hey this is stephen james from project life mastery today i'm going to show you how to self-publish your own book on amazon using kdp kindle direct publishing which is amazon's free self-publishing service and i'm going to show you how to publish a kindle version of your book as well as a paperback version of your book and i'm going to use this book right here as an example for demonstration purposes this is a book that i've self-published on amazon it's a pretty short book about 90 pages long it's called 67 morning ritual habits for your body mind and spirit and i'm going to use this as an example and for demonstration purposes so i can guide you throughout the process now the cool thing about kdp is that anybody can publish a book on amazon for free amazon's provided the opportunity for anyone you don't have to be an expert you don't have to be a best-selling author you don't have to be you know have this incredible talent if you have a message if you have something that you want to put out there in the world and you want to publish it on amazon you can do that you don't have to go through a traditional publisher and that whole big process of what it used to be amazon's really changed the landscape so that it's an equal playing field for everybody if you live in india if you live in australia canada the us europe brazil wherever you live in the world you can leverage their platform and you can publish almost anything that you want whether it's a shorter book a longer book kindle paperback the paperback platform they have is print on demand which is pretty amazing you don't have to order a lot of inventory and store that in a warehouse and ship it every time someone buys your book the print on demand service that kdp has is when someone buys your book on amazon then they automatically print it and ship it to the customer on your behalf so amazon's pretty amazing they have millions of customers on their platform and they provide an incredible opportunity for you and the other cool thing is they make it very easy and very fast for you in fact if right now you already have the file of your book it's already ready to be published on amazon and you have the cover of the book you can go to this process in a matter of minutes and hit the publish button and your book will be live available for sale on amazon within about 72 hours but usually it's about 24 to 48 hours so if you've got all that ready fantastic you're good to go this video is going to help you with that and if right now you don't have a book you don't have a cover i'll show you some options on how you can hire a graphic designer to design a cover for you rather inexpensively or you can hire people to edit to proofread even to write the book for you there's many ghost writers out there i know you might be watching this and you're a publisher and you're not a writer there's a lot of publishers out there that hire authors and work with authors and writers or ghost writers to create a book and publish it on amazon so that could be an option for you as well so with that being said let's dive in i got my computer here i'm going to guide you along the process so right now i'm on kdp.amazon.com kdp is known as kindle direct publishing it's amazon's self-publishing platform i'll link to kdp below this video in the description as well as other things i'm going to mention and reference throughout this video training i'll link that below for you but it's free to sign up you just need an amazon account if you don't have one you can click on sign up if you already have a personal amazon account i'd recommend to set up a separate one just for business and self-publishing you do need a different email address for that but i would recommend to kind of separate the two here you can see some of the benefits publishing takes less than five minutes your book appears on kindle stores worldwide within 24 to 48 hours you earn up to 70 royalty through their platform and you can publish your book worldwide so in the us canada uk germany india france italy spain japan etc and of course they allow you to publish the print version as well which is really cool i already have a kdp account so i'm not going to go to the sign up process i'm just going to log right now inside my kdp account to show you what the dashboard looks like so when you log inside kdp you're going to see the dashboard if you click here on the bookshelf you can view all the books that you've published under your kdp account reports gives you the data sales data royalties a lot of information about your books and how they're performing they have a community they have tools for marketing i'm not going to go through all those different sections i encourage you to play around and browse their website and platform but if you're ready to publish your book you're going to click here for the kindle ebook kindle's a little bit easier and faster than a paperback book because with a kindle book all you need is you need the book file in the specific format that's required it could be a doc file from like ms word and you're also going to need the cover and the cover is just going to be a flat cover that meets the dimensions of what they require but that's all you need to publish as a kindle version paperback on the other hand you do need to format it for paperback but you also need a back cover and also a spine so for example the back cover of the book and the spine of the book is also going to be a requirement for that ways you can get that done is hiring a graphic designer that can do that for you the website that i'd recommend for you that's pretty inexpensive is known as fiverr if you go to fiverr.com i'll link below for that if you come here you type in book cover you're going to find many graphic designers that can create a kdp ebook paperback book cover design you know many different people that are pretty talented for fiction non-fiction books you know you can work with them pretty inexpensively to get a cover done so i'd recommend fiverr and there's some other resources that i'll link to below for you as well now when you're ready to publish your book it's gonna ask for certain information i'm gonna guide you through this process and some of it's optional that you're going to skip over it depends on your book and and what you want to pursue with it so first is the book title you put here the title of your book so here i put in the book title with a book title of course you want to make sure it's catchy something grabs people's attention when they see it when they hear it they say to themselves i want that they want to know more they want to click you know on the the amazon listing to learn more about the book and if you're trying to use amazon search to optimize your book for different keywords because amazon's a search engine people go there they type in keywords to search for that's how they can find your book organically to buy it then you might want to learn a little bit about different keywords that you can put in your book title that will help your book rank higher for those keywords and attract more potential customers if i come down here this is asking for series information if you have a series of books you can put in the name of it and the number for each one some people might do that for certain fiction books that there's a series of stories that you might have or a continuation of books uh the edition number i'm going to leave blank that's optional primary author and contributor this would be the author name this would either be your name it could be a pen name or a pseudo name it can really be any name that you want um this is something that is an option for a lot of authors a lot of publishers mark twain is a pseudo name a lot of celebrities have changed their names for branding purposes and what it's not their legal born name so there's an option there too if you want to be anonymous or published under a different name you're free to do that but you're also able to also include any contributors as an option too so if you want to you know if you're the publisher and then there's another author that wrote the book and they have the rights to it then you can use their name if you have like an illustrator editors anything else you want to include you could include that here as well it's all optional but you do need to have a primary author or contributor name so i'm going to put in my name here okay so if i come down here it's going to ask for the book description you have 4 000 characters to write up a book description you don't have to use all 4 000 although the more space that you use and the more that you include here it can help with the ranking of your book even people finding your book in google based on different keywords that you might have here in the description but the primary purpose of the description is for those that want to know more about the book before they buy it so you want to share more about the book perhaps what inspired you to write it or what they're going to learn the benefits of buying the book you can include that here to intrigue someone and to get them to want to buy your book so this is kind of like a sales copy area of where you try to sell people on why they should buy your book i'm just going to put in a description that i've already have written up it's about 2 000 characters i've got 2 000 left but it's a good description that shares more about my book i always like to include a call to action at the end of any sales copy so just this last piece get your copy today by clicking the buy buy now button right now having that cta that call to action will direct people to go and buy the book here is the publishing rights so you want to determine either if you own the rights or if it's public domain work i'm going to click here i own the copyright and hold the necessary publishing rights if you wrote the book yourself you're going to own the rights to it if you hired a ghost writer and you pay them you can make sure that you own the rights to the book so they're selling the the rights to you there's also some instances of books that are public domain anybody can republish and if that's the case you'd want to select this here now is the keywords keywords help people find your book in amazon search you can put up to seven keywords it's optional but i do recommend that you use it and that you use all seven you want to use the keywords that are relevant to your book so think what keywords would someone search for to find my book on amazon for my book i'm going to put in morning ritual morning routine habits motivation and i could put in some additional ones now choosing the right keywords is very important because if you choose keywords and your book ranks for those then you can attract more customers of your book and knowing which keywords to target based on which ones are in high demand which ones are getting a high search volume is important because if you choose some keywords that no one's searching for or that might be too competitive that even if you put that as a keyword there's no chance someone's going to find you for that keyword then it's kind of a waste of space using that and so you really want to optimize your listing for the right keywords the best ones and sometimes you have to come back and test different ones you know once you publish your book see where it ranks for different keywords and you can come back and play around with that a little bit there are some tools and softwares that help you do research on amazon to identify keywords and give you suggestions and even share with you how much money certain keywords are making for certain authors and publishers of their book i'll link below to that software in the description if you want to learn more about it coming down here you can choose up to two different categories categories are very important because this is where your book's going to rank and be listed in a variety of different categories on amazon and you can rank as a bestseller in those categories as well so each of these categories has a bestseller list and some categories are easier to rank in than others they're less competitive and others are a lot more difficult but different categories depending on who you're trying to attract it's going to make a difference in potential sales that you're going to get as well so here i can choose fiction nonfiction this is a non-fiction book you can see there's many different subcategories and by the way right now there's a lot of ideas for topics and keywords um that you could potentially create books on and publish on amazon if you'd like they actually have one called body mind and spirit which funny enough that's the subtitle of my book for your body mind and spirit so i'm going to choose general for that i'd probably spend a little bit more time browsing these categories but i'm just going to pick pick two right now just so we can move on so self-help this is a self-help book if there is one related to habits or routines that would be fantastic i might just pick motivation and inspirational okay that's good enough all right so i got my two categories click on save you can see here uh it's certain subcategories and you can change this later down the road if you want to see where your book ranks um amongst those categories coming down here is age and grade range this is not a children's book if it was you'd want to include that i'm just going to leave this blank pre-order i'm ready to release my book now or i want to make it available for pre-order pre-order is great if you if you want to release your book at a certain date in the future but you want to take pre-orders right now which can be useful to get some sales early to have a successful launch of your book so if you're good at marketing and you have a launch strategy you might want to set it as pre-order many authors do it that way lets people know that something's coming they're looking forward they're excited to it similar in a way you know when the new iphone comes out they release the date of when it's going to be available and by saying this is the date they can collect pre-orders but people also line up outside the apple store to buy it so same same idea if you want to build anticipation for the launch of your book in this case i'm ready to release it now i'm just going to select this option okay now we're on the section of the manuscript this is your book that you're going to upload to kdp and upload as a kindle book so that it can be live on amazon it's going to have some content guidelines you might want to review to make sure that your book is compatible with what what they require you want to choose whether or not you want to enable digital rights management drm this basically means that you're going to allow people to unauthorize distribution of your book you want people to be able to lend your book you may or may not but when people download a kindle book they can lend it to someone or they can gift it to someone as well but this is something you might want to you know review and decide which one you want to go with i usually select no for this i don't want people to distribute my book without my permission or authorization in terms of the ebook manuscript this is going to be the book file the formats they accept are docx that's like a microsoft word uh doc file epub or kpf so you can choose which format you want to to upload it as they do have their own platform to help you format your book yourself if you'd like or i'd recommend hiring someone to help you with that because you want to make sure your book looks good on a kindle e-reader device and the formatting of it on a kindle device is going to be a little bit different than on a paperback usually for example the kindle version might have less pages than paperback because even on a kindle device someone can actually choose what size of font they want to use and there's a variety of factors that'll affect the length of the book but going to fiverr you can go back there you can find someone that you know book formats let's say you could find someone where you send them the file of your book and they can proofread it in some cases people will format it for you get it ready so that you can save yourself a little bit of time there or like i said you can do it yourself they have their own uh uh formatting platform which i can link to and share it's actually right here kindle create is the one that can help you okay so you're gonna upload the file from your computer and i'm gonna do that real quick okay so i've uploaded my manuscript it's just processing the file right now pretty soon i'll be able to preview it which is useful because i can preview it to see how it looks on a kindle e-reading device before i publish it you want to make sure that you do preview your book to make sure there's no errors or mistakes because otherwise that will lead to negative reviews kindle ebook cover so here you need the the file of your cover um this could be a jpeg or i think a png file as well again you can get that from someone on fiverr another place you can also go that i like for getting covers created is 99 designs you can put on a contest and have a lot of designers from all over the world that will compete to create a design for your book cover or really your website or anything you want it is more expensive than fiverr but you get a lot of different options and that's what i like i like having the different options so that i can pick and choose um the best cover because your cover is really important that's what's gonna determine for the most part whether someone buys your book the cover and the title are the most important things the cover is what will stand out to someone when they're scrolling through amazon and you want a cover that makes someone say man i want that what's that about i want to check out this book i'm sure when you go to the bookstore certain covers grab your attention more than others so people do tend to judge books by the cover and so of course having a great cover is an important part of the success of your book i've already got a cover great created so i'm just going to upload that right now okay so i've uploaded my book cover scroll down this is where i can do the the online previewer recommend this so that you can make sure that your book looks good when someone buys it so i'm going to launch that here real quick okay so this is the preview of my book cover looks good here's a legal notice disclaimer this one i did not include my table of contents table of contents with a kindle a kindle book you can make it clickable and that requires some formatting so when you include your table of contents someone can click on it and go to that chapter of the book for example so that's something that you could do for your book this one just excludes that for now and just make sure the spacing look good looks good and you're happy with everything that you see so i'm not going to go through this whole book but i do recommend that you do that for your book to make sure everything does in fact look good okay so let's go back to the process of publishing okay so let's come back down to the bottom almost done isbn is optional that's something that is required for a paperback or hardcover print book you'll get that when you publish the paperback the print cover which i'll get to in a bit it's optional you can put it here if you'd like but i'm just going to leave this for now save and continue the next piece is kdp select enrollment kdp select is a program that you can enroll your book in with amazon which means that your book becomes exclusive on amazon so it can't be sold anywhere else but on amazon and that is a contract that you agree to for 90 days and can always renew in doing so you get certain benefits so for example you know you can get more royalties because you can have your book um as part of a kindle unlimited program you can run a free promotion for your kindle book you can do a kindle countdown deal which allows you to offer a discount for your book for a limited time they give you a lot of cool kind of features and benefits to help market your book it does depend if you are planning on distributing this book on other platforms or selling it on your website in that case you can't use this feature but if you're just going to stick to amazon i'd recommend enrolling in kdp select territories is you deciding where do you want your book to be available on amazon who can buy the book you can select all territories worldwide or individual ones so you can select all the individual countries that you want to make your book available to there's 245 currently i'm just gonna do worldwide next is the royalty and pricing so as you can see they have two different pricing structures for a kindle book there's 35 royalty which means your book has to be sold in a certain price range from 99 cents to 200 right here but if you want the 70 percent amazon uh incentivizes you to sell it for 299 to 9.99 because they've determined that's how they want to price books on their platform so i'm just going to select 299 as you can see here i'll get about two dollars and seven cents royalty delivery fee is three cents and that depends on the size of the book so the more um the bigger the file size then the more it's going to cost for delivery which is pretty much not much i can also choose the other marketplaces so here i can choose the price in india the uk germany france spain italy etc um right now it's automatically being adjusted based on the us dollar price which is on amazon.com that's a u.s marketplace but people that want to buy it in india uk you know other countries you can select the price for that in in their currency so i just kind of leave this as is for now and then book landing this is if you want to allow people that buy your kindle book to lend it to other people this is something i like to allow and then terms and conditions if you want to read through that you can but it takes up to 72 hours for your book to be published usually it's a lot faster than that usually it's about 24 to 40 that 48 hours they send you an email once it is live and once your book is live on amazon you'd go to amazon.com or whatever amazon countries platform and do a search for your book to make sure it is in fact live sometimes it might take a little bit longer but it's pretty rare your book should be there up on amazon and you can kind of see where it ranks for its keywords um you know that you selected and play around with that but usually how amazon will rank a book is based on the sales of it so not just the keywords but the more sales you get for your book the higher it will rank for those keywords so keyword optimization and marketing your book on amazon is a very different strategy if you do want to learn more about book marketing then i do have a course called mastering book marketing you can learn more by going to wwe i'll link below in the description for that and i also have a course called mastering book publishing which goes through the step-by-step process on how to find a niche how to identify keywords how to do the research of a book how to create a book with a ghostwriter how to create a book with book cover with you know fiverr and the back and forth the process of creating a book cover how to publish it which i've already kind of shared with you a little bit here and then how to market it and get it out there on amazon as well so that's called mastering book publishing www.masteringbookpublishing.com and if you enjoyed my style of teaching and training you want to learn more then i'd recommend those courses for you because they're a lot more in depth and you're watching me and following me through the process as you were in this video right here now once you're ready to publish your book as a paperback version you're going to come back here to your bookshelf and you're going to click on create paperback with the draft of what you already set up or even once you've published it you can come back here and create the paperback version it's automatic in the poll almost all the information that you already set up in advance so all you really got to do is come down here and make sure everything looks good click on save and continue here's where you get the isbn so you can just click here to assign a free assign me a free kdp isbn so you can do that and there's more information here that you can select it's pretty straightforward but with the print options they do have different options for that because it's a print on demand service whenever someone you know purchases the book on amazon they're going to print it based on what you select here's the options so you can select the interior and paper type such as black black and white interior with cream paper or with white paper or premium color of course when you go higher quality with color for example it's going to cost more money for them to to print it for you so that does cost more by using those options the trim size is basically the the trim around the book the standard is six by nine inches but you can select a different size this information is important when you format your book because when you let's say work with a designer or someone on fiverr or upwork you're going to want to give them this information but usually they do it just based on the the default options they already have here if they already have experience doing this for example on fiverr you can choose the bleed set settings which is the bleed that's kind of around around the book here this is the bleed okay same thing with the the cover it's a bleed around it paperback cover finish whether it's matte or glossy you can choose from that and then you're going to upload it and then upload the cover as well with the cover like i said you're going to need the back cover and the spine which is why it's good to work with a designer that has experience with that but everything else you're just going to set up as you did with the kdp the kindle version and then you're ready to set the price and then publish it on amazon and i did mention there's a resource that you can go to to hire a ghostwriter for you if you want to get someone to write your book for you and do the research of it or if you want someone to proofread edit even find designers there as well fiverr is a good inexpensive option but you're gonna be limited in some talent especially when it comes to writers and ghost writers so the website i'd recommend for you is called upwork upwork.com i'll link to upwork and all the other things that i mention again in the description for you but here you can find writers you can post a job have people from all over the world bid on that and it's one of my go-to places to find writers editors proofreaders or any freelancers for that matter that i want to use to help support me and build my business so upwork is fantastic for that there are some book writing services that i have a lot of experience with and use and recommend inside my courses unfortunately i can't share them here publicly because they can only handle so much work and my students will be mad at me if i do but if you are looking for more resources i do share that inside my my courses as well otherwise i hope you enjoyed this video and this process if you did enjoy this video please give it a thumbs up here on youtube subscribe here for more videos i also have a playlist going more into amazon book publishing and different strategies on how to make money and how to build a book publishing business so i'll link that below in the description otherwise thank you so much for your time i appreciate you god bless you and i'll see you again soon