Self-publishing on Kindle or KDP Amazon can be a challenge. They have very specific requirements for how your eBook needs to be formatted in order to be accepted by their online editing software. Your best bet is to take advantage of every Free tool they offer to make the process as painless as possible. You will need to read their formatting guide first and will probably read it several times again before you even upload your manuscript to their website for publishing.
The very first thing you will want to make sure of is that you have up-to-date personal information on your account. The name, address, phone number, banking information, etc. Once that is set-up make sure you electronically fill out and sign your W-9 forms. So long as they are correct you may not need to update those every year. But if you move or change banks you will, of course, need to correct those and resign the tax forms.
Please don’t forget to fill out all the information on the Author Central Page. The more complete the information the better. It is an introduction to you as a writer that a lot of potential reads like to read before they buy your books. And you want to make sure that each of your titles are linked directly to your author profile page both eBooks and paper books. Of course, if you are publishing your paperback with CreateSpace or even KDP Amazon, now, they should be automatically linked together. You should update this profile every time you publish a book or at least once a year. If you have a blog that you post to and keep updated you can link that to your profile page and the blog articles show up on the profile within a day or two of the publication of each article like your RSS Feed for your website. This lets the readers know that you are still active.
The next thing you will want to do is read through the Help sections and submission guidelines information. Uploading an eBook for publication can be a stressful process as it requires that your file is formatted correctly to be accepted. Thankfully, they have a previewer that allows you to view your book as it will appear to the buyers on the various different devices such as Kindle Fire, Smartphones, Computers, etc. The look of your book and flow of the chapters is very important to your readers. Please look through all the way to the end and on as many devices as are listed to make sure your book acts like you want it to. You can always change things and upload your book file again.
You will want to visit the KDP Amazon Tools and resources section for more information and help. They have a Preview app that you and download and practice with. If you are writing your story using a Word Processing software like Microsoft Word you will need to be extremely careful about the background formatting that the software automatically adds to each new document. To strip out the formatting you might want to consider copy and pasting your words into a plain text program like Notepad then copy and paste those words into the template provided. There is lots more information we could share about this process but you really need to read through the material on their site for yourself. Of course, you can always pay someone like us to do all that formatting for you 😉
We have already talked about book covers in a previous post.
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Until next time.
