Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
After formatting the paperback, you’re ready to upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing. Uploading means providing KindleDP with a manuscript that it can use to print your book and with information that Amazon can use to create a web page to sell your book.
Before uploading, you can make sure you’re ready to by taking a few steps.
First, you’ll need to set up an account with KindleDP. Your Amazon and KindleDP accounts are linked, so when you sign up for the latter, you’ll be asked to enter your Amazon username and password. You can set up a KindleDP account separate from your Amazon account, but doing so requires that you use a different email address than that for your existing Amazon account; in addition, KindleDP then will create an Amazon account for you using your KindleDP sign-ins. You’ll then have two Amazon accounts. You can create a KindleDP account at kdp.amazon.com
Next, you’ll want to write your book description. Since you’ve already created a book cover for your paperback, you can use the blurb on your back cover as your description. Make sure you have a copy of this blurb saved in Microsoft Word or some other easy to access word processing program so that you can cut and paste it into the appropriate box when uploading your manuscript.
Also write an author’s bio. While this won’t be uploaded with your manuscript, you’ll later use it to create an Author Central page at Amazon. You can include your author’s bio at the end of the blurb that you upload with your manuscript as well.
You’ll also want to research the keywords you’ll use to promote your book. When uploading, you can enter up to seven words or phrases (each no longer than 25 letters) that you suggest Amazon bring up your book for when someone types one of them into a search engine. Obviously if you can guess the seven most likely words that someone who wants to read your book would use to find it, you could sell a lot of copies. This can be done by looking at books similar to yours at Amazon and seeing what words frequently appear in their titles and book descriptions.
In addition, you’ll want to finish your cover so it is ready to be uploaded. The book cover should be a single PDF in which the front cover, back cover and spine are designed as one piece. There’s a lot to know about cover design and meeting KindleDP’s standards for an acceptable cover, so you may want to check out Design Your Paperback Cover in this series.
Lastly, determine the price for your book. As you’re a new author, you’ll want to undercut your competition’s prices. Take a look at books similar to yours on Amazon for their prices. Determine an average and charge at least a penny but no more than a dollar less for your book.
Of course, you can wait until uploading your book to do all of these steps. By taking care of them in advance, though, you can upload your book in less than a half-hour, while waiting stretches out the uploading process to a whole afternoon if not a few days.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Amazon ads work on an auction-based system.
In essence, with your ad campaign you tell Amazon, “I want to show my book to people who are searching for x, and I’ll pay X dollars to do so.”
Your book, of course, is what is you’re advertising. The lowercase x stands for the keywords people type into Amazon when searching for a book to buy. The capital X is the dollar amount you’re willing to spend to have that ad appear on the pages that pop up when readers type in those keywords.
When a reader enters a keyword that you selected for your ad campaign, Amazon’s bots instantly look for all of the authors out there who have said they want their book shown when that keyword is typed in. It then gives preference to whoever has typed in the largest dollar amount for that x. If another author has a higher amount than you, then they outbidded you. If you typed in the highest amount, then you outbidded them and get preference.
Fortunately, you won’t get outbidded every time. That’s because authors set limits on their daily spending. So if an author bid $1 for a keyword but has a daily budget of $5, the sixth time that keyword is shown, they’re out of money and the next highest bidder gets preference. With far more than 200 million people typing keywords every day into Amazon, don’t worry, your turn will come.
In a nutshell, that’s generally how it works. Of course, Amazon’s system is more sophisticated than this as there are other variables. For example, if you set your bids to be “dynamic,” Amazon’s bots on their own will identify keywords that best sell your books and then raise your bid to make sure your ad pops up.
But like all software and algorithms, human intervention is needed to make sure everything works the way you want it to. A danger of the dynamic bid, for example, is that Amazon’s bots will start bidding a dollar amount higher than the amount of profit you would make from the book sale. A sale is great, sure, but not if you’re losing money on it…but more on that later.
In a future entry, we'll show how to set up an ad campaign for your book.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
When you're all done formatting to your manuscript to be uploaded at Kindle Direct Publishing, save the document as a PDF. As a PDF essentially is a series of “pictures” of how the designed pages look, this marks the best way to ensure that KindleDP doesn’t mess up your formatting as processing what you’ve uploaded.
Before saving the document, you’ll want to delete the first blank page that you inserted before the title page. That page was a placeholder so while formatting the page numbers you could ensure the even numbers went on the left side of the book and that the odd on the right. Once you remove the blank page, the odd numbered pages suddenly will appear on the left. Don’t worry about this, however, as KindleDP will consider the inside front cover of your book as your uploaded document’s first page and restore the page numbers to their correct order.
One problem to check for is the insertion of a blank page after every section break. You’ll recall that we used section breaks to automate page numbering. Some apps make this error when converting a Microsoft Word document to a PDF. The result is that after the section break, you’ll have an extra page so odd numbered pages will wrongly appear on the left side of the manuscript and even numbered pages on the the right side when uploaded to KindleDP. The simple solution is to delete this blank page by modifying the PDF in an advanced version of Adobe Acrobat. Of course, Adobe Acrobat requires a subscription, but usually you can get a free trial so you can take care of the extra blank page, cancel, and move on.
Once the document is saved as a PDF and the section breaks are removed, you’re ready to upload it to KindleDP.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.