Inexpectant Reader,
Having now made enough money out of my Danbury Place eBook to afford a meal at Spoons, in my attempt to advocate that everyone in the world should really do this, surely there’s no point just writing something and leaving it doing nothing I would like to write a short tutorial on how to publish an eBook for sale on Amazon in just a few minutes. This certainly isn’t up to the standard of any of my previous tutorials, mainly due to the very little time I have to myself right now, for each bit that’s wrong you may yell at me.
Hopefully, if you’ve used the internet any time in the last decade, you should have an Amazon account. This is pretty essential I’m afraid. If you don’t have one, go make one, it’s free. Make sure you’ve got a card linked up to it as well or you’ll probably struggle to get money from your ebook into your bank account*.
Next, make your way to kdp.amazon.com, where you’ll be able to publish your ebook to the world in just a few clicks.
Log in with your amazon account, and you’ll find yourself on the helpfully named ‘dashboard’ page. Don’t be fooled, you’re not in a car, this is where you can begin uploading your ebooks. Press the ‘Add new title’ button on the left side of the page.
This’ll load a lovely long page of input boxes, fill them each out with the relevant information. Enroll in KDP select if your book or any of its contents are nowhere else on the internet, I’ve never done this since I like putting odd bits on here…
Make sure you’ve pressed Add Contributors and added yourself as author, editor, firefighter, or whatever else your roll was in the production of the ebook. If it’s your work, tick the ‘It’s not public domain’ box, if it’s public domain then it must be significantly different to other versions of the work on the internet, or the only ebook copy of that public domain work.
Remember, for your own work you get 70% of all sale revenue, for public domain work ebooks you’ll only get 35%.
Upload a cover if you have one, otherwise their cover creator is actually very good, and I’ve used it for both of my ebooks.
Finally, upload your ebook file to Amazon, they’ll then convert it to their own ebook format so that anyone can read it. They accept Word, HTML, Zip, mobi, ePub, RTF, TXT, and PDF files, so no, you can’t upload your ebook as a series of unrelated GIF files and a live hamster.
Now press Save and Continue, and Amazon will take you to the pricing options for your eBook.
Tick worldwide rights, unless your ebook breaches any copyright laws of different countries or world powers – if it does, blimey. Next there’s 70% or 35% royalty tick boxes, if your work is public domain then 35% should be ticked, otherwise tick 70%.
Finally, there is a tickbox at the bottom of the page that you have to tick to confirm that you’ve done everything legally and you’re not trying to smuggle space fuel to Gibraltar. Tick this (unless you are really smuggling space fuel to Gibraltar, in which case, why are you wasting your time publishing an eBook?), and press Save and Publish.
There you go, now your eBook will be reviewed by those lovely people at Amazon, or maybe a computer program that crawls over it to make sure you’re not giving advice on space fuel smuggling and other illicit activities. In a few hours you’ll be able to fill your blog with all sorts of annoying BUY THIS NOW PLZ sentences.
BUY THIS NOW PLZ http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00HNU90TM OMG ALSO THIS http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00HJZVV7A
Works well as an advertising strategy, doesn’t it? Also hastily written Amazon ePublishing tutorials are a great way to get away with writing BUY THIS NOW PLZ in a post where it would otherwise be out of place, and a little annoying.
To start earning money, you’ll have to click on the ‘So-and-so’s-name Account’ link at the top of the page, where you can complete your tax information and change it so that Amazon make all payments directly into your bank account. By default, since this is the late sixteenth century, they send you a cheque.
*This statement excludes wizards