Amazon has offered a wonderful way for people to make a name for themselves in the world of books and publishing. They’ve totally removed all barriers to entry by allowing anyone who has a book to upload it and within five minutes become a published author through Kindle Books. This is a wonderful opportunity for you. Get known; make money. What could be better?

Choose a Topic for Your Book

Like with most products or content that you create, it’s imperative that your topic be directed at a specific audience or genre. You can write information products in the form of Kindle books, or even fiction novels if that is your desire. You can make money with both. But, go to Kindle and find out what is selling most. If one of those niches fits your audience, choose a topic and get started.

Write, Edit and Format for Kindle

If you don’t already have some books that you’ve written, now is the time to prepare your manuscript. Don’t skimp on editing, and follow the instructions to the letter provided on the Kindle Direct Publishing site as to the format of your work. It’s better to spend some money on an editor than to skip this process. Many people think writing the book is the hard part, but it’s everything that comes after that’s hard.

It’s very difficult to edit your own work. If you want to be taken seriously, find an editor within your budget that understands your genre. Edit for clarity, grammar, format, word flow as well as style. Finally, clean up any formatting issues. Check over your work until you find an error-free final draft. This process is going to take longer than writing it.

Don’t Skimp on Cover Design

Unless you are a graphic designer, contract with a graphic designer to get a great cover designed. More than most products, books are truly judged on their cover. Provide your ideas and a general description of the book’s contents to the designer and ask for two or three ideas to be presented to you.

Choose the one that best represents your book and piques the interest of your audience. The book cover should make a person want to read it. Even though your book is only digital, that cover is what stands out in the list of titles that your audience will see as they search for books that they want to read.

Price Your Book Right

A really important consideration is pricing your book. Right now you get about 35% royalty for books at $2.99 or less and 70% for books you price above that. In this case it makes sense to shoot for that 70% threshold if you write a full-length book. If your book is simply a repurposed report, you might consider pricing it for less. It depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to make money, you want to write full-length books and price them higher than $2.99.

One way to choose your price point is to look at where other similar books are priced and match their pricing scheme or go just below or slightly above. Your book is going to show up in searches with similar books and you want them to pick yours. Some of the reader’s choices will be on price, but some will be based on the other factors of your book such as the information provided, the ratings, and your book cover.

Upload Your Book

Once your book is edited and formatted correctly, and your book cover is done, you’re ready to upload your book. Basically just follow the information that Kindle provides as you’re doing each step. Pay close attention to your title. Make sure you don’t misspell anything.

One of the most important aspects of uploading your book is the description. You will have a description pulled from your book’s detail page, but this description will appear immediately. You will get up to 4000 characters to enter this description.

The description area is a great place to use good descriptive keywords that will help people find you book. Work on your description before trying to upload your book so that you can take the time needed to craft a description that really tells the reader why they should buy this book without appearing like sales copy. Enter your author name and other contributors if any. Again, make sure you have spelled your name correctly and that it appears here as it will appear on the cover of your book.

Choose the right category and subcategories for your book. Like your description, this will help your readers find your book. Do not skip the optional search keywords area. This is a very important aspect of helping readers find your book. Use keywords and keyword phrases that you’ve studied and determined will be helpful to those seeking your book to find it.

Finally, don’t forget the cover image. Then you will be given the opportunity to upload your book file. Make sure you know where the final version is stored on your computer so that you can do this without any issues. Upload. If there are no issues with your file, your book will be live within 48 to 72 hours.

Market Your Book

Before you even upload your book you need to think about how you plan to market your work. Marketing can be started before publishing date as long as you know what the book is about, have some art work, and know the audience. Get your email list excited; consider offering your book free for a day in order to build up some ratings and reviews.

Provide advanced copies to bloggers within your niche to review on Amazon.com as soon as your book goes live and in their blog posts. If they’re affiliates with Amazon, they can link directly to your book on Amazon and make a small percentage for promoting it. Leave no stone unturned as marketing is your most important function once your book is published.

If you already have eBooks that you’ve published on your own elsewhere, you can use those for Kindle eBooks too with just a bit of editing in terms of format. You can also write exclusively for Kindle and create exclusively Kindle books for a little extra promotion opportunities via Kindle. The opportunities are truly limitless with Kindle Publishing.

Over 25% of Amazon’s top sellers are self-published Kindle books. If that doesn’t encourage you, nothing will.

Reference:

Kindle Direct Publishing site