Your COMPLETE guide to Amazon KDP publishing

1. Introduction: In 2017, I published my first book, six by nine inch paperback text-only, went onto hit Amazon Best Seller status. After that, I published a two-volume tome, 1600 pages in total, black and white, six by nine inch paperback book, children's books and coloring books, 8.5 inch by 8.5 inch paperback, concert programs or pageant programs, 8.5 by 11 inch full color paperback book. And then most recently coffee table books, some of which are hardcover, 8.5 inch by 11 inch, full color on the inside. My name is Adrian Kwan and the only reason I showed you all those books wants to show you how many different types of book it's possible to create on the Amazon platform. And what I have for you in this course is basically the course that I wish I'd had when starting out my own publishing journey back in 2017, how to write your first book? How to format it? How do I format my manuscript, my cover, how do I do the actual uploading and publishing process? Two, kVp and how does that process work? So if you ever wanted to get published on the Amazon kVp platform in this course, is going to be your complete guide to understanding the platform and how to utilize it to publish whatever book you want to create as quickly and easily as possible. 2. Course overview: Before we get to the meat and potatoes of actually how to publish a book on the Amazon platform. Let me take you through a quick overview of this course and just run you through a couple of slides so I'll share my screen here with you. First off, why published on the Amazon kVp platform? It's fast. And when I say fast, I mean, from the time you submit your your book, you can be approved sometimes in less than 24 hours. It's easy. Now I'm not going to say that. That means it's intuitive and you can just do it without taking a course such as this. But it's a lot less difficult or it's a lot easier than a lot of people think, especially first-time authors. It's free publishing of the Amazon KTB platform. You need an Amazon KTB account, but that's free. Here's a big one. The printing prices offered by kVp are a lot lower than any other platform I've seen. Put it to you this way. I have a best friend who's in real estate and he wanted to do a small run of real estate books. And he got a quote here from a printer, an Australian printer. And I said, why don't you check out the printing prices on Amazon? It could be cheaper. I think it turned out to be 1 third to one-quarter of the price. So it's very, very competitive price, very, very competitive print pricing, which is not really surprising given the scale that Amazon does it at. It's available worldwide. That's it. So when you publish a book on the KTB platform, people literally around the world can buy it. Amazon handles shipping. And when they buy it through Amazon, it's often free if they have Amazon Prime. That's hugely important because Amazon shipping is also very cheap and very, very quick. You can print hardcover, paperback, and e-books. There's a large variety of trim and manuscript options. So to give you an idea, this was the first book I published. This is a six by nine inch paper back. I have published, I've just got a stack of my own books here. This is an 8.5 by 8.5 inch children's book. And then underneath here I have a gigantic 8.5 by 11 inch. This one is full-color coffee table book and I have a hardcover version of it down there. So sky's the limit really, when it comes to your different options for printing on kVp, this is a really big one if you are invested in creating a business or becoming a best-selling author. There's a lot of people already on Amazon looking for your book. There are other printing platforms and publishing platforms who might let say add another. They might say they book quality is better or they offer faster shipping or certain trim sizes. So combination that you can't get on Amazon ADP. The thing is none of them can compete with the number of eyeballs, the amount of traffic that Amazon has. So if you're serious about selling lots of copies of your book or as many copies of your book as possible. You have to be on Amazon. I'm just gonna put it out there, which means you might as well publish on Amazon because it's one of the easiest, best, and fastest. You can get paid very easily. This is another big one you put in your banking details. There is tax information you need to put in. I'll cover that in a subsequent video. But it's very easy to set it up. You give your bank details and you get paid for the month. 60 days after the close of the month, 60 to 90 days after the close of the month. So there is a bit of delay in getting your royalties, but it's very easy to setup. And obviously you don't have to worry that Amazon, within reason, you don't have to worry that Amazon is just going to fold up and disappear and take all your royalties with them so you can trust them In that sense, proof copies. This is when you have submitted your book, but you haven't hit Publish and you just want to make sure that it looks right. You can submit a request for proof copies to Amazon. You don't have to pay any markup. You just pay the printing cost and the shipping cost. You're not allowed to sell these copies. So they'll actually have proof copy printed in big bold letters on the front cover. And I'll have a special bar code on the back that just makes it very clear that this is not you're not supposed to sell for retail. And because it has proved copy on the front, then obviously you're not going to do that because people go why does my copy of the book have proof copy written on the front? The big ones. So that's if you want to check that everything is printed correctly, correctly. The big one is author copies. Now, author copies is after you've hit Publish and your book has been approved. And so your book will be available for sale to public. However, obviously, someone buying through the Amazon platform will be paying the Amazon markup, which is 40 per cent. It's not insignificant. Now, if you want to sell or if you want to give away copies of your own book, or you want to have some copies of your book that you can sell either in person or let's say on your website or maybe on your social media than Amazon allows you to buy author copies. There is no limit. No limit on how many you can order. You can order up to 999 at once, but you can place multiple orders of that size if you want. And again, you pay printing costs and shipping cost only. Now you might go, What? Adrian, why don't I just do everything as author copies? Well, first off, people, the public can't buy author copies through Amazon. So if someone wants a copy from you, you will have to work out the shipping. You'll have to get the address, you will have to take their payment. Secondly, it won't count towards your book sales. So if your goal is to become, is to climb up the Amazon bestseller list, none of the author copies are going to count towards your book sales, but author copies are a huge thing for me. I think there will be for you as well if you're a self-published author and you're just getting started out and you want some copies that you can sell yourself? Yes, you can. With author copies, they can be shipped everywhere around the world and you do get them fairly quickly as well, which is great. Now what do you need before publishing? Well, you need to set up an Amazon KTB account. There'll be a subsequent video on that. And remember, an Amazon KTB account setup is free. You need a formatted menu script. So if you've just got your book in Word document, now you can just upload the Word document. There are certain ways that needs to be formatted and certain file types that are accepted. You'll need a formatted cover. So you can just create some sort of image and then say, hey, stick this on the cover. Again. It needs to be formatted in certain ways and be certain measurements details. Now the details that you'll need, some of the details anyway, some are obvious title. Some of you will have a subtitle. The description is the book description on Amazon. So when somebody goes to buy your book on Amazon, it's what appears underneath that description. Keywords. This doesn't pop up in public on the public listing, on your Amazon listing, but they help people search and find your book. So remember the public is searching for a book on, let's say, cooking or ketone cooking or paleo diet. Then you probably want to put paleo diet or keto cooking, Quito recipes, let's say in your keywords, pricing, that also includes royalties. So that's something that you'll need to work out. Just get a rough idea as to how much you want to sell your book for or how much royalty you'd like to make. Then you can adjust them up and down very, very easily individually for each market or each country, I might add a few other details you need to add. Now the Amazon kVp publishing process. First off, you will submit what we just covered, the details, the manuscript, and you'll cover to Amazon kVp for approval. Now that's just a fancy way of saying they're gonna go, go away and check that basically everything is the right size. Everything is formatted correctly and there are no glaring issues. The approval process itself, they say it takes up to 72 hours. I have at the beginning of 2022, notice that it's taking about 24 hours, so they say can take up to 72 hours. If you are printing a thicker book or more complicated book or a longer book, then that does make the approval take a little bit longer, which I think makes sense. The approval notice will be delivered to your email inbox. You got Adrian, I submit my book. How am I going to know I'm approved? Keep your email. Keep an eye on your email. And you will get you'll get an e-mail very obviously from Amazon kVp saying that either, hey, congratulations, your book has been approved or hey, it hasn't been for these reasons. So for example, this so your book has approved, it is available immediately for purchased by the public. There's not a separate process you have to go through. So if it's approved, people can find and buy your book on Amazon. If it's not approved, then they will tell you why it's not approved. You go away and make those requested changes or fixes, and then you resubmit the approval and the approval process begins again, so that 24 to 72 hour process begins again. For me, at least the most common reason, and with people I've helped, the most common reason for something to be rejected is the manuscript or the cupboard being the wrong size. And it's normally to do with images formatted correctly being too close to the edge or too far away from the edge, things like that. I do have one weird one where I got the title wrong because I just put sample Tidal because I was just practicing uploading books. And then Amazon realized that, hey, the title on your book is not sample titles. So there was a mistake there, but aside from that odd one, or some really flagrant ones like copyright rejection, copyright infringement, then the most common reason for rejection is hey, you gotta fix these images. Something's a bit the wrong, the wrong dimensions. Fix it, resubmit it, you'll be fine. Okay, what we're going to cover in this course, how to set up your kVp account. A reminder that that's free. The different types of book you can create on Amazon, kVp, and there are a lot I've just shown you a few then, and I'll show you more in the course, the three parts to every book, how to set up your book. And that's in terms of the trim size which I was talking about before in terms of approval, bleed and margins. The bleed is not you bleeding, don't worry, bleed is a specific term for publishing how to create. We'll cover these types of books and these probably are the main types of books you're going to want to create something like the standard black and white text-only box. So for example, the first book that I created. Which is this one here, from fear to freedom. So six by nine inch black and white book, that's just text on the inside. So we'll cover that 1 first. Then photo, I've called them photo heavy books. So either something like a concert program or a coffee table book. So something that looks a bit more like this. This is 8.5 by 11 inch. It could be hardcover, could be paperback. This one is full color on the inside. And the images go all the way to the edges. As you can see, by the way, that's what bleed means. How to create or what I would recommend for creating what software, what I recommend for creating that sort of book. Low or no content books. For so low content books. So for example, this is a book and I will be using this book quite a lot as an example of how to create a low content book. I created this as a birthday gift for my friend Chloe. It looks like a children's book. It's really not that a bit adult themed on the inside. But this is a low content book. It's called that because it doesn't have a lot of texts. You're certainly not like a normal, let's say, 200 page book which took me months to write. This might take an hour to do the manuscript if that. So that's a low content book. There's also things like children's coloring books that I have down there. A no content book Is doesn't mean it's blank on the inside means for example, a journal where all you've got on the inside might be ruled lines or maybe your journal prompt. You haven't really written anything at all. So those are low content and no content books. And a lot of people who are creating businesses out of low content and no content books. And it's something that I'd never thought of. Even though I published my first book in 2017 and hit Amazon bestseller status, it never crossed my mind that you could write a children's coloring book on Amazon. Just never thought of it. I'll show you how to create that. And the software that I would recommend for creating that will cover how to create your cover. That will be both for print books and e-books. Really importantly, the kVp uploading slash publishing process. And that is a screenshare. It's really important, That's one of the most important, not the most important part of this course. I'm not going to talk about how to upload your book. I will share my screen with you and you will see me entering the title and the subtitle. Changing prices are uploading the manuscript, finding it on my computer, uploading the cover, entering all that good stuff. Because it's a really, really want to help people get published. And it's so easy to talk yourself out of it. Get intimidated and go, Oh, it must be really complicated and you just don't do it. That's why I'm going to share my screen with you. You can watch along in real time, pause the video and I certainly encourage you to do this. Pause it, you do your part and pause and watch me do my part. Pause it, do your part. That way. You watch that video once at the end of it, assuming you have your manuscript and you'll cover ready to go, you'll be published by the end of watching this course. And that's really, really what I want. So that's it. I'm not going to keep you any longer. So we'll get straight into actually how to publish a book and your guide to this Amazon kVp platform. But just again, there are a lot of good reasons to choose the Amazon platform. And even if you chose another platform to primarily publish on, my guess is you're going to want to at least publish that same book on the Amazon platform because everyone knows what Amazon is. Everyone trusts it in terms of it's not some sort of shady deal on the side where they're going to take your payment details and steal them. People trust that people are comfortable using the Amazon platform to buy things, especially books. So let's get to it. If you have questions about any of it. First of all, watch the course. Watch it again if you have to. You can always email me on info at Adrian jay Kwan.com with any questions and I'll help you out where I can. But let's get into your guide to the Amazon Katie platform and how to get published. 3. Set up your KDP account: The very first thing you're going to need to do in order to be able to publish to the Amazon k d p platform. Remember, k d P stands for Kindle Direct Publishing. I guess it comes back from the days when it was about publishing on Kindle. Nowadays it's not just about publishing Kindle. Obviously. You can publish paperback books, hardcover books that works. But the very first thing you need to do is go to k d p.amazon.com and set up a k d P account, which is free. You don't need to pay anything. Now, the good news with this is that if you have an Amazon account, which you probably do, most of us do, then you can use the exact same login details to create your kVp account. It's very, very straightforward and simple. I'm not going to walk you through it. This here is the page as you want to get to so Kindle Direct Publishing. And if you need to create your, I mean, this is a sign-in page. If you want to create your kVp account, then obviously you'd hit this button here. Then you'll be taken to, I need to enter my name. I won't do this obviously because I already have an account. But the point is, go there, set up your account, it's free. I won't walk you through it because it's very straightforward. Things like enter your name and your e-mail address. The most important part there from my point of view is the tax information for me being Australian, it was a text questionnaire. And you need to have some texts details and you'll want to put your banking details in there as well so that when they are royalties, Amazon knows who to pay. The tax questionnaire is important to fill out and look, I'm not a tax expert by any means. So if you need to get tax advice from a tax professional than do that. But it's important to set that up because, for example, for me being an Australian citizen, whereas Amazon being an American company, after I filled in the texts questionnaire, Amazon decided it would take 5% withholding tax on all my royalties. Now if you're an American citizen, that might be different. If you're a UK citizen, that might be different again, but it all depends on you filling out that tax questionnaire. So sign-in or create your kVp account. It is very, very simple. Just have your tax information. I needed to have my tax file number here in Australia and have your banking information ready to hand before you do that. So that when you go to set it up, you have all the information you need and you don't need to go running about. But it's at k d p.amazon.com. Create that account. And again, it's free. 4. What type of book do you want to create?: The first thing we're going through this in the order that I would say that I would have liked to have gone through if I was starting this whole self-publishing journey again. But you have to decide what type of book you're going to want to create. For many, many people, the first book they want to create is something like the first book I created, which is, for me this was a nonfiction book, but nonfiction and fiction aside. It is a paperback book. It's about a hundred, two hundred pages thick. On the inside is just text. There's no photos, there's no fancy formatting. I know some people have approached me about producing poetry books which have a little bit of the text is formatted in a slightly different way. But I think for many of you, this is going to be the first port of call. Nonfiction or a fiction book. Probably a paperback, and probably about 30 thousand words long, 100 to 200 pages. So you might want to create a type of book like that. Now, the reason that we're going through this is just to, maybe you don't want to create this. Maybe there are other types of books you want to create. Or if you have an idea for a book and I'll show you some of the books I've created. Maybe it will help spark some bright idea or you might want to actually change the type of book you were thinking about grading. I've been putting more effort recently into publishing low content or no content books. Primarily for me, it's been children's books. So you can actually publish now, I never thought of it. So you can publish a book on Amazon and have it be a coloring in book. Now the reason I didn't think about that is because I was thinking when I was publishing that I'd create a book like this. And obviously I'm hoping no one buys this book and then start coloring in on the inside. But there's absolutely no reason why you can't use Amazon to publish a book that looks like this. And now this has been colored in by my five-year-old nephew didn't come colored in. But I use them as a test subject to see whether the actual paper would hold the color from a pencil or crayon. In this case, it did. There's no reason why you can't create a children's coloring book. You just need the appropriate images. And I've even put some texts in there which can be colored as well. And that's only a 24 page book. This took about I mean, this took months of work. This book in total took about an hour for me to turn around. Now I know the publishing process because I've done it many, many times. But in order to create the manuscript and the cover, it took all of about an hour to create, so it was very, very quick. Now you might want to create just a genuine children's book that has, let me open this up for you. Images on the inside, looks like that and some basic texts. So it's somewhat similar to the coloring book I need. The images aren't colored in a bowl. So you might want to create a low content or children's book. You might want to create a training journal for a particular sport. And by the way, if you're interested in low content or no content books as a business, just go to YouTube, for example, and put in a search that you'll be amazed at how much materials out there about turning low content and no content books into a genuine business, particularly on kVp. You might want to create a coffee table book, whether it is hardcover, paperback. Now, these, what you put on the inside of these is very much up to you. This is only a test print, so it doesn't have the actual words in it. But when I say coffee table book, I'm talking about books where there's a heavy emphasis on the images. And it's a nice large book. This is 8.5 by 11 inches, which I like to think would look good on a coffee table. Or maybe in the backdrop, if someone has a YouTuber or streamer or an Instagram influencer will just be nice in the background. So you might want to create a book that is not just text, but it has at least an equal emphasis on the images. So that's a possibility for you there as well. I've been looking at creating programs for pageantry. As I said, I've been working in the beauty pageant industry. I've thought of the idea of either a yearbook or a pageant program. Think about it like when you go to a live content and there's a concert program, same sort of thing in there, except it would be photos of headshots of the pageant girls that are competing, together with a written interview with each of them on the inside. There was gonna be spaced on the inside for message from the director who is in charge of the tangent. The section for sponsors. So you can see here you can get books sponsors. These are just mock sponsors. They're not real. But at the front of this book of this program had potential sponsors. The message from the director, something like that. Just to say thank you, or this is what the pattern is about, etc. So that's another idea that you could have there. What else do I have here? Now this, these books, as I said, were based on interviews that I did. And each one of these remember it's two volumes and the other volume is there, each one to 800 pages thick. Now the idea with this book was, I didn't interview a 160 people face-to-face. I had pre-written questions. The women who were featured in this book emailed me be answers to their questions, and they emailed me a photo because the beginning of each chapter had a full now it's a black and white photo, but a full-page photo. This is only six by nine inch by the way, it's not 8.5 by 11 inch like the coffee table book. It would have their name, their pageant title, and a little quote about them. So it had a photo. But then after that, the inside was the written answers to all their questions. This book had a mix of photos and words, but the emphasis was still very much on the words. But you might want to do a book that features interviews. And then the final book that I have here that I've produced anyway, this is a unique, well, it's a birthday present I created for my friend over in Ireland. So only published this really with the intent of ever selling one copy, and that copy was to myself. But it's like a children's book only. It's kind of adult themed. So that's part of the attraction of it. It looks like a children's book, but it's really not. And on the inside, it has particular stories about her. It's about a girl named Claudia. Obviously she's from Ireland. I just put some sort of maybe inappropriate or joke themes in there. And this is a book that you could, could, you could create either for, let's say a child or a friend, or even, let's say a partner. You might want to turn the story of how you two met, how you met your partner into a really nice book for Valentine's present or for Christmas present or something like that. So those are the types of books so far that I've published. Having said that, you could easily create, come up with an idea that I haven't included here. You are by no means limited to those types of books. Come up with your own. I just wanted to show you a few different types because I think a lot of you might be thinking about, as I said, this is what I'm going to be publishing. Just a book, fiction or nonfiction, and just texts on the inside. As you can see, there are a lot more options available to. You. Gotta decide what type of book you'd like to create first. 5. The three parts to EVERY book: I'd encourage you to think of any type of book, regardless of what type of book you're trying to create. In three parts. There is the inside which we'll call the manuscript, the written stuff or the photos if you have that. There's the outside the cover, obviously. Now, eBooks do have covers. The file format is slightly different, but an e-book does have a cover as well. Then there are the what I call the uploading details, which is what you will need when it comes to the uploading or publishing process with k d p. Now just to give you a sneak peak, this is the kVp platform. And I've skipped across to the middle of this book. This is just a dummy book I'm uploading, as you can see by the title, sample title. But some of the details that you'll need to put in title, some of these are optional by the way, so subtitle, but that's optional. Then the description, obviously you probably will put a different description here, at least if you want to sell your book to more than just yourself or your friend. But there's a description here which is important. And then the key words which I've already said as well. So those are the three parts inside, outside and then the details that you'll need for the uploading process or the publishing process, how you create the menu script for each book does vary a lot depending on what type of book you want to create. That's what we're going to go into next, my suggestions as to software, particularly, just remember that creating the cover and those uploading details, they're pretty much identical regardless of which type of book you want to create. But we're gonna get into creating the manuscripts for the different types of books now. And look, you can skip ahead to, if I'm creating, if you want to create a book that just text, then you can just watch that section. If you want to skip ahead and look at how I created, let's say a low content or no content children's book. Then you can just skip to that section. If you want to look at all of them to get an idea of different ways and different softwares you can use to create different manuscripts. Then go for that as well. That's what we're getting into next. 6. Trim size, bleed and margins... oh my: The first thing you need to do is decide on what's called your books. Trim size, the bleed, and the margins. The margins. It's more like you need to be aware of them. You don't really decide them, but you definitely need to pick your books trim size. And that's a fancy way of saying how big do you want your book to be? So for example, this one is six inches by nine inches. This book here is 8.5 by 8.5 inches. And then you have books which are, oh, by the way, if you decide to cover type paperback or hardcover, although that's more of a recent thing you need to decide with Amazon because used to be you could only publish paperback but cover as well. This one is 8.5 by 11 inches. So what size do you want to and what type of cover do you want? Paperback or hard cover. Now, I am going to give you one link. It's going to be down here. It's Katie p.amazon.com and I'll put it under there. But let me share my screen with you now. And here it is. Now the reason that I'm just going to send you here rather than talking you through it is because there are a lot of different options, but there's not unlimited options. So a sensible question might be, well, Adrian, can I create a 20 inch by 20 in hardcover book? Now you can't, there are certain options here. And there's information about, as you can see, trim size, bleed, and margins. So I really need you I strongly encourage you to read through this. I didn't tell you what bleed bleed is. Sounds very weird, but bleed common is only important when it comes to images. Now, an image with full bleed or with bleed goes all the way to the edges of the page. And imager doesn't have full bleed, has margins around these images. As you can see, they don't go all the way to the edges. Now, there's a reason that that's important because it affects your menu script setup. And it's to do with printing and the way they manufactured the book. But bleed. So books that have bleed or the images, those are the ones that you want the images to go all the way to the edges of the page. If you select no bleed when you're uploading your book to Amazon, then that means there's going to be margins or whitespace around the edges of the book. So to give you a typical example, if you are writing a non-fiction book such as this one, images in this one. This book has, doesn't have bleed. If you're creating a cover, a coffee table book such as this, then maybe your book will have bleed just for reference. The cover of every book does have bleed just the way Amazon words and images going. Because this is actually an image file and you think that it looks like text. But there's a blue background to this book that's an image and it has to go all the way to the edges. So cover always has bleed. But that's what bleed is. Now, to go back to this KT P topic, you're going to have to go through this, educate yourself as to what the different options are. So, for example, trim size specifications, width by height with minimum and maximum page count for Amazon.com. So you click this and here are the different options you have. So there's a five inch by eight inch, there's 8.5 by 11 inch and this is paperback. These are the hardcover options. Then you have black ink on white paper. So black and white on white paper, black and white on cream paper, standard color ink, premium color ink. And you'll notice that for example, premium color ink, you can have a minimum of 24 pages, but with standard color ink, you have a minimum of 72. So when I was producing my children's books, I only wanted about 30 pages, so I had to choose the premium option. If I had chosen the standard color option, I would have had to produce a minimum of 72 pages to take it back to here, go through this and work out what trim size works best for you. Whether you're going to want bleed or not. Suffice to say, go through this. I'm not going to read this to you. This is probably one of the most important katie P, help articles you're going to have to read before you start writing your book. Now, they are margins here as well as to the minimum margin requirement. And then really importantly, if you're creating your book in Microsoft Word, which I will get to in a sec. But Microsoft Word is one of the best tools, are one of the tools certainly for creating a book that's simple text. So if you're looking to create a book such as this, where it's just text, no images than Microsoft Word is a really good option to use because a lot of people have it already and it's widely available and most people know how to use it. But you're going to want to know how to set up the margins. So you'll need to know this information here. And then it actually has. And I've used these guides before and they are thorough, detailed, but you need to follow them through. They're not difficult, but they are detailed. How these are step-by-step guide as to adzes, formatting using Microsoft Word or Pages for Mac. Now, you follow those steps. Then when it comes time to publish, we are guaranteed that your manuscript is going to upload it straight away and not have any issues. If you just decide to open up Microsoft Word and start typing and not pay any heed to the margins. When you upload it. It will not be accepted because it's the wrong, probably the wrong size and the margins will be wrong. And I'll probably be all, all different types of reasons why it will be rejected by Amazon. Because if you think when I open up Word, at least to me, it to a standard A4 size piece of paper or letter size piece of paper. That's not really, that's not likely to be the size of the book that you want. So this is your first port of call, deciding the trim size. Remember that actual physical size of the book. Deciding whether you want a book with bleed or not, because that will affect the manuscripts size as well. Again, if it's just a book with texts, you probably don't need to worry about it. If it's a book that has even one image in one image, then you will need to make that decision as to whether you want bleed or not because that will affect the manuscript size. And then when it comes to actually formatting the inside of you want to use something like a Microsoft Word. Then go through the step-by-step guide so that you get your documents set up the right way. The first time. You get the margins set up the right way, the first time. When you do the uploading process, you're not going to get email back from kVp saying, sorry, can publish your book because this is wrong, this is wrong, that is wrong. That's really not what you want. So this is a little bit of hard work you need to do and a bit of self-education you need to do. Again, the link, I will put the link to this article. But if you just search for k, d p trim size, maybe they changed the link. I don't know. But if you Google for kVp trim size, you will hopefully get to that help article. And it is full of useful information. And it's probably the most important information you're going to need to know before embarking on your book. 7. Creating a text-only book: Alright, let's get into how I would go about creating the manuscript for different types of book. Now the first one I'll go through in this video is your standard text only book. So regardless of whether it's fiction or nonfiction, only text on the inside, no images. Paperback or hardcover makes no difference to how you create the manuscript. Now, this book is probably the most flexible in terms of how you start. I'd mentioned in the previous video that I want you to decide on trim size, bleed or no bleed and margins. Now, I do stand by that. Having said that, if you've already written a book in Microsoft Word and you didn't know about picking trim size or bleed, no bleed or margins. Well, the good news is that if it's a text only book, Lead doesn't matter because you're not bleed only comes into it when there's images in the book. Remember, margins. There's an easy way to fix that. And then trim size as an easy way to fix that as well. When it comes to different types of creating different types of manuscript, this is probably the easiest kind of manuscript to create. Now you can do it in Word, open up a Word document pages. For Mac. You could use OpenOffice. You could even use something like a rich text editor or Google Docs if you want to do that. So Google Docs I mentioned because that's completely free, although OpenOffice, I believe is free as well. And honestly, you can just get in there and just start typing. And I say that for one reason, when it comes to uploading are created, when it comes to turning your manuscript into a format that kindle can understand. There is a tool that they've come up with called Kindle create. But if you click on that, you can download Kindle create for free. You don't have to pay for it. And you can see download for PC, download for Mac. And I can actually open up my copy of kindled credit for you here. What Kindle create allows you to do. In fact, pretty much what it's designed for is to take that Word document that you've created or that rich text document, you import it. And it does all the formatting for you. So if you can see here, this is actually a book that I just typed. I didn't end up publishing this book and there's some adult language in here, so forgive me for that. But I just typed it up in Word. I didn't set up my margins are my trim size First, I just typed it in Word, then I imported it into kindle create. And all you need to do is for your different chapters, you apply what's called and you can find this, how to do this in the Kindle, create help. But basically all you need to do is apply the heading style to your chapter headings. And then Kindle credit will import your document and it identifies for you, if you have a look on the left, it automatically identifies the different chapters for you. Because again, forgive me for the adult language. But the use of the heading style, the heading paragraph style inward. And even if you don't, kinda credit is pretty good at working out where your chapters begin or end. Once you've imported it into to create important your document, your Word document, or you're rich text format document. Obviously, I hope that you've spell checked it, et cetera. And the first thing I'll get you to do is make sure that all the chapters that can degrade has detected are actually the chapters that you want. Then you can export this file and you can just simply upload it into Kindle, which is very, very simple. So you don't need to worry about the formatting. You don't need to worry about bleed. You don't need to worry about margins or anything like that. You are going to be able to Take, take your word document imported into kinda create, make sure the chapters are correct, then export it, and then upload that file that you exported directly into kindle, into ADP. And your book's done, you need to create the cover, but the book's done without you needing to worry about any sort of formatting, fancy formatting margins, etc. It's all done. That is extraordinarily simple and very, very quick. Big benefit as well is that you can take that same file that you expect from kindle create and use that to create your e-book. So you can from one, from that one file on your computer, create both the paperback version, the e-book version, which are super nifty. So you can give your customers the option whether they want to buy the paperback, the real thing. So something like this. Or whether they want to purchase it on their Kindle or the Kindle app. Now, the formatting and if your book has, I know I said textile, we're talking about texts, any manuscripts here. But just so you know, as soon as you start bringing in charts or images, then kinda create is a bit harder to use. You may then want to use your word document or your Microsoft Word, beg your pardon. Your pages, apps. Obviously this is Microsoft Word. This is the outline of the course that we're going through at the moment. If you decide to go through this, if you decide to use Microsoft Word, yes, you will have more flexibility. In terms of now, I used Microsoft Word to create this book. And I probably would use Microsoft Word again only because this book did have images in it, some images in it. I wouldn't describe it as image heavy, but it had images in it. If you do decide to create your manuscript in Microsoft Word, however, you will need to go through that kVp help article I told you about in the previous video. Set up your trim size, setup the blade, and set up the margins. Now you can do that after you've written the book, but it's probably better that you do. Before you write the book. You will need to make sure you set up that document correctly before you can upload it to the kVp platform. So you really have two options when it comes to creating the manuscript for a text heavy book, such as this, you can just go crazy, type it up in Word, type it up in pages, OpenOffice or Google Docs. And important into kindle create and let Kindle create, do all the heavy lifting for you. Bonus, you easily create your e-book from the same file. If you really want to have fine control over the formatting, or you have some images or charts in your book, then you're probably going to have to use a Microsoft Word or something similar to that. And you will have to watch that KTB read that KTB articles that I referenced in the previous video and set up your document properly. So margins, paper size, things like that. Otherwise, when you go to upload it, it will not be formatted correctly and it will be rejected. So when it comes to a text heavy or predominantly textbook, I think you've got two options. One, they can do create, simplest, simplest thing to do. You don't have many options in terms of formatting, but you probably don't need it. If option to use a word processor like Microsoft Word, it will give you more flexibility in terms of fine tuning things, but it is more finicky and you'll need to pay more attention to setting up things like trim size, paper size, margins, etc. So those are your two main options for creating the manuscript. For a book like this. 8. Creating a photo-focussed book: When it comes to creating a book that has much more emphasis on photos. Beg your pardon. So something that looks like this. Yes, there is text, but this is an 8.5 by 11 inch book. There are large photos. They need to be high-quality. You need to have the ability to really edit but manipulate those photos. Although being able to edit those photos is super important for book like this as well. Then Microsoft Word is not going to cut it. A word processes is not going to cut it and Kindle, create, forget it. What I've used to create the software I've used to create books like this in the past is Adobe InDesign or Adobe InDesign. And I will show your screen shared here now, Adobe or the Adobe Creative Suite is by no means free. I believe I'm paying $50 or $55 Australian per month to use it. But I was initially hesitant about using a book using software such as this because I thought it was gonna be super complicated. And I didn't want to have to learn how to use another piece of software because I had some bad experiences with Adobe products in the past, with Photoshop and then with Premier Pro, although I do a lot of video editing, so I know my way around that last one. But this software, Adobe InDesign, is really custom built to create books such as this, where you do have large images, you need to have fine control over where those images are going to be. Are they sufficient quality enough? And then you're going to want some tools that help you with the amount of texts that you're going to have n. So for example, one very nifty feature in InDesign is that you can allocate an area here for text. But there's no guarantee that your text is going to fit perfectly into this text-box. So it allows you to create the reflow text boxes where if the texts, if this textbox is not big enough to contain all the texts, then you can link this textbox to another textbox, and it continues on with the rest of the text here. So you can see here, maybe you can't because it's a bit small. Forgive me. I'll try and blow it up for you. But you can see here, I really love to bring the best out of other people. And that's what pageant queens. And then it's finished there. And then in the next text box because it's flowed on do. So that's what, that's what pageant queens do. Now you might go, Adrian, what's the big deal? I could just do that in any other piece of software. Well, let's say I wanted to take this text and I didn't like the font. I wanted to make it a bit bigger, a bit smaller, or just a different type of font. Suddenly, this finely tuned textbox that you might have created, it doesn't fit the text properly. Then you might have the text might be cut off or it might be way too small, whereas in InDesign, it will automatically adjust, so it goes smaller. Then there'll be less texts in the follow-up textbox, for example, or if it's only bigger, I can show you this, not that I probably want to do this. So I got to remember not to save this, but let's say I go into here and I make this text bigger. Let's make a 12th. 12 is now less texts that can be fit in here, but it flows into here. Now, Adobe InDesign, it is only a piece of software that I would be using to create photo heavy books such as this, such as coffee table books, where yes, you want large quality photos, but you also have some texts. Maybe it's for designing a pageant program or a concert program book. Or maybe it's designing a coffee table book, which is my current projects such as this. I understand that you do have to pay for it and understand that there is going to be a fairly steep learning curve. If you're someone who's not particularly tech-savvy, then It's not that I wouldn't recommend Adobe InDesign, but what I would say is that the type of book, if you're trying to create a coffee table book or books such as this, and you have the limited tech skills. This may not be the best or the easiest type of book for you to create, at least for your first book. So you might then want to outsource a design to someone else. Obviously that's going to cost. But when it comes to this type of book, I would recommend Adobe InDesign or any type of software that allows you to do some of the functions that I just showed you here. So reflow texts. It allows you to fine tune control the images, make sure the images are the correct size. Even do simple things such as actually looking at your book as it's going to appear as a book, that's not always an option. So if your goal is going to be create something that looks like this, then you're probably going to need a more advanced piece of software, such as InDesign. That piece of software is going to cost more than likely. Your alternative is to outsource it. And then obviously you have to probably pay someone for that. But for this sort of book, I'd recommend Adobe InDesign. 9. Creating a low or no-content book: Now when it comes to creating children's book or low content, bulk or no content books such as this. This is my favorite pastime by the way, because it's so quick to create books like this. And I think it's a really, really cool, unique gift to be able to give someone. But whether you want to create a unique gift, whether it's about creating a coloring book, such as this, or whether it's about creating a genuine children's book, not a joke children's book for your adult friend, but a genuine children's book. Then the piece of software that I'm going to recommend is Canva. Now I will bring them Canva up on your screen here. This is the exact menu script or my joke children's book for my friend over an island. Chloe, The Girl from dairy. Now, canva. The big benefit about Canva, there's twofold. Number one, it's an image, well, to Creative Suite where you play around with images. And it is super powerful, yet easy to use retail, that's a jackpot you want. So number one, you can create amazing things very easily. In Canva, you can create websites, images, social media, even videos. Now, that's number one. Number Two, benefit of using Canva is believe it or not, it's free. Now there is a paid version of it, but you probably don't need the paid version. The paid version has access to a few more templates, which is kinda cool. A few more stock images, which certainly is some of the images I've used in here, or the premium ones. But you could find free ones. That's fine. So when I say free ones, for example, elements, if I go into here, let's look up lion. And let's just say I go to graphics. This image here and this image here with the crowns. Those are the premium you need to pay Canva in order to use them. But all these ones here, 12345678, I mean, they're all free to use. So you don't need to pay to use Canva. It's super powerful, super easy to use, and it's free. Now, this is, as I said, the exact manuscripts that are used to create Chloe's book. This is the one that I uploaded to Amazon. It got approved. And you can see how it looks in Canva. But just to give you a super quick idea as to how simple it is to create this book, a children's book in Canvas. If you go to create a design and you put them custom size. And you can see 8.5 by 8.5 inch because these books were 8.5 by 8.5 inch. Click on that. And now I have my first page and then I can add pages or duplicate pages. But what I need to do is go to elements. And let's say, let's stick with the lion motif. And let sound creating a children's book about Align. Click on this. Voila. It's there. It even has these margins built-in so you don't put the image too close to the edges of the page when I think about bleed or no bleed, this book wouldn't have bleed. So I don't want my images to go too close to the edges, otherwise Amazon won't approve that. And then on my next page, I could put some text. So I go here and just add a heading and go. This is the story of a lion named Leo. What's not be very imaginative. Now, I'll shrink this so it's back within that purple box. You can see popping up there. So it's not too close to the edges. That text is not very Children's Fund, is it? So let me go pick this can be picked up more or kids font. Let us pick, I think I've used this one before. Brush. Oops, let me get rid of that. Let me hit brushes in here. Oh, here we go. Here's brushes. So that is how easy it is to start creating a manuscript for children's book in Canva. Obviously you just add more pages. You can add more images, you can add more text. You can play around with different fonts. So maybe I don't like the brush or font for my coloring in bulk, I use this blueberry outline font. You can make the font bigger if you want to. Make sure it's still within those margins. And when it comes to text, while, so when it comes to images, you can add more than one image if you want. The benefit of being on Canva is that, you know, all these images you're actually allowed to use. You don't have to worry about copyright because on Canva, That's part of the benefit of working on the platform. So you can put more than one image there. And look really Bob's your uncle. Here's one that's only for the pro, but I have the Pro can I do actually pay for Canva? That's how useful I'll find it. I don't pay for a lot of different software, but I love Canva. So if you want to invest in one piece of software to just Canada, particularly if you want to produce this book Canvas, you can create things like this. Very, very simply. Children's book, coloring books. I will say if you want to create and remember Canva is free and super powerful, you can use it for things other than creating books, such as your social media. But if you're wanting to create genuine no content books such as journals, training journals. I know some people have produced number tracing books or handwriting tracing books for kids to learn. There are some other pieces of software there might be a bit better to use. I wouldn't say they can do the number of things that Canvas can do. Such things as book, bolt or creative fabrics. They're more tailored and I'll put the links to those pieces of software below. There, more tailored to creating no content or low content books. In Canva, you definitely can do it, but Canva is more an overall graphics platform. It's a super powerful, super easy to use platform, and I love it. And I can create, as I said, I can create a book such as this within an hour. I created this book within about an hour as well. And the coloring book, I think it was even, even shorter. So I love these books, like I have a lot of fun creating them and you can create unique gifts, as I've said. And the Canvas software is free. So if I was going to recommend one piece of software for your low content books are no content books will be Canva if you really want to do things such as journals, things like that, where it's a genuine no content buckets, maybe just lines or boxes or journal prompts, things like that. Then maybe have a look at creative fabric of book bolt because those are the two ones that I see everyone in that space using. 10. Creating a cover with the KDP cover creator: Let's talk about book covers. Now. They're gonna be two options here that I will recommend for you. The first one is completely free. In fact, they're both completely free. The first one is the k d p cover creator. Now I will share my screen with you. This is one that pops up during the uploading process. So when you begin the uploading process for book, it will ask you to upload your manuscript, which we've just created, just covered in the previous videos. Then it will ask you to upload your cover. When it does that, it gives you the option to create a cover using Kindles cover creator. Now, you can produce a relatively okay looking cover with Kindles cover creator. And I say this because I literally published this book for the sole purposes of testing out really Kindles cover created. Actually, I also use it to test out whether Kindle create that app that I recommend for creating text heavy books to make sure that the book inside worked well and you can see it worked really well. Then I wanted to use Kindles cover creator to create the cover. Now, again, forgive the adult language when I created this book and it arrived, so I publish it just shifted to myself. I looked at it when that cover. Yeah, it works. But it doesn't look great as opposed to maybe let's say a cover that looks like this. My cover that hit number one on Amazon. But you know what? The more I look at it. I mean, this book kind of stands out. It's very basic. But almost because it's basic, it really, really stands out. So I might almost now, having looked at it for a long time, prefer this sort of cover design, this sort of cover design. But let me break it down to you this way. The Kindle cover creator. So the one that you will be prompted if you want to use it during the actual uploading process. This is not something you can skip two, so I can send you the link for this one. But if you decide you want to use it, you do get some templates over here, choose Design. And it comes pre-loaded with some texts based on, again, when you begin the uploading process, for example, you put the book title in the subtitle, the author name, and kindle the cover creditor will pre-load some of that information onto some of its templates here, template design, and then you just pick whichever one you want. And then you can make some edits to it. So I pick the template and again an auto filled. So an auto filled the tidal wind from the title information I put in during the uploading process. It got my name, he got the subtitle, and it got this from somewhere else as well. I might have actually just type this in. You can put photos in there so it looks basic, but it works. So if you want something that's super basic and you're happy with the way these templates look. Then use the cupboard credo Kindle cover creator. Again, I can't send you the link for it because it's part of your pop across it during the uploading process. And when I do the walk-through of the uploading process with you, you will see very clearly where the Kindle cover crater is not really hidden, but where it is. 11. Creating a cover with Canva: If you want a bit more creative control or you don't like those templates because I kinda recover credit just looks a bit arcade to me. Then I'm going to recommend Canva, our friend Canva, or again, to create your cover. Now let me share my screen. This again, I keep using Chloe's book as the demo. This is the cover, the exact cover that I uploaded to kindle for this book here on the right. On the right is the front cover. And on the back, on the left is the back cover, as you can see here, front cover, back cover, front cover on the right, back cover on the left. Now the only thing that you need to be cognizant of when you're doing your creating your cover. And I mentioned this now because when you do it on the Kindle cover credit, it takes care of all the sizing for you. When you create your cover on Canvas, you will have no idea what cover size you want to create. You may know that it's an 8.5 by 8.5 inch book, for example. But you don't know exactly the image size you need to create. And if it's off by even one or two millimeters, kVp will not approve it. So what I recommend you do is go to something called the K D P cover calculator. Put the link below because this is one that you can link to indicate ADP cover calculator. It will ask you to put in all the information hopefully that you already know. So I'll be talking about hardcover or paper back. Let me fill this out. So interior type, black and white, premium color or standard color? We'll go with well, for Chloe's book, it was premium color paper type. Well, there's only one option, so we'll go with white page turn direction was left to right. We're not going backwards. Measurement units. We'll do it in inches for this example. The interior trim size was 8.5 by 8.5 inch. Now, you'll note that in this course, I got you to do the manuscript to, I covered how to create your manuscript first. And there's one reason for that. And it's when you get to this stage here. And it asks you for the page count. Now obviously you can't put page count in if you haven't done your manuscript or if you've done your manuscript and you haven't formatted correctly, because if your manuscript you've done it in Microsoft Word and it's on A4 size pieces of paper. You might think, oh, that's 20 pages. But then when you go, oh, well actually the trim size is six by nine inch and I'm going to use this font and this size font. You then go, Oh crap, it's actually a 100 pages. So that's why you need your manuscript and you need your formatted manuscript before you can actually use this cover calculator. But for Chloe's book it was 24 pages. Now when you hit calculate dimensions, it will go away and give you the dimensions and look, you can use this. And if you know your way around Photoshop, then you can use this. What I suggest however, is that you download the template and it will download the template as a PDF or actually know as a zip file. You hit Download Template. You'll get the zip file here. You open it up and you extract it. Now I want to extract this one because I already have my PDF extracted, but I want you to get a hold of this file right here, the PDF version of the P&G, we could use a PNG, I guess if you wanted. But the PDF, you're now going to get that PDF go to canva and you're going to import it into Canvas. So the way it goes is you'll go to the top, create a design. To get all this. You'll go to import file. You hit Import File and find that PDF. Yeah, right there. So paper bag, you can see 8.5 by 8.5 underscore 30 because in this case it was a 30 page book premium white NUS dot pdf. You import that file, and then you get to this page right here. Now there's a whole lot of information here that you don't really need. But it's very useful for graphically shows you where you need to put stuff. So remember front cover as it says here is on the right, back cover is on the left. You can delete all this stuff because you certainly don't want to print this stuff on your actual book cover. But it explains what each part is. You'll remember that I told you that bleed that regardless of whether your book manuscript as bleed or not, covers always have bleed. So all that means is that your images will go all the way up to the pink. But then Amazon's machines are going to come along and chop it off somewhere within, somewhere within that solid black line. You can see here black solid line equals trim size. This is where your book will be cut to produce the final trim size. It's not an exact science. Those so anywhere within the pink, that is where Amazon might cut your book off. That's another fancy way of saying anything that you really need. Printed on your cover. Put it within the white. Okay. So you can read through this and I do encourage you to read through it and understand it. But in Canva or you need to do, once you've understood this, you can start dragging things onto here. I'd probably say get rid of the texts first once you've read it because we don't want to print that on our cover. So we can start dragging things onto it, right? We can drag text onto it at a hitting Leo. The brave line, right? We use our font. Let's say we go with Prussia font. That's a bit small. Let's make it 70 to play around with it. Leo, the brave line. You'd want to put your author named, et cetera. But you can see the process here and you keep playing around with it until you get to something that looks like this. So you can see here, this is how I created my children's coloring book. You can see the remnants of the template in the background with that pink outline. Obviously, I've gotten rid of all this text here, like remove this template layer from final artwork. If you want to know how, you want to know how I removed it, you just click on it and then hit Delete. It's super simple. But you drag your stuff onto the template so you don't need to worry about the measurement. It's been calculated for you. You make sure that you don't have stuff that's going into the pink, anything that you really, so for example, if I did this, then I have no guarantee that the top of this girl's crown would actually be printed. It might cut it off right here along the white line because remember it could be cut off anywhere in the pink. So it might end up cutting the top of a crown off, which is not great. Even there. It might cut the top of a crown off because there might be cut anywhere in the pink. So if I really want that image shown in its entirety that I need to drag it into the Y. But you put your text, you put your author's name. Very usefully. The template will show you where the bar code for your book is going to be printed. And we'll see this more in the uploading process. But every book that's printed on Amazon has a bar code. Any image that you put there might be covered up by the barcode, which is not ideal. So this just shows you, Hey, this is where the barcode is going to be. Anything you put there will be printed over. So you'd want to just be mindful of that. So that's really useful there. That front cover on the right, back cover on the left. When it comes time to actually upload this or export this, then you'll want to get rid of everything except your actual images. So it will look something like this. No more pink, no more solid lines, no more dotted lines. Even got rid of the bar code, space holder or placeholder. That's important because if I uploaded this as my cover, when I printed my actual cover, when I purchase a book, it's going to come with these pink bars around the outside and this giant yellow rectangle on the back. So make sure you get rid of all the templates stuff when it comes time to export your actual cover. But you could probably guess from this. If I was just told that these were the actual dimensions of the cover and to create something. Well, I don't really know where the front cover begins and the back cover begins with the spine of the book. How close to the edges can I put the images, whereas a bar code going to appear, all that stuff. So for creating your cover, I recommend Canva and you can create a much bigger cover. You can go in there, use a cover calculator and credit an 8.5 by 11 inch cover. And you go through the exact same steps. So yes, the ending image would be different. But as I said all the way at the beginning of this course, creating the cover. You can create any size cover you want in Canva. So you go to the kVp cover calculator, put in the specifications of your book, download the template, import the template, the PDF into Canva, and then use that template to guide you in creating your cover. Once you have all your cover setup, then just remove all the template material and then you're going to export that. Katy likes a PDF file. So when it comes time to export your file, then importantly, camera allows you to do that. So you click Share. This is actually changed a little bit since last time I used it. Download. And you would just, I mean, here, choose PDF print. Now I have two pages. The first one still had the templates of material on it, so I don't want that. I just need page two. I click Page two. They'd done download and Canva will go away and export that to somewhere where a place of your choosing. And export that as a PDF file. When it comes to the uploading process with Katie p. And it asks you for your cover file, your PDF file, or you have to do is locate that file uploaded to Canvas and you'll be done. So those are the two ways that I would suggest for creating a cover. Either use the built-in KTB cover calculator, which again, I can't endure, linked to KTB cover creator that you'll come across during the uploading process and the next video, I'll give you that walk-through so you'll see exactly where it is. Use that KTB cupboard crater or use Canva. Canva is three super powerful, got lots of good templates, lots of cool images. If you want to create something more advanced, you could use something like Adobe Photoshop or a more advanced graphics package. I'm by no means an expert with that. So you will have to pay for that. The other option is you can pay people to create your book covers for you as well. But I think you can get pretty far with either the free KT P cover creator or Canva. And now I'll take you through a walk-through as to how to actually upload or publish your book on the KDE platform. 12. Uploading/publishing a physical book to KDP: Alright, so the process of actually uploading or publishing your book to the KDE platform. Now, whether you're publishing a physical book, so a paperback or hardcover or an e-book, kVp, breaks it into three pages or phases, and you'll see this in a second because I'm going to share my screen and upload a dummy book or a pretend book with you. The three phases are Detail. Number one. Number two is content. Number three is rights and pricing. So those are the three phases. And then once you upload it, you hit Publish and then you gotta wait for KTB approval. That's just a fancy way of saying that manuscript and the cover that you uploaded, did you do it all correctly or not? So when you are ready, so you've got your manuscript and you've got your cover ready to go. You go to k d p.amazon.com. Now, this is my kVp.amazon.com. And for the purposes of what we're demonstrating here, let's go with paperback. So let's zoom through this language. Whichever language you want, book title or offload Chloe's book again. So we'll put in Chloe, The Girl from dairy. This one didn't have a subtitle, so I don't need to put anyone in. It wasn't part of a series or addition number. You could fill those out if you want. Obviously, I'll put my name in. Contributors. There weren't any. If you had an illustrator or something like that, this is where you can put them in description. For me, the goal of this book was simply to publish one copy or two copies. Want to center myself so I could show you and the other one too obviously sent to Chloe. I'm not thinking about selling this book to the general public. So the description, you need to put one in. I just put this something like this is a story about a lovely girl named Chloe. For me, that was enough. But if your goal was to be a bestseller, When I asked you what your goal with a book is, you will need to give some thought as to what description would best fit what someone is searching for left is that, let's say as an example, or what gives your book, what description would give you a book the best chance of being found? That also applies by the weight of the title and the subtitle which I just gloss pass. That is more important if you want your book to be found by the general public. So what I might suggest that you go through this video, see all the different information that you're going to need to fill out. And then if you really want your book to be a bestseller, maybe give some thought to it before you start the uploading process because it's a bit late to be trying to figure it out on the fly and not too late but on the fly. You might not be able to give it the thought that it deserves if you want it to be a bestseller. But for me, for this book, I'm only expecting to sell two copies. So that description right, there will be just fine publishing rights. I own the copyright. This is one of the reasons why use Canva because I know all the images in there I can use. If you're publishing a public domain work, that's not something we've covered, then you would hit that here. Keywords. Now it says optional because once again, I'm not intending on selling any copies of this book. I'm going to leave that blank. If you are intending on selling a bestseller or selling it at least to the general public. You'll want to put keywords in. This is not an exact science. Different people say different things. I would suggest if your book is about real estate, real estate in there. If you're trying to sell our children's coloring book, put children's coloring book in there. So you can have up to seven key words. But give some thought to this. If you want your book to be discoverable by members of the public, categories, choose up to, to browse categories. You'll need to choose at least one. Here, the different categories. Now, again, because I'm just sending this book to Chloe. I think I just put comics and graphic novels and just put gentle and I'd be done. That's fine. If you are intending to be a bestseller, The wisdom is you want to try and pick categories that are applicable to your book, but aren't super competitive. That way you give your book the best chance of hitting number one in that sub category or that niche or niche. And then you increase the chances of Amazon promoting your book for you in the suggested results. So there are a lot of different categories here. But for example, if you go into nonfiction and let's say you go into business, I would say the general business and economics niche is going to be super competitive. So you probably don't want to pick that one. You might, maybe it's about bookkeeping, that it probably be a bit less competitive and gifts. But again, it's not an exact science. Pick. You need to pick at least one category. You can pick up the two. And your book will rank differently or separately in those two categories. Again, because if this was just a gift for Chloe, the categories really were immaterial for my purposes. Adult content. Now, for Chloe's book, it happened too, yes. So I'm gonna hit yes. If your book doesn't have adult content, then hit, Save and Continue. So that was the paperback details. Now we're going onto paperback content. Remember there are three phases here. Isbn is a unique identifier for your book. You can buy them yourself. They do cost money but might as well get a free one. Hit. Assigned me a freak ADP ISBN. There it is. Publication date, I leave it blank, which means it will default to today's date. If for some reason you wanted to put the date in the past, you could do that as well. Print options. Well, what did you choose back all the way in the trim size and what type of book. Right. So I chose premium color interior. The trim size, it wasn't six by nine. It was 8.5 by 8.5. It is bleed settings. Me there was no bleed. Paperback cover finish. This is a glossy cover. You can see it's shiny. If you publish and met cover. It's not shiny. I like the shiny cover for children's book. I will say that if people are going to take photos with your book and it's in front of flash photography, then this will just blind the photographer and you won't see the book details. So mad cover, the only thing I can really think of is it's better for flash photography. Otherwise, I really think it's a matter of subjective choice. I will choose glossy. It's a children's book. There we go. Glossy is the part you've been waiting for. Manuscript. Upload your paper back manuscripts. So if you created it in Word and you format it that correctly fingers crossed, then this is where you'd upload it. As you can see here, you can upload a doc, doc X HTML, TF. You can also upload the special Kindle create format there as well. But you go to upload your paper back manuscripts, I hit this. I will find Chloe's book, which is here, and I manuscript dot PDF, double-click that. Does the uploading. Now, I think it goes without saying the bigger the manuscript, the longer will take to upload or to depends on your Internet speed. But that should be uploaded. Now, it will normally say uploaded. Okay. There it is. I don't know why I wasn't saying I uploaded before, but manuscript has been uploaded successfully. We move on. If you want to use the Kindle cover creator, the one that is a bit more basic, but hey, it works. Then you'd hit Launch cover creator and you'd be routed straight into the cover creator. I'm not going to use that because I created my cover in that print ready PDF. So I will upload my cover file. There's my cover, cover dot PDF, double-click that, does its thing again, uploads and now that's done as well. It should say cover uploaded successfully. I'm not sure why it's not coming up, but we'll check other it is cover uploaded successfully. Now, did my Does my cover include a barcode? No, I didn't put the bar code on there myself. I left a space for it, but I didn't put one there, so I leave that blank. Now here's where you go through the preview. So book preview, we're going to check that our book actually looks right. So hit Launch preview. Now, it may take some time depending on how big your manuscript and the cover that you just uploaded is. So you may need to give it a few minutes. When I did my 800 page tome, I think it took about five or so minutes at least for this preparing your files and to finish and for the preview to load up. But go away like a coffee, whatever you need to do, and then come back when it loads up. And here it is. So now just before you start worrying about the dotted lines, these are just the guides. So if I click guys, they're not gonna be printed, but it's useful to see where the margins are. So that's the cover, ron cover on the right, back cover on the left. And then you can go through this page by page and just make sure that the text there's no spelling mistakes. Make sure it's within the gray line. That's where the margins are. Make sure the images are within the gray lines so you can go through the whole thing like this. Or rather than the two-page view. What's neat is that you can hit the thumbnail view. You can see the book as it would actually appear, as it's gonna be printed with odd pages and even pages. So page spreads. So page on the left, page on the right. I've checked obviously before I published Chloe's book, I checked to make sure it's all okay. So I know this is all okay. I can hit Approve. But if this is the first time you're uploading, it really makes sure that everything looks right, that there are no spelling mistakes, that everything's within the margins. Because if you submit it and it's wrong, then kVp will flag it and you'll need to go through this process again. Better to take a little bit more time here and get it right then glossy fruit and have to go through the whole process again. But suffice to say, when you've done your checking, it approved the bottom-right corner. And we'll scroll back down. It will now tell you based on the choices you made with your ink and paper type, et cetera, how many pages you're printing cost. This is not your list cost. This is not what the public will pay. This is how much you're going to pay in the different Amazon countries for the printing. $3.60-five us for Amazon.com. As an example, versus $5.5 Australian fires here in Australia, but we'll hit Save and Continue. Okay, final phase, we're almost at the paperback, the rights and the pricing page. Territories. Select the territory for which you hold distribution rights. I just leave it as all. If you wanted to individual for some reason you can do that there. I'll leave it as all. Choose location where you expect the majority of your books at us. Now to be honest, I think the only function of this is to decide which price comes up at the top down here. So if I leave it as Amazon.com, which is the American store, then the top line here is in US dollars. Now you can see minimum, maximum. So I need to enter our price somewhere within there. So let me put $9.90 in us than I tab. Then what Amazon does, which is actually really cool, is it figures are roughly equivalent price in the other countries. So one US dollar being more than one Australian dollar. You can see here, if I charge roughly ten US dollars, Amazon and suggesting to charge $14 roughly in Australian. If I chose, if I change this to be Amazon.com today, you then at the top is the Australian dollar price with different mean and different max. So let's say I put in here 1999. Give it a second. Then Amazon will calculate rough price is based on the Australian price. I don't really think this makes any difference. It's not like if I put in Amazon.com, people in Australia can't buy it. I know that's certainly not the case because I've done Amazon.com before and people will necessarily have been able to buy my book. People in the UK, people in the EU. I think it's really just what ends up being this price up here that Amazon will base everything else on. Having said that, you can choose and set all of these prices individually. So if you wanted it to be £7.99 rather than £7.66, you can put that in there. And that by the way, because it's not the primary marketplace up top, it won't affect all the rest down here. So you can go down here and go, oh, I want it to be 99999099999999999. Neural. I want it to be 1199 yen, $12.99 Canadian 1399, Australian, €999. So you can see that's how that works. So it's just a top-line. Amazon likes to calculate a rough equivalency for you and that's a neat feature. On the right, you will see numbers. This is money. So you're printing cost, amazon royalty rate. So 60 per cent of the list price that you've put in here, then the royalty that you actually get is the 60% minus the printing cost. If you wanted to use expanded distribution, which is Amazon, might promote your book into other channels or other bookstores. You can take that. For that you pay in the form of reduced royalties. So if you enroll your book into expanded distribution, you only get 40% royalty. So you can see that your royalty is decreased. Obviously, whether you want to do that or not, It's completely up to you. I don't. I'm happy to just sell on Amazon. So that's how the pricing works. Once you're happy with that. T's and C's, as it says here, that you can take up to 72 hours for your book to be available. I found that the beginning of 2022, at least in my children's books, it's taking about 24 hours. Having said that, if your book is bigger or more complicated, it might take longer, but it's up to 72 hours by clicking publish, blah-blah-blah. Of course, here's where you actually hit Publish. Now, I would recommend that you do, do a quick once-over, especially on your first time, that everything is right before you hit Publish. Because once you hit publish, the approval process is going to begin. And then if you change anything, once the approval process has begun, their approval process has to begin or over again, which means another 24 to 72 hours. So that yellow button there, I guess should be a red button. You hit Publish and then Amazon will go away and begin its approval process. Then after 24 to 72 hours in your inbox, you will get an e-mail from k d, p. It will either say something like this. Your paperback book is available, which means, hey, you pass, it's all good to go. Anyone can buy it. And here's a link to buy it on Amazon. If there's something that needs to be changed or fixed or corrected, you'll get an email like this saying attention needed. The email will tell you what needs to be fixed. You then need to go away and fix it, re-upload it if that's applicable, and then trigger the hit Publish and trigger the approval process. Again. This is why I said it's better to take a bit more time, get it right the first time. So you don't get an e-mail that says, Hey, your manuscript wasn't formatted correctly, then you need to fix it anyway, trigger the upload process and then wait another 24 to 72 hours. So it just pushes you back. 13. Uploading/publishing an eBook to KDP: Let me quickly run you through the e-book uploading process because it's almost exactly the same. So share the screen. We go to Kindle e-book and you'll see much of this is familiar, so I'm not gonna go through this again. Put in sample book, title, series, edition number, author, exactly the same. Contributors, exactly the same if you had an illustrator description, this is a cool prescription and remember, you need to give this more thought if you really want your book to be discoverable by the public, I own the copyright. Keywords exactly the same as with a physical book. Browse Categories, exactly the same for this one. I just choose nonfiction and let's choose, I don't know, health and fitness and general age range, agent grade range. This is a bit different. You can pick whatever you want for this, it's optional if you want to pick a children's book age range or US grade range, I'm ready to release my book now. You can make an e-book available for pre-order up to a year from the release state. You can read through that and see if it's right for you. But I'm ready to release my book now. Hit Save and Continue. Okay, this is a bit different. This is the upload manuscript. Digital rights management. Again, Kindle is good at explaining what this is. You can choose whether you want to enable digital rights management on your book. I tend not to, because I'm not too worried about people pirating my book because if they do while they're reading my book anyway, but maybe you want to enable it. But uploading e-book menu script, you remember what I told you about Kindle create and that you could upload the same file not only for your physical book, but also for your e-book, or here's how it works. Here's the KPF far from kindled, create our user to create the paperback version. By the way, this book right here was created from that KPF file. So here's working. The credit really is super cool, saves you a lot of time. I hit that KPF file and it's going to upload it for my e-book. I don't need to create two separate files. Do any separate formatting, done, cover, creator, or cover exactly the same as before. I will say the color for an e-book is different. So uploading a cover for an e-book, it requires a different type of file. It's a JPEG or tiff file, which is a fancy way of saying it's a basic image file. You don't need to worry. So specifically, if anything, it's easier than creating the paperback or hardcover image file. If you need the guidelines, you can click them here. And you can see here it says format. These two files, I would say J peg is the more common one. Ideal dimensions recover files 2560 by 1600. So you could easily go into Canva, create a new design, make a 2560 pixels high, 1600 pixels wide, and then go nuts and create whatever file you want exported as a JPEG. Then you'd come back to here, upload your cover file, which for me is here, test cover up like that. Now it's finished uploading successfully. So manuscript is their cover is uploaded there. You launched the preview, exactly the same as for your physical book. And you can see here that it has launched the preview. It looks a little bit different because it's an e-book. But you go through the same process. Make sure in this case, this is not a book that has images, but you still want to check the spelling. Make sure the formatting looks about right Kindle formatting is a bit different, but just make sure it's good. When it's good. You can also see what it looks like with different font sizes because on most Kindles you can change the font size. So play around with it. That's how it looks on a tablet phone Kindle, eReader. And you've got your table of contents which has automatically created because you use to kindle create for this. This is where it's super, super cool. So you can click on this and it will take you straight to the correct chapter, which obviously you can't do in a paper bag. But once you're done here, go back to the book details, scroll down to the bottom and we say ISBN. Now it says can do e-books are not required to have an ISBN. So if you wanted to put one in, you can, but you don't have to. I'm not going to I don't want to make this more complicated than it has to be. Hit Save and Continue. And then final page, the pricing. Maximize my royalties with kVp select again, it's optional. If you want to enroll, you can find out well, you can find out more about what kVp select is there. Katie p. Select is basically almost like Netflix. You pay a monthly subscription and you get to read lots of books. And my understanding is that you then get paid for how many pages of your book people read on a Kindle eReader. So because it can track that. So if you wanted to enroll in that, you can, there is a caveat there. If you want to enroll in KTB select, you'd like to make your Kindle e-book exclusive to Kindle. So read up more about that if you want. I'm just going to leave that for now. Um, well, let's hit Enroll. Territory is exactly the same as with a physical book. I'll leave it as all primary marketplace. You know how this works. Since I'm from Australia, I guess I'll put it in Australian. Now, you can select a royalty plan here which is different. Thirty-five percent. You might ask, well, why would I want to pick 35 per cent? It comes down to the prices here. If I pick 35 per cent, I can charge anywhere from $0.99 to 220 Australian. If I want 70% royalties, Kindle, amazon will lock me into a much more fixed price range. So it's up to you. If you're happy to have it within this price range, obviously, you will get the 70% royalty, which is more if you need it for some reason or wanted to charge something different than you'd have to go with a thirty-five percent royalty. Kindle charges, delivery fees versus printing fees for the physical book. It's a lot less than the printing fees minute, so $0.03. You will see here also 70% royalty plan has delivery fees based on how on the file size. So how large is a file? 35 per cent royalty does not charge delivery fees. So this is all very self-explanatory, even though there's lot of information here, it's not too complicated to understand. And you'll see your final royalty calculated there. If I hit 35 per cent, you'll see that it updates there. So set your price is the same way as you would with a physical book. You can allow Kindle book lending if you want to. Okay. I believe if you put in 70%, then it's locked. You have to allow. So that's just a little detail there. This will look familiar. It can take up to 72 hours, but once you are ready and you've double-checked it, hit Publish, it will take those same 24 to 72 hours to either be approved or come back and say, Hey, you need to fix this up. Then wanted to proved, then you're good to go and it will be available to purchase on Amazon. 14. Wrapping it up: Okay, We made it well done. I feel like because I've recorded this course in one go and my throat is beginning to hurt. I feel like I've dumped a whole lot of information on you. So go back, watch the parts and watch it again. Watch the parts that you didn't understand again, what your parts that pertain to you. Again, if I didn't explain something fully enough, We're still confusing. Then please please feel free to email me info at Adrian jay Kwan.com and I will be happy within reason, obviously to help you out. I won't simply take your manuscript, format it for you, upload it to the cover, all that stuff. But if you have any particular questions as to, let's say you publish your first book and it comes back and it needs a correction and you're not really sure what that means. I'm happy to help. If you have any questions or you need advice about what sort of trim size to use or you have a book idea and you maybe want some suggestions or advice, then I'm happy to give you give you that advice as well. But suffice to say, I mean, I started this course pretty much by showing you all the different types of bolts I have created, especially just within the last month or two in 2022. So I like to say that everyone has a book inside them. That's not to say a book inside them, which would be painful. But I think for everyone, there's at least one book that you could publish that would be useful to someone somewhere. So I really hope this course has given you an idea to different types of books that you can create. Different types of goals you can create, whether you want to be a bestseller or as I've done, you just want to create a one-off unique book has a really cool gift. I really loved this idea by the way, I'm going to do more of those. But suffice to say, the sky's the limit, you're really only limited by your creativity and your imagination. So now that you pretty much know the fundamentals of how to create any book, the different types of manuscript, the cover, and the uploading process. Please please please go away and give it a go. This would be a waste of my time and your time or mainly your time. If you just watched some code that you never do anything with it. And I'm continually astounded by how many people have author on their bucket list says they have wanting to become a published author on their bucket list. And the reason it's on their bucket list is because I think it's so hard to do. It's up there with things like jumping out of a plane and climbing Mount Everest. Sunlight publishing a book is much easier than either of those two. So I hope this shows you the different options, how to get it done. You can always educate yourself more, especially like with low content, no content books, if you wanted to educate you. So how to use Photoshop or InDesign, you can go and do that too. But I hope this gives you a good grounding. If you have any questions, as I said, e-mail me info at Adrian jay Kwan.com, and I'll be happy to help you out. And all that remains is for me to wish you best of luck with your authoring journey. And I hope you drop me an email and let me know how you went.