far as engaging on social media, feel free to message your favorite books Srammars and TikTok accounts and offer them free signed copies of your new release. Maybe you're handy with graphic design and you can make a sticker for it or something. I will never stop recommending sticker mule for custom stickers. I love them. They have great sales all the time. You know, along the same vein, you can ask friends and family to leave reviews for your book as soon as they can. Amazon pretty much ignores your book listing until you have at least 50 reviews, which sounds like it would be like, Oh, they bought me a book, they'll review it. People forget. You know, even if they loved it, they forget. You should have already, but if you haven't yet, fire up your Amazon author page, as well as your Goodreads page and get your book linked on there. Okay. If you have a website link your book there, cross post your social media and create a network of all the places that you exist on the Internet so that it's super easy for someone to find you. Because if they hear your name and they type you in and they can't find you that first time they look for you, they might not look for you again. It's amazing that they look for you in the first place. You're going to be easily findable. Just shout about your presence online. Speaking of a website, if you have one, make sure it's optimized for SEO for the search engines, y SEO is I mean, that's a huge category. You know, people that's full time jobs working with SEO. There's 1 million ways to play with it and improve it. Making sure your website pages have interesting titles. I mean, that's so simple. Don't let it just say home, have it say Malory Swinsky author, publisher, make it part of the network, make it grab their attention. You really want to start looking at all of the ways that you show up online and have each one say a little bit about you and make them be like, Oh, who's this? Let me check this out. You network will grow and grow and grow the more you work on it and get creative with it. Same goes for Pinterest. I think that's an overlooked one, and Pinterest lengths last forever. There are 1 million ways to market your book. Try not to overwhelm yourself by doing it all at once. Your book will be out there forever. While you only have 30 days to get the new release flag, your books not going to expire. It's going to be around now. You've done it, you've done the work it exists. Just look forward to the future and stay positive. Okay. 12. How to Check Your Royalties: How to check royalties. So Try not to obsess about sales at first. I know, I know that's easier said than done. But when you do want to check them and see how you're doing, you're going to head to your KDP dashboard. At the top, there's says reports. That will bring you to the reports dashboard, obviously. And at a glance, that's going to show you estimated royalties. I also show you orders and K E N P, which is your kindle page is red. I know this is a tutorial for paperback, but I'm just putting the knowledge in your brain. You know what you're looking at. Looking at the screen on the left side vertical menu under tools, you will see royalties estimator. This screen is fun. It'll give you a visual graph of how many of each of your books you sold. Once you publish more than one book, chart gets all fun and colorful and pretty in all different colors, one for each book. You can see which one is doing better. Maybe which ones need a little bit more attention and promo from you. I know. You love all your book babies equally. But some make more money than others. That's okay. Please remember that paperback sales do not show until they're shipped to the buyer. So if a bunch of your friends are like, I ordered your book and you're like, you did and you go to the website and it says zero. Like you lie. You said you ordered my book, relax. The hasn't shipped yet. So it hasn't shown. So don't go losing friendships. They're not lying. It just hasn't shown up on your dashboard yet. Okay. If you haven't yet, this is the time to double check your payment accounts. You have time before your first payment. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. But just make sure that you've synced up the correct bank account to receive your royalty checks when they come and fill out your individual tax information. You'll get a prompt if you need to update that and everything, but make sure you do that. Okay. Okay. So speaking of the payment schedule, Amazon KDP pays you approximately 60 days after sales are reported. So if you release and start selling a book in July, you'll receive your first royalty check in September. Okay. And you'll receive separate payments from each marketplace that you sell books. So you'll get one from the USA, one from UK, India, Australia, et cetera et cetera wherever you sold anything. Okay. Quick note, I am not going to give tax instruction here, but I'm just going to quickly note with a disclaimer that I am not a tax professional. Okay. When you receive your royalties, you receive them as a self employed individual. Meaning they don't withhold tax for you. It's your responsibility to withhold about 40% of your royalties and put them to the side so that you're prepared for tax time. That's all I'm going to say? I'm not saying anything more about taxes. I don't feel like getting in trouble for giving wrong tax information. I'm just saying be level headed. Let's move on. Okay. 13. Conclusion and What Comes Next ...: In conclusion, your paperback is out. So exciting. Just remember, if it feels like you're promoting too much or talking about your book too much. It's just part of the game as an independent author. It's a good rule of thumb, though, to share the wealth the promotional wealth. No your royalty is necessarily unless you want to do that. Share and support the work of other Indie authors. I cannot say this enough. Don't do it just because you want them to share your books. But because you are genuinely cheering for them to succeed as well. There's room for all of us in the writing game. Have you been to Barnes and Noble recently? Have you tried to count how many books there are? There are so many of us none of us is in direct competition with anyone else. Each story written is special and unique because of the people who write them. Okay. So just make sure that you're paying it forward and you're finding a crew that you can genuinely cheer for, and it's okay if you don't find them right away, give it time, but just make sure that you're reciprocating. It's the right thing to do. It comes down to authors with big contracts and a big marketing team. They may not have to do all the endless work that we have to do to promote our books, promote ourselves, we want to succeed. But if you want to find the silver lining and that, if you want to find the silver lining and self publishing and all the work that we put in. You are inherently a part of a new community and you are creating new ties. Indie authors have each other's backs and it's beautiful. It's a freak and beautiful thing and you're part of it now. I love that. And I think that's really special. Now what? Start writing your next book. People always asked the second you publish a book? What are you working on now? Oh, my God. I just wrote a book. I just made this book. They they mean well. They're trying to they're excited for you and they want to know what you're working on. So you start your next book, if you haven't already, if that sentence scares you and you don't really want to write a new book, you're not ready to write one or maybe you just only wanted to write the one. That's fine. You can have one book. One books amazing. One book is more than so many people even do. Okay? So don't feel pressured to write a book just because people are asking you when your next book coming out. But if you still want to stay in the writing game, You have the option you can now release the paperback in a different version. You can tackle an book and get your book published for Kindle or you can even do the hardcover. But I would say do book first because so many of the world's readers read books. And they usually read them on Kindle. If you don't release an e book version of your book, you're leaving money on the table. It's a totally separate tutorial, but you will end up using the manuscript that you formatted for your paperback to make your book. Part of the work is done, and that's exciting and that's why I always do paperback first. So keep an eye out for my next tutorial publishing your kindle book until then, I just want to say I'm very proud of you. I hope that you realize how many skills that you've added to your skill set and I just want to say, congratulations. Okay.