Egregious Reader,
It boggles my senses, the ease with which one can put an eBook on a Kindle! Having just put Verses by Van on Amazon (sadly, they don’t have a easy way to list eBooks for free) I thought it would be interesting for those of you cursed with insolent biros to read a blog post on how to easily (really, very easily) put your scribblings on to Kindles.
Firstly, go to the Amazon KDP Website, where you can sign in with your Amazon account, or create a new one.
Once you log into this service there’ll be a window in the corner saying you need to complete your account details before you can publish an eBook (it’s nice to get this sorted as soon as you sign in to KDP, so you can get straight on with uploading and publishing your eBook afterwards).
Fill them in – there’s basic stuff like address, phone number, &c. – all these are needed. You also have to fill in a tax form; as long as you’re not a US resident this is a relatively simple task of saying nothing really applies, since that’s all there to calculate taxes only relevant to US residents.
Now that’s all done follow the Bookshelf link on the navigation bar and you should be able to start creating a new eBook.
Firstly, you can choose to go for KDP Select or not – I didn’t bother because my eBook is publicly available elsewhere, it has some marketing benefits, which are explained on that page if you really want it.
Then there are a load of boxes with fairly obvious uses; fill in the title, author, description, and all the other little bits.
There’s an option to upload a cover image; the ‘Cover Creator’ option for this is an excellent tool if you don’t have a cover already – and has a very nice and easy to use interface.
Then there’s a browse option, by which you can choose your book and upload it. There are plenty of files you can choose; epub being the format I used, and is a simple one to convert your writing into. Otherwise, and also incredibly simple, you can save your text as .pdf, or put it into a zipped html format.
Now just press ‘Save and Continue’ at the bottom of the page. Note should be made here; this is only possible once your account tax details have been processed by Amazon, which can take an hour or so. Until then, you can still save the book as a draft.
Now just wait and Amazon will process the book, the progress of which can be monitored through the Bookshelf page. First Amazon will check the text and, if all is well, they will begin to publish it; the whole process can take 24 hours or so – I was lucky and had my eBook up and on Amazon within two hours.
That’s how simple it is! Now go, flood Amazon with eBooks for all! And (late) Merry Christmas!