Self-Publishing on Amazon

Amazon is a great place to do some market research, including checking out how many books are selling in your niche.  This tutorial shows a couple of examples of how you can find out book sales volumes and other book details by visiting Amazon.com.

It may depend on the type of book you are writing, but for non-fiction writers, it is worth planning out your book before you start to write it,  I want to show you how I do it, with mind mapping.

You can use any Word Processor you like to write your books.  I'll show you a few of the alternatives, and tell you which on I recommend and am using in this course.

To make the formatting of your book as simple as possible, you need to make correct and diligent use of Styles.  This lecture looks at the styles in Word.

You cannot just use any fonts for your book.  Fonts, like images, are owned by someone.  You therefore have to be very careful about fonts used in your books and covers.

The way you create your heading is important, as these are used to generate the table of contents.  I'll show you how to correctly use headings, and also how you can quickly change the font, size or weight of the heading.

When you are writing your book, it can be tempting to use the carriage return to space things out.  Don't do it.  It will mess up the formatting of the book in Kindle.  Use Styles to control spacing, and page breaks to move chapter titles to new pages.  This lecture shows you how.

If you want to add links to webpages in your book, you can.  E.G. If you are a fiction author, it makes sense to include a link back to your author site.  If you write non-fiction, you might want to include URLs to important documents on the web.  

The way you handle hyperlinks depends on whether you are creating Kindle only, or Kindle & Createspace paperbacks.  This lecture explains how to insert hyperlinks into your books.

Bullet points can make non-fiction easier to read, but they can cause a headache with the final formatting.  If you find your bullets don't render properly in your Kindle conversion, this lecture shows you how to insert them manually.

I cannot help you write the book, but I can give you a few tips on how I go about it.  This lecture looks briefly at creating a skeleton book, then just filling it in.

Should you use colour or black and white photos in your books?  And what resolution? This lecture explores these questions.

Screenshots are often found in non-fiction tutorial style books, but they do come with a few restrictions, namely resolution.

Page Numbers are required for paperbacks, but not for Kindle.  I recommend that if you are going to be publishing your book on Createspace too (paperbacks), that you insert page numbers when you start writing the book.  During the process of saving for Kindle, these will be stripped out anyway.

All books, whether Kindle format or paperback, should have a table of contents (TOC).  In this lecture, I'll show you how to add one, plus add a necessary bookmark to help Kindle find the TOC.  Failure to do this last step could lead to your book being removed until you do.

Bad grammar and spelling will lead to bad reviews.  Bad reviews will kill the sales of your books.

Whether you hire an editor, or get a friend to proof-read your book, it does need to be done.  You can also take the cheapest option and do it yourself.  

Learn how to save your book in a format that can be imported directly into Amazon Kindle.

A note about paperbacks.

Before you can start publishing your book, you need to create an account on KDP.  Actually, if you have an Amazon account, you can login with those details.  If you don't have an Amazon account, you'll need to create one first and then login with the details. 

A worksheet you can use as you go through the publishing process.

Book Covers are really important, often providing a first impression to your potential customers.  While I cannot help you design a cover, I can give you guidelines to follow and places to go if you want to hire someone to do this for you.

What language is your book?  And is it supported by Amazon Kindle?  This lecture shows you which languages are supported on Kindle.

There are only a couple of guidelines for title, which are covered in this lecture.

Is your book part of a series? If it is, you can enter the series information, and this will help customers find other books in the same series.

The edition of a book can tell customers whether the book is an original version, or a significantly updated later edition.

Who wrote the book?  Did someone edit the book, or provide illustrations?  Amazon gives you the opportunity to mention everyone that contributed.

The book description is your chance to pre-sell a potential customer.  You have up to 4000 characters to do that.  When someone finishes reading the description, you want them to be excited about reading your book.

When you publish a book, you must specify whether you have the publishing rights of the book.  This lecture looks at the options.

You need to choose 7 keywords that represent your book. These will help your book rank for your chosen phrases, so you need to choose words that are:

1. Relevant
2. Being searched for by Amazon visitors.

You need to submit your book to two categories but it's not as easy as it sounds.  This lecture mentions the BISAC system Amazon uses to categorise books, and how the actual categories you have to choose from are not the BISAC system.

Amazon will filter books according to age range and grade range.  Therefore if you are writing books for a young market, these are worth filling in to make sure your book is shown to the appropriate audience.

DRM can help protect your book from unauthorized distribution.

The final step in our preparations is to decide on a price for the book.  The minimum price is 99 cents, but commission rates are linked to book price, so this lecture explains how this works.

We've spent some time creating a checklist document that contains all of the information we need to publish our book on Amazon.  In this lecture, we'll use that information and go through the publishing process.

So you've pressed the publish button.  What happens next?

The look inside feature on Amazon gives customers a sneak peak at your book.  You control that sneak peak, so make it count.

Author Central is your "profile" on Amazon.  This lecture looks at how you can use Author Central to promote your books.

If you are enrolled in KDP Select, Amazon allow you to give your book away for free.  What's the point of that you ask?  Watch the video to find out.

As part of the KDP program, you can create a Kindle Countdown promotion.  This tutorial explains what they are.

The KDP dashboard gives you all the tools you need to track sales.   

This is the release strategy I often follow, and recommend for new authors.

This lecture explains where to start when you come to publish your paperback.

This lecture looks at wrapping text around images for a cleaner layout, and the implications of doing so in terms of book length and printing costs.

You need to decide on the size of your print book.  The size you choose will have an impact on the royalty rate you receive per book sale.  This lecture explains how it all works.

It's important to check the styles are correctly used in your document.  This lecture shows you what to look for.

Make sure all of the links in your document are correct and display in an easily typed format.

It's important to go through your book, page by page, to check for any minor layout issues.  I'll show you what to look out for in this video.

The position of your first numbered page is important.  Let's see how to make sure yours is correct.

The final check is to make sure the table of contents is correct, and updated.  After updates, make sure your page numbers match the TOC.

While I cannot teach you to use a graphics package in this course, I can show you the basics of creating your paperback cover.

Please read this before getting the ISBN for your book.

The interior is done and checked, the cover complete.  Now is the time to submit the book to Amazon KDP.

This lecture finishes off the section on paperback publishing.

This lecture explains the importance of the NCX navigation system.

This lecture shows you the two free tools you'll need to generate the NCX navigation system.

When implementing the NCX navigation system, you might want to make a few changes to the Kindle manuscript.

This lecture shows how to use Sigil to create your document for upload to KDP.

This lecture shows the process for updating your book if you need to make changes.

This video shows how easy it is to create footnotes and citations in your Kindle books.  This will allow your Kindle readers to click a link to view a footnote, then use the back button on their Kindle to go back to continue reading.

This bonus lecture includes all of the resources mentioned in this course.