How to Publish Your E-Book on Amazon in 3 Quick and Easy Steps

Just a few years ago, trying to get a manuscript published was like searching for the Holy Grail, or, my favorite metaphor, emptying out the Atlantic Ocean one spoonful at a time.

Then along came Amazon.com’s digital publishing program allowing authors to upload their books to make them instantly available for sale to owners of e-book readers, smartphones, tablets, PCs and other devices. These readers of e-books buy the books, Amazon collects the money and then pays a royalty ranging from 35 % to 70 %, deposited directly to the author’s checking account. Cost to the authors? Nothing.

For many writers, the only stumbling block remaining is the mechanics of actually how one publishes on Amazon.

Author James Byrd, guest posting on social media coach Andrea Vahl’s Web site, recently did one of the better jobs of plainly explaining this simple process. He distilled the procedures into three easy steps, so painless that if you have a finished manuscript today, you might well have it online and selling tomorrow.

Step One: Prepare the manuscript

Step one is to get your manuscript ready in Microsoft Word. Keep things simple by eliminating all fancy formatting which may skew the uploading and converstion process. Forego bullet lists, tables, headers, footers, special fonts. Keep pictures to a minimum.

Step Two: Create an Amazon.com account

Open a Kindle Direct Publishing account at Amazon.com. Go to kdp.amazon.com. Either sign in with your existing Amazon account, or click a link to create a new account. Follow the instructions on subsequent pages. When choosing how to be paid, many authors choose the direct deposit option – to get their royalties quicker. 

Step Three: Upload the book

Once you have an Amazon.com account at kdp.amazon.com, you’ll be taken automatically to a page labeled “Bookshelf.” Here, you click on “add a new title” and follow the instructions. You’ll be prompted to enter information about your book, to upload a JPEG from your computer’s hard drive as a book cover, and to upload the Microsoft Word file that contains your book manuscript.
 
Some newcomers get confused when selecting a royalty rate for the book. The rate can be 35 % or 70 %. To get 70 %, Amazon requires a book to be priced between $2.99 to $9.99. More or less than that and the royalty drops to 35 %. When you finish, it will take a day or two for your book to go live on Amazon.com.

If your manuscript and your book cover are already finished, you could get them uploaded to Amazon in perhaps just a few hours, allowing time for formatting and adding “front matter” (title page, copyright page, table of contents, author bio). Even sooner, if the manuscript is already ready for an instant upload.

For more information on all aspects of getting published on Amazon.com, see Amazon’s tutorial at kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help.

Remember, though, that publishing a book, as lofty an accomplishment as that is, is just half the work. The other half is promotion. For information on publicizing and promoting your book, see A 25-YearPublicist’s Guide to Promoting Your Book.

Escape from Oblivion: What Could be the Single Most Effective, Least Time-Consuming Way to Promote Your Book?  

 

What could be the single most effective, least time-consuming way to promote a book today?

The short answer may be: Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing Select program  -- or KDP Select, for short.

If you are already an electronic publisher on Amazon, you can sign up for the KDP program for 90 days. You must agree to sell ONLY through Amazon for that period, although you can withdraw from the program at any time. Since many digital authors sell the lion’s share of their books through Amazon, anyway, this is often a small sacrifice.

 

While you’re in the Select program:

 

• Your ordinary customers can buy and download your books to their Kindles, smartphones, tablets and other devices as usual.

   

• Amazon customers who pay a monthly fee to be part of a special library-style program called Amazon Prime, can borrow your book cost-free. You still get paid – but out of a special monthly fund that Amazon sets aside for that purpose. The author-compensation fund varies each month. In March, 2012, Amazon set aside $600,000, and each author earned $2.18 per borrowing when the pie was divided. By the way, borrowings are counted by Amazon as “sales.” 

   

• Most significantly, you gain the right to have a total of five days in which customers can download your book for free. You can pick the days, and in any combination.

   

It is this last benefit that has brought me sales results that resemble the customer response I have gotten over the years from radio and TV interviews and press coverage.

 

For example, in the days leading up to the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of The Titanic this month, I offered a five-day free download to promote a title I released last year, Prophecies Surrounding the Titanic. Within three weeks, the book was downloaded for free 546 times and this resulted in 61 extra sales, a download-to-sales ratio of better than 10 per cent. Although the promotion has long since ended, I am continuing to get higher-than-normal sales.

 

Let me emphasize that I did virtually no promotion of this giveaway – except for a posting on Facebook and less than a half-dozen e-mails. It was simply an experiment. What if I had been systematic and thorough?

 

Giving away books seems counter-intuitive to writers, but you’re gaining massive exposure and building a fan base. Once heavy readers realize your material is professional and interesting, the ice is broken.  

 

Keep in mind also that all these free downloads – like the borrowings mentioned above -- count as customer demand when Amazon’s software calculates your title’s all-important demand ranking. These downloads push you up in the Amazon ranking charts. You’re like a band rising in Billboard’s charts and, as a result, having more radio stations play your “hit.” Which exposure results in more sales. In other words, this is a “virtuous” cycle upward – the pleasant opposite of a vicious cycle downward.

 

Only in Amazon’s case, as you move up in the charts, the Amazon software may start displaying your book in “teaser mentions” to readers who are searching for subject matter similar to that of your title. Also, you could begin to have readers, bloggers and others review your book online, continuing a promotional ripple effect. All this attention builds credibility for hesitant prospects.

 

You may also enjoy a spillover effect, as readers who discover you begin to look on Amazon for other books you’ve written.

 

Authors can repeat the Kindle Select Program for another 90 days after the initial period. This opens up the possibility of another five days of free download promoting. Happily, there is no cut off.

 

My conclusion is that Kindle Direct Select is ideal for professionally written, marketable books that are currently lost needles in the haystack of hundreds of thousands of titles in the marketplace. It’s an old axiom in publishing that the best book in the world will often die on the vine without promotion. KDP Select has become the spotlight to throw on any languishing book.