How To Publish Your Book On Amazon
Before I go into details on how to publish your book on Amazon, such as the type of files, keywords, categories, blurbs, price, and other metadata, let's look at the basics.
The basics
In order to make a success of your Amazon Kindle title, and before you can publish your book you will need:
A brilliant story, aimed at a specific type of reader (ie. it is within a genre) that has been professionally edited, proofread, and formatted into a book that will delight readers.
A professionally designed book cover that signals to the readers what kind of book it is that they are about to read.
Lots of patience!
Publishing your book can be scary
I’ve helped many first-time self-published authors through the process of publishing a title on Amazon KDP and I know it can be a scary process. First of all, the thought of letting the world see something you’ve poured your heart and soul into requires courage. It can be terrifying to let go of the work, but it can also be frustrating. When you’ve finally taken the huge step to publish your book, the last thing you want to do is mess about with files and worry about keywords.
However, this final step in publishing your work is crucial.
That’s why I wanted to write this post to let you know how to publish your book on Amazon. Follow these steps and you’ll get there!
Why Amazon?
You may notice that I am only talking about publishing on Amazon. There are other platforms, many of which are gaining in popularity, but for the sake of simplicity, I am concentrating on Amazon. It is, after all, by far the largest book-publishing platform. The process is also fairly similar to all the other platforms, so once you've mastered Amazon KDP, you’ll find it a lot easier to do the same with the other online book publishers.
The decision to go wide with your book or just publish on Amazon is one that all self-published authors talk and ponder a lot about. If you are a first-time author new to the process, I recommend going exclusive with Amazon. You can read my blog about the pros and cons of both strategies here.
Book Title and an (optional) subtitle
The first decision you need to make before publishing your book is what you are going to call it.
It is important to consider your book tile carefully. Does it fall within genre conventions? I’ve written a blog post about how to find your genre here which you might find useful if you are struggling to know which genre your book falls into.
A book called Murder at the Palace for example immediately signifies that it is a mystery novel, possibly set in the past and possibly a cozy mystery. This book is most probably not a romance, or a thriller, in spite of the word ‘murder’ in the title. So it’s a good idea to take time over your choice of title.
The best way to test your title is to go to the Amazon Kindle store and see if there are any other books with the same (or similar) name. You can, incidentally, call your book the same as another title.
But you cannot change the title of the book once you have published it.
Subtitle
If you haven’t yet done so, consider adding a subtitle. This is one piece of the title that you can change after publication. If you are writing in a series, Amazon will automatically add the series name and book number to your subtitle, but you can also add further information about the type of book you have written.
In our example, you could add, An absolutely gripping English cozy mystery.
There is a rule that the subtitle has to be shown somewhere on the book cover, but most self-published authors and even major trade publishers ignore this rule and Amazon doesn’t seem to mind. The subtitle is a very handy tool to give more information to the reader, but it is also part of the book’s metadata, something which is very important to give the book visibility (see below).
Most publishers, large and small, as well as self-published authors, change the subtitle several times. Especially when the book is newly published, they test the market with different words in the subtitle.
You may think that the subtitles are a bit banal or even melodramatic but have a look at your favorite author's titles on Amazon and you will see almost every book has a corny-sounding subtitle.
Even the most high-brow literary fiction books often have a subtitle even if it is just, A Novel. If your book is literary fiction, I’d advise you to add this subtitle because if nothing, it signifies that your book falls into this genre. (And yes, literary fiction is also a genre).
The best way to find out what you should call your book is to find and look at similar titles on Amazon. (This will also give you an idea of whether your cover is right for the genre.)
Epub files for Amazon for Kindle Book (PDF for paperback)
Let’s now get to the nitty gritty of publishing your book on Amazon.
You will need to upload Epub files for Kindle when publishing your book. To get these files, you need to convert the book from whatever you used to write it.
I use a piece of software called Vellum. This software, which basically takes a word file and turns it into ebook and paperback files, completely changed my publishing routine. It is so easy to use and fast, that it seems almost as if it was a bit of magic. It also makes it super easy to make changes to your files – something which often happens. Although designed to use on a Mac, there are ways you can run Mac software on Windows. Check this software out. Believe me, it changed my self-publishing life.
There are alternatives if you don’t want to use Velum. Sites such as Draft2Digital or Reedsy Book Editor offer free conversions of Word files. You can also convert files on the Amazon Kindle dashboard, but I hear this process is very fiddly and time-consuming.
You’ll need a designer for the paperback book files unless you are very good at producing publication-ready PDF files, and have time to do this work. (Or have Vellum – see above). Amazon KDP offers some useful advice on how to do this.
Cover files
The cover files most commonly used for Kindle books are in JPEG format, but you can now also use TIFF files. For paperbacks, you need a print-ready PDF image.
The dimensions are clearly set out by Amazon. Go here for ebook file requirements and here for paperback cover dimensions.
Metadata
Your book’s Metadata can be divided into these main categories:
Book title and subtitle (see above)
Author name
ISBN (if using)
Keywords (7 words or phrases)
Categories (2 + 8)
Price
Description (blurb)
Author Name
I’ve discussed the title and subtitle above, and I presume you know your author name. Of course, you can write under a pseudonym. If you aren’t decided on a name, again you could have a look at names in your genre. You’d be surprised how even the authors’ names follow a pattern. Romance writers tend to have ‘girl-next-door’ (or -boy) type of names while thriller writers have more punchy ones. Compare Colleen Hoover, the hugely popular romance author, against the best-selling thriller author, K L Slater.
Be aware that you can’t change the author name once you have published the book.
ISBN
When publishing on Amazon KDP, you do not need an ISBN because Amazon can assign one for you. Even if you do choose to get an ISBN, Amazon will refer to your book by its own ASIN number.
Most of the other platforms don’t require you to have an ISBN either, but it will be useful if the book has one if you decide to 'go wide. This way the book carries one piece of metadata that is the same across all the platforms. You can purchase ISBNs online, at a fairly low cost.
Keywords
The keywords you use for your book are again dependent on the genre, but also on the subject matter of your title. These 7 words or phrases allowable on Amazon KDP are one of the most important pieces of metadata and will help get your book in front of readers' eyes in the Amazon store. You should therefore think of them as your main marketing tool when publishing your book.
There are many ways to find out what your keywords should be. I will write a full post about this soon, but the main points are:
Subject matter: make a list of all the words associated with your book
Genre conventions: find out what words are used in your genre (I recommend K-Lytics genre reports for this and other very useful information Amazon categories)
Software to find keywords: I use Publisher Rocket and K-Lytics to find and evaluate keywords.
You can also find relevant keywords by going to the Amazon Kindle store and typing the keyword into the search box. It’s a good idea to use the main word you want to use, for example, romance, and then add each letter of the alphabet and see what comes up.
Categories
Just as Keywords, categories are a crucial part of your book’s metadata and therefore its main marketing tool on Amazon.
When thinking about book categories, think about how books are organized on the shelves of a physical bookshop. It’s exactly the same, except you are allowed up to ten categories and there are over 25,000 categories listed on Amazon. They also introduce new categories and ‘retire’ old ones., so this landscape is constantly changing.
I wrote a blog post about how to find your book’s category some time ago. You can find it here.
Just as before, I use K-Lytics and Publisher Rocket to find out niche categories, but I also keep an eye out for new books similar to mine and find out their categories. You can see which categories any book is listed under and what rank it has achieved when you scroll down the book’s page in the Product Details section.
You may notice when you go to look at any book’s categories as listed on Amazon, that instead of the three categories that you can choose when publishing your book on Amazon, the title is listed under three separate ones. This is because Amazon can choose categories for a book depending on how it’s searched on its platform and depending on its other (very secret) algorithms.
Also, note that paperback titles are listed under ‘Books’ and Kindle books, funnily enough under ‘Kindle ebooks’, and all Amazon international stores have their own categories. So, for example, Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. will have different category strings.
Price
It’s obviously up to you what price you should charge for your book. Here are a few things to consider before you make your decision.
The royalty Amazon pays you depends on the price you set for your title. The lowest price you can set is $0.99. For books priced between $0.99 and $2.99, you’ll get 35% and for anything higher than $2.99, the royalty rate is 70%.
Amazon pays the royalties after 90 days, but you get a real-time report on the Amazon Dashboard of your sales, so you can check them as often as you like. Just go to the Reports section at the top of your KDP Dashboard.
If you are enrolled in the KDP Select program, you will also get royalties for the number of pages the readers enrolled in Kindle Unlimited have read. See my post on the subject of going wide versus Amazon only here for a more in-depth explanation of this program here.
Amazon publishes the rate per page (about 187 words) each month. It currently stands between $0.004 and $0.005, so if you’ve published a book with 350 pages (as determined by Amazon), a read title will earn you between $1.40 and $1.75. This compares to a book priced at $2.99 where the royalty at 70% is $2.09. If, however, you sell your book at a lower price point, say, $0.99, your royalty will only be $0.34 per book, whereas if your book is 340 pages long, you can get up to $1.75 per book.
The pricing, as with everything, also depends on your book’s genre. Again, it is a good idea to have a look at similar books sold on Amazon and set your price accordingly.
Description
Together with the title, subtitle, categories, and keywords, the description of your book is the main piece of metadata your book contains. The blurb, as it’s known, should contain some of your keywords, as well as be enticing to the book browser on Amazon.
When deciding on the blurb, remember that this is not a synopsis. Rather, the description should carry the style and feel of the book, as well as an idea of the plot. It’s good to use the names of your main characters and the main turning point in the plot – without giving it away.
Read the descriptions that books similar to yours have used, and without plagiarising, try to evoke the same kind of blurb for your own title.
You can change the description as often as you like, exactly the same way as you can change the keywords and categories.
One more thing to remember when writing the blurb – Amazon shows only the first three lines of your description so make those lines count so that the reader taps the Read more link.
Over to You
I hope I've been able to shed some light on the publishing process on Amazon KDP. Please let me know how you are getting along by commenting below!
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