Publishing your book on the Kindle is a must for self published authors, and the benefits are endless. Every month more and more people are buying a Kindle, and hence there are more and more book sales.

For those who don’t already know, the Kindle is a wireless device that makes it easy to purchase and download reading material. It does not have to be connected to a computer in order to connect to the Amazon store. And as it’s so easy, and relatively cheap to buy content, customers just keep on buying their favourite books in electronic format. That’s why you simply must consider publishing your book on the Kindle!

You can publish any book you own the copyright to on the Amazon Kindle platform, but please note that it must be formatted in the correct way…for a Kindle formatting service click here. Once you have the formatted version of your book plus a cover design, here’s a list of steps you can follow to publish your book on the Kindle:

1. Go to Amazon’s Desktop Publishing site. If you have an existing Amazon account, use that to sign in, otherwise, create an account and sign in.  Amazon will have the right to promote your product by ‘making chapters or portions of your titles available to prospective customers without charge.’ This means interested buyers can read a free sample of your work.

2. Choose a payment method to receive the royalties on your book sales, then click ‘Save Entries.’

3. From the Dashboard, click the ‘My Shelf’ tab and then ‘Add New Item.’

4. Once you’re on the book page, fill in the title of your book. Under description, type in your ‘sales pitch’ for the book. Enter your book ‘blurb,’ a paragraph or two which tells readers what your book is about, plus editorial reviews and a brief excerpt.

5. Under Book Contributors, you must enter the name of at least one contributor, usually the author, or, in the case of a compilation work, the editor. You can always add multiple authors/editors later if necessary.

6. Enter the language the book is written in and an ISBN number if you already have one for the ebook. Do not enter the ISBN of the print version of your book. If you don’t have an ISBN for the ebook version, that’s fine as it’s not a requirement.

7. The next section is Publishing Rights. Your choice is between public domain rights and private, copyrighted material. You will usually choose private copyrighted material.

8. Next is the Browse and Search section. Choosing the right categories to list your ebook under will help it to be more easily found by customers. You may choose up to five categories in which to list your book.

9. Under the Search keywords section, you can enter 5-7 keyword phrases that apply to your book.

10. Now you must upload your book. First, you must upload your cover image. The cover image needs to be in JPEG or TIFF format, 72dpi, and a minimum of 500 pixels wide by 1280 pixels high.

11. Select whether or not you want digital rights management (DRM) enabled on your book. DRM is special formatting to make it difficult (though not impossible) to copy your book.

12. Now you will be taken to the Pricing and Publishing page. Here, you must select your Content Rights. If you are publishing a non-public domain title for which you hold the copyright, you most likely have worldwide rights to your title. If it’s a public domain title, or someone else has copyrights over it, you probably have rights only in certain territories.

13. You also need to choose your price and royalty option. If your book is priced in the range from $2.99 to $9.99, you’re eligible for either the 35% or 70% royalty. I would suggest choosing 70%, which means your royalty will be 70% of the selling price less a delivery fee, which is based on the size of your Kindle file. If your book is priced outside of the this range, you must select the 35% option, but there is no delivery charge. To decide how much to charge for your Kindle book look at books similar to your own and price similarly.

14. When you’ve finished setting the price, affirm that you accept the DTP terms and conditions, then click ‘Save and publish.’ Don’t worry, as you can always go back and change things later on!

After submitting your book for review, you’ll return to the main page, and you’ll see your book listed, awaiting review and approval. A new book is usually approved within 24-48 hours, but it can take several days for all the information, especially the description, to show up on your page. Once the ‘Buy’ button appears on the page, however, your book is officially for sale!

Here’s hoping that you make a huge success of publishing your book on the Kindle.

Love & light

The Word Queen xx