- Would you like to learn how to publish a book for free?
We're gonna do that in today's episode,
where we're gonna be getting started with KDP.
Stay tuned.
Hey, I'm Dale L. Roberts, best selling author,
as well as the self publishing advocate
who wants to show you,
how to publish books and sell.
If you want that too,
of course, subscribe to this channel,
and also join me every Monday at 12 p.m.
on Twitch.TV/selfpublish,
and you can subscribe for free,
with your Amazon prime
and get a few freebies in the process.
Stick around to the end,
I'm gonna show you a brief overview
when it comes to how to publish a book for free,
but I'm actually gonna show you another way,
in a deeper dive,
and I'll tell you at the very end of the video
where that's at.
So here are the best first steps
to publishing a book for free,
through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
Number one, set up an Amazon KDP account.
You're gonna go to KDP.amazon.com,
and you're gonna go ahead and set it up
with the particular email that you usually use for Amazon.
You're gonna fill out the tax and bank account information,
and just before anybody asks any of this,
they say, okay, what type of tax information
'cause I'm in a region doesn't collect tax
and such like that, regions will vary.
Okay, so you're gonna need
to find out what type of tax information
you, if you have questions,
scroll on down to the very bottom of KDP,
and there's a contact us link,
and you can go ahead and click that
and ask them there if you have tax questions.
Number two, create the content.
Okay, so you can't just simply go over
to the platform and just publish something
without actually having the content.
So you're gonna need to, of course, write the book,
you're gonna have to create the title,
the subtitle, the author name,
if you're gonna be having like a pen name of some sort,
think about a book blurb or a book description of some sort.
You need to get all this put together
also do something that's called keywords,
you need to put together some keywords.
These are the words that make your book more discoverable.
So think about when you go and browse the Amazon platform,
and how would your audience look up your type of book?
Think two to three words or more,
you're gonna need about seven of those
for when we upload your book on KDP.
Number three, two options, ebook and print book.
Okay, so for simplicity sake
and to keep this video as short as possible,
so that way you know the full process,
we're gonna kinda cover ebook.
Print book is a little bit more heavy lifting,
and requires more formatting, and some intricacies,
so I wanna kinda keep it simple, focus on ebook.
So what you'll do is
select Kindle eBook inside your dashboard,
you're gonna fill out all the relevant data
as soon as it goes in there.
So the title, the subtitle, the author name,
your description,
getting those keywords,
remember those keywords I told you about?
You also select categories,
and you gotta kind of probably browse a little bit
to find the right categories,
but either way, you're gonna go ahead
and select one that at least loosely resembles
what your book should be going into.
Click save and continue,
as soon as you're done on this first page.
Then you're gonna go ahead and upload your manuscript
and it accepts almost all types of documents.
So if you have Microsoft Word or use Google Doc,
Doc X is kind of like the gold standard,
you can upload it there.
Now bear in mind, when you do upload it there,
KDP has an auto formatting software that goes through,
and it may not look precisely as what you had done there.
There are ways to work around this,
but just to kind of keep this video brief again,
this is probably the easiest way to do it.
Next, you're gonna upload a cover or make it yourself.
Now we can talk about making a cover yourself,
and that requires an entire whole different video,
but for simplicity sake, you can either hire out
or you can use KDP's cover template.
Now the cover designer is not the greatest,
so I recommend that if you really want to make
a living at this and publishing your book,
then you may want to hire out
and get a good cover designer
to make something nice for you.
Stick around to the end,
again remember I told you I was gonna give you
a full instructions on how to self publish
a book beyond this particular video.
Now launch the preview,
you're gonna go through and you can look at it
on various devices, on various forms,
and see how it looks,
make sure everything's in place
exactly as you would imagine,
remember, it's gonna shift a little bit
because based on an iPhone or an Android or a tablet,
or an iPad or a desktop computer,
all these devices are gonna look different
and it's going to change up the way it looks
on each one of those areas,
so don't get too hung up on this area.
Now click Save and Continue.
Now it's time to go ahead and set the pricing,
and what I would recommend is look in your given niche
or your genre on Amazon and see what other books
are starting to price at,
this will give you a good idea.
Now, Amazon has a pricing Beta feature
it's been their Beta for a long time,
I don't always agree with it,
but if you find yourself kind of really hamstrung
and stuck on this step,
you can always just select what they say.
But I would recommend you try
to get it in the 70% royalty range,
because you'll be paid 70%
and stay in the 70%, it's 299 to 999.
If you go outside of that it's 35%.
Now I'll go into each one of the regions
and make sure that you keep it close to the dollar.
Now when I say close to the dollar,
make it 999 and not 938 or 947, or 1052,
get it as close to the dollar as you can.
So 99 is typically the dollar that I go for,
there's some psychological factor,
I don't recall right off top my head
where it's at, but either way,
go with closest to the dollar, just one cent below.
And now hit publish your Kindle eBook,
it's gonna be about 24 to 72 hours
for them to go through your content
to make sure everything's on the up and up
and it passes everything,
and you will most likely get a notification
when it is live and you actually have a link
to actually go over to your eBook.
Right as soon as you hit the publish,
there's gonna be a pop up screen,
it's gonna recommend
that you go into the print book version.
The whole upload process is somewhat similar,
but it's going to vary because you're gonna have to change
the sizing and such like that.
What I'm gonna recommend actually is,
I have an entire video series
called how to self publish a book.
And I actually did it with a company called Fiverr,
who helped me out with this whole thing,
it's in a six part video series.
Go ahead and join me on the very first part,
we do a deeper dive on what you need to do,
I will see you there.