If you consider yourself a serious creative person, you need to write a book, especially if you want others to take you seriously. It’s the business card and resumé of the 21st century.
There are plenty of YouTube videos and blog articles that can tell you how to get your book on Amazon, but they’re a crapshoot.
To save you time and grief, in this post—the first in a three-part series (subscribe so you don’t miss it!)—I’ll lay out the steps and best practices for how to do it.
Here’s now to publish a paperback book on Amazon:
Cover
The biggest mistake most first-time authors make is designing their own cover. Don’t do it. You’re hurting yourself. Hire a professional. Expect to pay anywhere from $100-$500 for a decent cover. The cheapest and best place to go is 100 Covers.
When you design your own cover, or get help from your buddy who’s a pretty good designer, this is like writing your resumé on a legal pad with a ball-point pen. Imagine how an employer would look at you holding such a resumé. That’s how readers will look at your book if you design your own cover.
Be sure your cover designer also provides covers formatted for ebook and audiobook as part of a package.
Formatting
Pick a good size for your book (“trim size”). Do your own research as to the best size for your type of book. There’s no right or wrong size. Amazon has a few options, listed here.
The cheapest way to format the interior of your book is with MS Word. You can upload a .doc file—even an .rtf file—to Amazon and they’ll format it for you. It won’t look amazing, but it will work.
The next cheapest ways to format the interior of your book are to lay it out yourself using Canva (about $13/month), Adobe InDesign (varying monthly fee, depending on the software package), or Vellum ($250). Of the three, Adobe InDesign is the best and most versatile option but has the steepest learning curve.
Should you design the book interior yourself? It’s up to you. It’s far less critical than the book’s cover, which you should never design yourself. If you decide to take a crack at the interior, at least find a YouTube video and follow a few simple instructions for designing a good interior. It’s not rocket science. The cover is.
The Cadillac option is to hire a professional to lay out your book interior in Adobe InDesign and provide you with a pdf that you’ll upload to Amazon. You can find someone competent to do this on Fiverr. They’ll look cheap at first, but a qualified, experienced, and well-reviewed pro (the only kind you should hire) will end up costing around $100 once you select all the necessary upsells.
Uploading
Once you have your cover file and your interior file—or even a rough draft of them—go to Amazon KDP (“kindle direct publishing”), create an account, and follow the steps below to upload your book.
I’m skipping over the obvious steps, like how to enter your name, which you probably know how to do. This is for Amazon.us. If you’re in another country, you may see different options.
Hit "+ Create” > "Create Paperback”
Enter your title and subtitle. Do some research with Keywords Everywhere to pick a title and subtitle that a lot of people are searching for. This little step will impact your sales more dramatically than just about any other thing you do.
Enter a book description. The cheap way to do this is to write it yourself. You can use HTML tags to create bigger headlines and other fancy formatting. Amazon provides a list of which ones you can use here. I don’t recommend writing the description yourself. It’s a job for an experienced copywriter. You can find someone on Fiverr to do it for you. The Cadillac option is to hire Brian Cohen’s Best Page Forward. They’re the best.
Choose your categories wisely and be sure to select all three allotted. The more detailed the categories, the better. Be sure they accurately represent your book. For help with this, I recommend Publisher Rocket. Lifetime access is only $25.
Choose your keywords carefully. You’re allowed seven and you should use all of them to help more people find your book. Use long-tail keywords according to Amazon’s guidelines.
On the next page, select “Assign me a free KDP ISBN.” Save this number.
Choose “Black & White interior with cream paper.” This is standard. White paper looks weird in a book. They don’t let you change this later.
Select your book’s size (the size you picked when you formatted your book to start).
Select “Matte finish.” It looks a lot better than “Glossy.”
Click “upload manuscript” and upload your interior file document.
Select “Upload a cover you already have” and upload the print-book cover file you got from your cover designer. Let Amazon create a barcode for you. Your designer will have left a space for this on the back.
Click “Launch Previewer.” Be sure to flip through every page of your book with this virtual-proof tool carefully to make sure it looks good.
Before you hit “save” and go to the next page, make note of the printing cost of your book at the bottom. This is how much Amazon will charge you every time you sell a book and they print it on demand. You’ll need to price your book higher than this amount in order to make a profit.
On the next page, leave “All territories” selected.
Pick a price for your book. Price it as low as you can if you want sales. If you prefer to look legitimate and sell fewer books, price it in the same range as other books of your type. Let Amazon calculate the price for other territories.
Before you click “publish your book” at the bottom, you can still edit all the above settings. Just click one of the other two tabs at the top. You can also save these settings and come back to them later.
Click “publish your book.” After you click, you’ll still be able to edit most of these settings, including uploading an updated book interior and cover, like if you find a typo. You can do this for the life of the book, which is one of the sweetest things about self-publishing.
Marketing
You won’t sell any books or get any reviews without marketing. And you need reviews to look legitimate. Check out this post from the other day for some of the best marketing practices.
Follow-up
For a book to do for you what a resume and business card might have done for you in the 20th century, you need some follow-up to make sure your book looks good online when people Google you and find it. Follow-up steps include:
Optimize your author profile on Amazon here.
Get some reviews! You need these for your book to both sell and function as a resumé. Ask all your friends to buy and review your book. Ask people on your email list to review your book. Pay for a service like Pubby to do review swaps. (Pubby only works with ebooks. See tomorrow’s post). All of this marketing will give you a good start.
Keep marketing your book as long as you can.
If you have questions, ask in the comments. Good luck and good writin’!
100 Covers...thank you.
Self-published my book earlier this year on Amazon. Super helpful guide!