Episode 106
Publishing on Amazon is Easy!
Self-publishing on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is accessible and easy. Professional editing and formatting are essential. Use PDF and EPUB formats for both print and ebook versions. Consider specialized software or hiring a professional formatter. Design an eye-catching book cover. Create a KDP account and connect your bank account. Write a compelling book description, choose relevant categories, select keywords, and set a competitive price. Develop a marketing strategy. Join a writing community for support. Your book will go through a review process before being published on Amazon.
LINKS:
- Liz Wilcox's Email Marketing Membership at http://wmdeal.com/liz
- Get your FREE Move the Needle goal-setting for authors ebook at https://www.writingmomentum.com
- Write with us! Join Chris, Gena, and Rene each Wednesday at noon Central and let's get our writing DONE! https://www.writingmoments.com
Transcript
What do you need to self publish your book on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing?
Speaker:Hey, we can help with that.
Speaker:Hi everybody and welcome to Writing Momentum.
Speaker:I'm Gena Maselli and this is my husband Christopher Maselli.
Speaker:Welcome.
Speaker:Thank you for having me here.
Speaker:So glad you're here.
Speaker:Oh hey, I'm excited today because we're talking about self publishing
Speaker:and I love self publishing.
Speaker:We have both been traditionally published in the past.
Speaker:Actually quite a few times over the years, but we love this new whole
Speaker:self publishing world and a question we get a lot is well hey, I want
Speaker:to self publish is it difficult?
Speaker:And it's actually not that difficult, especially if you're doing it through
Speaker:Amazon because they've made it super easy through what's called KDP or
Speaker:their Kindle Direct Publishing.
Speaker:So today we're gonna talk a little bit about what do you need to
Speaker:self publish on Amazon's platform.
Speaker:Yeah, this is for the people that maybe you've thought about writing a
Speaker:book, or maybe you're in the middle of one, or maybe you've finished one, and
Speaker:you're wondering what the next step is.
Speaker:And it's a process.
Speaker:It's not a terribly difficult process.
Speaker:There's definitely a learning curve with it.
Speaker:But it's possible.
Speaker:Would you say that it is possible for the novice?
Speaker:I would say it's not only possible for the novice, but I'd say that
Speaker:learning curve is mostly in your mind.
Speaker:I know that sounds a little aggressive, maybe, but the truth is, when you
Speaker:publish a book on KDP, as long as you have everything you need to
Speaker:publish, which is what we're going to talk about in this episode, there
Speaker:are only literally three webpages.
Speaker:Three web pages to click through and it asks you questions on every web page
Speaker:or tells you exactly what to input.
Speaker:If you can go through those pages, you'll have a book published on Amazon.
Speaker:It's not near as difficult as you might think.
Speaker:If you're used to going through online questionnaires, if you've
Speaker:ever, taken out a loan online.
Speaker:That's not a good example.
Speaker:Loans can be difficult online, right?
Speaker:Because they ask you for a lot of information.
Speaker:But if you've ever gone through some kind of questionnaire online that's deeper
Speaker:than, what kind of Wookiee are you will probably be able to publish on Amazon.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:First, we strongly recommend that you have your book written.
Speaker:There you go.
Speaker:Start at the beginning.
Speaker:You can't really use KDP until your book is finished, right?
Speaker:Because KDP is for a book that is finished and ready to go.
Speaker:So before you jump onto the platform and start learning how all of it
Speaker:works and start setting things up and putting information in there.
Speaker:I recommend, leave it alone until you've got that book written.
Speaker:Once it's written, then you're very close to be able to publish it.
Speaker:But!
Speaker:The other thing you need to do is not only have it written,
Speaker:but you need to have it edited.
Speaker:KDP does not have any kind of internal way to edit your book.
Speaker:Now, it does have ways that it will automatically go through
Speaker:your book when you upload it.
Speaker:It'll tell you if it finds any spelling errors that are major, right?
Speaker:It's a little bit smart but, it's not very smart, it's not going to
Speaker:find if there's grammatical issues.
Speaker:It's not going to find if there's content discrepancies, right?
Speaker:It's not going to find anything like that.
Speaker:So you've got to make sure you've had your book edited.
Speaker:We recommend by four editors.
Speaker:Look back in our list of podcasts if you want to find
Speaker:out what those four editors are.
Speaker:But once you've done that, you've got your book written, you've got your
Speaker:book edited, you're almost ready to go.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:So then you need your book formatted and it needs to be
Speaker:formatted in PDF or in EPUB.
Speaker:So talk to us a little bit more about that, Chris.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:So ideally you want it formatted in both PDF and EPUB, because PDF is for a print
Speaker:book, EPUB is a file format for eBooks.
Speaker:So if you wanna publish both a print and an ebook, you're going
Speaker:to need it in both formats.
Speaker:Now, here's the thing.
Speaker:You can upload a Microsoft Award document to Amazon.
Speaker:And they will use their AI to format it for you.
Speaker:But can I tell you a secret?
Speaker:It looks pretty bad.
Speaker:Pretty bad.
Speaker:It doesn't work very well.
Speaker:We recommend you use an actual formatting program or that you hire someone to do it.
Speaker:A lot of people have hired me over the years to help them format their books
Speaker:and the reason why is because it's just not something that's It's very
Speaker:easy to do on your own, and it looks so good when you have it formatted.
Speaker:You can do some really fancy stuff in a print book especially,
Speaker:but also in an e book.
Speaker:But if you don't have it professionally formatted, that's
Speaker:something that cannot look good.
Speaker:So you want to make sure that you've written your book.
Speaker:You've paid someone to have it edited, you've paid someone to
Speaker:have it formatted, and then you've paid for what third thing, Gena?
Speaker:To have your cover done.
Speaker:Your cover done.
Speaker:Don't recommend you do your cover yourself.
Speaker:People, unfortunately, today still judge books by their covers.
Speaker:Make sure you have a very attractive, eye catching book cover created
Speaker:that hopefully looks like the genre that you're publishing in.
Speaker:Because people can tell when it's self published, if it
Speaker:doesn't look professional.
Speaker:You want people to not be able to tell, is this self published?
Speaker:Is it traditionally published?
Speaker:How did this get published?
Speaker:You want them to feel like it's truly authentic.
Speaker:Now, your cover needs to be in PDF format for a print book,
Speaker:or JPEG format for an e book.
Speaker:Those can both be exported easily by whoever designed your cover.
Speaker:I'm gonna back up a little bit when you were talking about
Speaker:having it Formatted in Word.
Speaker:We have worked with people before who have had their books formatted in Word.
Speaker:And if you've ever worked on a really long document in Word, and all of
Speaker:a sudden, somewhere, about three quarters of the way through the
Speaker:document, the formatting changes, the font changes, the size of the font
Speaker:changes, something about that changes.
Speaker:That is the thing that becomes very noticeable when you go to have
Speaker:it printed or when you go to have it uploaded or used as a ebook.
Speaker:And, It's just really noticeable.
Speaker:And it's one of those things that becomes, in my experience, it becomes it's not as
Speaker:quick as just going in and changing it.
Speaker:I've worked with people before that have had their books formatted in
Speaker:Word and all of a sudden they come to some section that is wonky and it's
Speaker:just somewhere in the code, it's not a quick, oh, I'm going to highlight this
Speaker:and change the font and change it and whatever because what they've done is
Speaker:they've tried to use Word for something that it's not meant to be used for.
Speaker:That's not its primary purpose.
Speaker:And so it became, I know in some of these experiences that I've seen and
Speaker:some that I've had, it becomes really difficult to fix some of these mistakes.
Speaker:So when Chris is talking about using a software that is designed for e
Speaker:publishing, It's really not just because, Oh, that's the cool thing to do.
Speaker:It's because you're using what it was meant to do.
Speaker:And so it becomes easier to catch those mistakes, to fix those mistakes, and
Speaker:to really give a polished product.
Speaker:And that's what you want.
Speaker:We're going to say that again.
Speaker:Microsoft Word is designed to write your book in.
Speaker:Microsoft Word is designed to edit your book in.
Speaker:Microsoft Word is not designed for formatting your book.
Speaker:So no matter how good you think it looks, no matter how much you think, Oh, I've
Speaker:created all these fancy things in it.
Speaker:You need to give your book to someone who can help you format it for the
Speaker:printed page and the electronic page.
Speaker:And when you do here's a big secret that I tell all my clients when I
Speaker:start formatting books for them.
Speaker:They're gonna the first thing they're gonna do is go in and strip all the fancy
Speaker:stuff you've done and get rid of it.
Speaker:So the best thing you can do for someone when they're gonna format
Speaker:your book is give them a book that's not been formatted at all.
Speaker:You don't even need tabs in it, right?
Speaker:You need paragraph breaks, but not tabs and then they can take that raw text
Speaker:and format it into something beautiful.
Speaker:And the reason that they strip out all of that formatting, and I know if you're
Speaker:someone who's fairly visual, you go in and you want it to look pretty when
Speaker:you hand it off and you work on it.
Speaker:I've done that myself.
Speaker:And you do all of this.
Speaker:The reason they strip all of that out, is because they want a blank canvas so
Speaker:that there are no little leftover code in there that's going to mess anything
Speaker:up that all of a sudden it's going to add a blank page in there or all of a sudden
Speaker:it's going to change the font or all of a sudden it's going to justify the text
Speaker:so that it's stretched out across the page or it's going to do the opposite.
Speaker:They're trying to get rid of all of that so that you don't have
Speaker:any of those little hiccups.
Speaker:So definitely find someone who can format your book with a true ebook
Speaker:publisher, an epublisher software so that you get a really polished.
Speaker:And then it also, Chris, I would imagine makes it really easy.
Speaker:If you decide you need to update your book for some reason, you can go in.
Speaker:And then it makes that process a lot easier as well.
Speaker:Yeah, one of the reasons we love self publishing nowadays is that you
Speaker:can correct anything at any time.
Speaker:I've had clients that have, I've helped publish books and they'll realize that
Speaker:right after it's published that they have a misspelling or they misspelled someone's
Speaker:name or they need to change something in the back or to protect someone's
Speaker:identity, they've got to take it out.
Speaker:And we can literally in minutes, change it, upload the new file and
Speaker:every book published from that point forward, will have the changes in it.
Speaker:Any ebook that has previously been sold, it'll go back and retroactively fix that.
Speaker:So in both cases, it's really great to self publish because of that.
Speaker:I would truly recommend that also, if you were dealing with any kind of
Speaker:finance, anything with a lot of numbers where those numbers are going to
Speaker:change as the years go by, definitely go ahead and do it in such a way
Speaker:that you can update your statistics.
Speaker:Any type of statistics that you're using, go ahead and make it easy for yourself
Speaker:so that in the future you can bring out new versions and update those numbers.
Speaker:So if right now it seems like, wow, this seems overwhelming, everything I
Speaker:need, let's just backtrack a little bit and really talk about what we've said.
Speaker:All we've said is write your book, edit your book, format your book
Speaker:and have a nice cover created.
Speaker:Those are all pretty standard things.
Speaker:You're gonna do that no matter what you do.
Speaker:But if you have those four things done, you're pretty much
Speaker:ready to self publish on Amazon.
Speaker:Here's the last few things you need.
Speaker:First of all, you have to have an account at kdp.
Speaker:amazon.
Speaker:com.
Speaker:It's completely free.
Speaker:Go to kdp.
Speaker:amazon.
Speaker:com.
Speaker:That stands for kindledirectpublishing.
Speaker:amazon.
Speaker:com.
Speaker:You log in with your Amazon login.
Speaker:So you use your Amazon username and password to log in.
Speaker:When you do, if it's your first time in there, they're going to ask
Speaker:you to connect your bank account.
Speaker:They're doing that because anytime you get royalties on your book,
Speaker:they're going to automatically deposit those into your bank account.
Speaker:Once that's done, now you go through those three pages that I was talking about.
Speaker:And on those three pages, here's what you need.
Speaker:You need a description.
Speaker:You need your categories that you want your book in, as well as some keywords.
Speaker:And you need to know the price of what you want the book to be.
Speaker:That's it.
Speaker:Those three things.
Speaker:Description.
Speaker:Category keywords, and the price.
Speaker:Anything you think about those three things that you want to share?
Speaker:With your description, I encourage you, whatever genre you are writing
Speaker:for, go out and read the descriptions of the other books in that genre.
Speaker:Especially the top sellers in that genre.
Speaker:Go ahead and look at how they formatted, and when I say formatted,
Speaker:how they structured their description.
Speaker:Description is really a big deal in Amazon.
Speaker:That's how people are choosing whether or not they're going to buy your book or not.
Speaker:It's your sales page.
Speaker:It's your sales page.
Speaker:So spend some time on that.
Speaker:And there are even people who do this for a living.
Speaker:They sell, that's their service is that they write book descriptions and they do
Speaker:that because they've really studied the science or the structure behind doing
Speaker:that so that they can lead readers, your readers, potential readers to a sale.
Speaker:So don't just think, Oh, I've written this great book, I'm going to throw it out
Speaker:there and everybody's going to want it.
Speaker:No, go through and do your due diligence of making sure that
Speaker:your description is really strong.
Speaker:If you can't afford to have somebody do that for you, there are, like I
Speaker:said, there are people that do this.
Speaker:But if you can't, then I really challenge you to study the other books in your
Speaker:genre, the top sellers in your genre.
Speaker:What did their description, have in it?
Speaker:How did they structure that description?
Speaker:You are, it's a big punch that you are going for in a very short amount of time.
Speaker:You've got just a few seconds to catch people's attention and to
Speaker:get them interested in your book.
Speaker:The best place to start is whatever you imagine is going to be
Speaker:written on the back of your book.
Speaker:So if you've uploaded your cover already, and that's when we talk about cover,
Speaker:we're talking about front and back of the book, whatever's written on the back of
Speaker:the book is probably what you're going to start off with as the description
Speaker:and you can always add to that.
Speaker:Now, I do want to say about categories.
Speaker:So as we talked about categories, description, price.
Speaker:Categories, you want to get as niche as possible, get it as narrow as possible.
Speaker:In other words, you don't want to be putting your book, if your book is a self
Speaker:help book, you don't want to have it in the Self help category because you're
Speaker:going to be competing against how to win friends and influence people, right?
Speaker:And I guess other major books that are out there.
Speaker:It's way too broad, so you want to niche that down as much as you can
Speaker:and so what you need to do is you just go in and On Amazon, you can
Speaker:actually see all the categories.
Speaker:You can start narrowing down and find out all the little
Speaker:categories that are available.
Speaker:And there's some other really great tools on the web.
Speaker:We're going to talk about this in a future episode about categories,
Speaker:how we select categories.
Speaker:PubRocket is probably one of the best and we really recommend using something
Speaker:like that to choose categories.
Speaker:But if you don't have it, go ahead and just be sure you niche it down.
Speaker:What is that again?
Speaker:PubRocket.
Speaker:Spell that for us.
Speaker:P U B Rocket.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:PubRocket.
Speaker:And then the other thing you want to do when it comes to price is, again, just
Speaker:like you did with the description, see what others are selling their book for
Speaker:in the same category that you've chosen.
Speaker:And make it about the same price as those.
Speaker:So your print book is going to be one price.
Speaker:Your ebook is going to be another price.
Speaker:Make sure both are competitive.
Speaker:You don't want to necessarily make, you certainly don't want to make it
Speaker:a lot more because people probably won't buy it and you don't want to
Speaker:make it a lot less because, Hey, you want to make money on this.
Speaker:So try to find that good place in between.
Speaker:And the other thing that we strongly encourage, and this is more than on
Speaker:the technical side of self publishing your book and that is really come
Speaker:up with a marketing strategy.
Speaker:Chris and I.
Speaker:You need a plan.
Speaker:You need a plan.
Speaker:You need a you need an idea.
Speaker:We get so sad when we work with authors or we hear about authors and
Speaker:they're so excited about their books that they put them out on Amazon
Speaker:but they have no strategy behind it.
Speaker:So it just sits there.
Speaker:This is not field of dreams.
Speaker:If you publish it, they will come.
Speaker:You are competing against millions of titles that are out there.
Speaker:So really put some effort into it.
Speaker:You have birthed this baby.
Speaker:Now take care of it and make sure that it, you know, you're giving
Speaker:it the best shot that you can.
Speaker:And we talk about some of this, Chris, on our Writing Moments and
Speaker:our our group that we work with.
Speaker:We've talked about different marketing strategies that you can use.
Speaker:And we've also talked about this in past episodes of our podcast
Speaker:about marketing and different tips that you can do for promoting.
Speaker:And we are going to be talking about it again, launching because this is
Speaker:a big part of it, but if you haven't heard about our group that we have,
Speaker:that we work with, and that we write with, and train about publishing.
Speaker:Go to writingmomentum.
Speaker:com and you will see our Writing Moments category.
Speaker:We meet once a week with people.
Speaker:We have strategy or training for about 15 minutes and then we write together.
Speaker:So we're hoping that not only do we help people learn about the publishing
Speaker:industry and about writing their book and about marketing their book, but
Speaker:we also give everybody a great time that they can mark in their calendar
Speaker:where they can join us and we have that on Wednesdays at noon central
Speaker:Yeah, and we want to do that because that helps us all get our writing done.
Speaker:We've said it before on here together we have writing momentum and that's what it's
Speaker:all about it's about writing together.
Speaker:Because let me tell you what when you do have a really good marketing
Speaker:plan, and marketing is a fancy word.
Speaker:But when you have a plan for how you're gonna sell your book.
Speaker:Oh Boy, is that a happy thing?
Speaker:We have worked with authors who have really pretty simple plans.
Speaker:They basically say, look, I'm gonna have a launch party.
Speaker:I'm gonna let people know about this.
Speaker:I'm gonna send out emails to my list.
Speaker:I'm gonna put some on social media and on their first few days, they
Speaker:might sell several dozen books just with just starting off, right?
Speaker:And it's amazing how exciting that can be and how that could really fuel
Speaker:a much larger sale in the future.
Speaker:So yeah, you want to have a plan.
Speaker:So just to recap, to start off, you want to have your book written, edited,
Speaker:formatted, as well as your cover.
Speaker:Then you log into kdp.
Speaker:amazon.
Speaker:com, connect your bank account, put in a description, categories,
Speaker:keywords, and your price.
Speaker:And then you're ready to go.
Speaker:When you hit submit, it's going to upload those files.
Speaker:It's going to take them, and Amazon usually takes about anywhere
Speaker:from, I'd say, 48 hours to 96 hours to approve your books.
Speaker:They have it go through, first of all, they have it go through
Speaker:a computer algorithm that kind of makes sure there's no hate speech,
Speaker:or anything like that in there.
Speaker:And then some books they also will have go through a pair of human eyes just to make
Speaker:sure that everything is set up correctly.
Speaker:This is really important, especially for the cover.
Speaker:They make sure that things aren't cut off on the cover and that, and
Speaker:they'll send you an email if it is, so it won't publish if there's an error.
Speaker:But if there is no error that thing will be live.
Speaker:It'll be out there and you will be a published author.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Hey, if you've enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, subscribe
Speaker:and share so others can find it.
Speaker:And let us know if you are self publishing your book where it is And how to find it
Speaker:and please send this episode to someone else who might want to know how to self
Speaker:publish their book too because remember we're not in this alone together.
Speaker:We have writing momentum.
Speaker:Bye bye
