- I'm gonna give you five need to know facts
about self publishing on Amazon KDP for Beginners.
Stay tuned.
Today's video is sponsored by the fine folks
over at ProWritingAid,
I'm gonna tell you a little bit more
about them later in the video.
Fact number one, free publishing for shared profits.
Not all is as it seems because, yes,
you can publish for free through Kindle Direct Publishing,
but it does come at a cost,
and that cost is actually known as revenue share
or revenue split
meaning that any time you sell an eBook or print book,
they're going to take a percentage of the profits.
For eBooks, you get 70% of all sales minus
any distribution fees.
So if you've got a certain file size,
they're gonna charge a certain amount.
If it's bigger, they'll charge more.
If it's smaller, they'll charge less.
Now keep in mind, though,
you're gonna have to read the fine print on this one
because it's not 70% in all regions.
There are certain regions, for instance, Japan,
that you're only gonna get 35% if you're not within
what's called the Kindle Direct Publishing Select Program.
Also, to get that 70%,
you need to price your eBook between $2.99 and $9.99.
In the event that you want to price outside of that,
you're only gonna get 35%, but the good news,
if there is good news to this,
you don't need to pay for distribution fees
if you have the 35% model.
Now is that enough to justify
that much of a decrease in royalties?
Ah, probably not because the distribution fees
are a matter of cents, and you know, maybe dollars at best.
For print books, it gets a little bit more tricky
because it's 60% minus the print fees equals your earnings.
So it gets a bit dicey here and you can price it anywhere,
unlike the eBook where it's 2.99 to 9.99 to get 70%.
For print books, it's 60%,
and it doesn't matter where you price it.
I believe you got to keep it below $200.
Fact number two, hard to set up, but easy to maintain.
The hardest part is setting up the banking information
and the tax information.
Now if you're within the United States,
it's probably relatively easy peasy.
You can just go ahead and be done with it,
or maybe some of this, probably not used to it
and you've never done it before
so it might seem a bit overwhelming.
Nonetheless, that's going to be the biggest hurdle
to overcome, and good luck, if you try to reach out
to the KDP Support Team to ask for guidance
on what to do for the tax identification information
or filling in your banking info,
they're just gonna send you over to
some rather ambiguous guidelines.
I'd recommend that if you feel like
you're in over your head,
either reach out to other authors
that are already established within this industry,
or more importantly, this is the probably safest bet,
reach out to a business lawyer
or an accountant of some sorts,
they can help you go through the whole process.
Fact number three, the KDP Select Program
equals 90-day exclusivity for eBooks only.
So the KDP Select Program
is essentially almost like a library-based system.
Kindle Unlimited is a customer facing product
to where when they subscribe to this service,
they're able to check out books
that are enrolled through KDP Select,
and for every time that they check out a book
and flip through a page, you're paid for each page read,
and here's the big bonus for you,
anytime they check out that book,
it influences your Amazon Bestseller ranking.
Now you're probably saying
that's a lot of information all at once, Dale,
I heard you say I was gonna get paid per page read,
okay, that's a good part, right, getting paid
anytime someone flips a page.
The better part is the fact that
you will actually get ranking.
You'll be recognized as selling
despite not selling any books.
I know it seems kind of confusing, but it is kind of nice
because it gives you the unfair advantage
by being in the KDP Select Program.
Now it is a 90-day exclusivity agreement meaning
that when you agree to enroll one eBook
into the KDP Select Program,
that eBook is set for the next 90 days until you unenroll
and until you de-list it from KDP Select,
and it's just a simple little checkbox
that you'd go in and make sure that you remove that.
Keep in mind that as soon as you select it,
it'll go into auto renew every 90 days
until you de-select it.
Don't like the results?
That's okay.
Just go ahead and fulfill the remainder of your 90 days,
and then, when it's all set,
just pull it out of the KDP Select Program.
At that point, you can publish your eBook
wherever your heart desires.
Now remember this.
It's probably gonna be easy for you to forget.
KDP Select only affects the eBook, not the print book,
and not the audio book version, just the eBook.
Fact number four, distribution rights differ.
Okay, so you remember in the last fact of KDP Select
where I talked about how KDP Select,
it did not affect the print or audio book,
well, this is almost universally true that eBook, print book
and audio book distribution rights vary.
So this means that even though
you might have it published exclusively as an eBook
on Kindle Direct Publishing,
you can take that print book
and publish it wherever you like.
Same thing could work for your audio book.
If for some reason you're publishing your audio book
as exclusive through audio book creation exchange,
you can still publish your eBook
and print book wherever you like.
Now there are rare occasions
and I can't think of any off the top of my head
where print books have some type
of an exclusivity agreement.
So in a lot of instances, print books can pretty much go
just about anywhere and everywhere.
If you have your own ISBN, well,
you can just about publish wherever you'd like
or wherever you'd want
or wherever you care to or wherever,
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and you won't feel as awkward or clumsy
as I did in that last take from fact number four.
Speaking of awkward and clumsy,
lets just switch on over to fact number five.
It's not a get rich quick scheme, right,
so a lot of people think
and have been told by all these would be gurus that
you could get rich quick by publishing small books,
and I hate to rain on your parade
that the instances of people getting rich quick
are far fewer than those
that really don't make a dime in this business,
and this is not to say that you can't have quite
a lucrative business in your hands,
but I'm gonna tell you it's gonna take a lot of work.
It's gonna take a lot of time.
It's gonna take a lot of perseverance.
It's not get rich quick,
but if you would like to actually
get some of the best first steps,
what I would recommend is you take a look at
the DIY Publishing Course for Beginners.
It's right up here.
Click on over there, it's DIYPublishing.biz/free.
It's 100% free to go through the whole course
and walk you through all the parts of Amazon KDP,
and by the way,
go take a look at this Amazon Author Central video series.
You can actually see
how you can leverage Amazon Author Central
to build your author profile
or take a look at this YouTube recommended video.
I'll see you in any of these links.