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hey everybody shayla raquel here i'm really excited because i get to teach you how to use kindle direct publishing for your ebook and for paperback i did a video like this a couple years ago but it's time to do an update today we get to use misty cogdeal and she is the author of in the right time and it is a time travel romance novel and she was kind enough to give me permission to use her book to set up kdp so she has already done the back end work of things she went into kdp.amazon.com and she went ahead and filled out her contact information account bank account tax so i won't be going into that side of things it's all very self-explanatory so just be sure to do that when you create your amazon kdp account so we're going to go ahead and sign in and you'll see that nothing has been created yet we have our bookshelf which is what you see in front of us here we have reports which is what will show you know how many books she sold both paperback and ebook her royalties all those fun things but we're not going to be covering any of that today right now we're focusing on creating our kindle ebook and our paperback i want to start with the paperback so that we can order a proof copy for misti so go ahead and click this now one cool thing that i like to do in the background is have a google doc available with just some of the main information that i'm going to need like isbn and specs and blurb and all that it's just handy to have that available so her book title is in the right time there is not a subtitle however there are some authors who use this especially fiction i mean you always think of a subtitle as being non-fiction but i have actually seen some novelists use the subtitle as part of a marcus marketing strategy you guys can do that if you want again we're not going to cover that today but that's an option if this is part of a series you'll put that here now this is part of a series so we can see right here that the name of it is the end time series so we're going to put that here and then the series number of courses book one addition number you don't need to put anything here because this is the very first edition now the author you do want to make sure that that name is here and that's you so don't forget and you can put that however you want whatever your author name is now there is an option for you to add some other people so let's say that if you want to give your editor some kudos you can do that maybe you had somebody write a forward for your book do that if you're a children's book author maybe there is an illustrator that you'd like to show off whatever it may be you can do that here if you want as an example if we type in my name on amazon.com you'll see some books that i've edited because they added my name as a contributor so you know if we scroll down here let's click this one you'll see that i show up as editor that's what it would look like if you guys are wondering you don't have to do it but it's there this is where your blurb goes now some of you know that you know we'll stay here with bill mccurry that you can make things look bigger you can underline it you can bold it you can bullet i mean you can do all sorts of stuff but we don't do that here in kdp it's done elsewhere if you guys need to know how to do that i do have a link that will help you on writeyourbestbook.com blog if you guys go there i'll make sure to put that link in the notes um it's uh christina k is the one that has this and if it'll load you guys can see it but i do give a rundown on how to bold italicize bullet all that fun stuff i show you guys how to do that through amazon author central all right so let's go ahead and grab misty's blurb all right so there's her blurb okay and don't let all this freak you out because again you can change this uh later you do on the copyright and hold the necessary uh publishing rights these are the key words now this can be a real big pain in the butt one of the things that i like to do um i will go i'll start with amazon kdp keywords romance like let's just google that okay this is the bare minimum the easiest possible thing you could do but i recommend going the extra mile now i do want to give you guys a few tips yes kdp will give you a list of romance categories right lots of good stuff there but i do not want you guys to use words that you will find in the blurb if you can help it or in the title or subtitle okay so you guys want to really watch out for that it can be very difficult to do but basically the way a keyword works let's say that you go into kindle here and you go ahead and click this search tool and you're going to click ebooks and then you decide that you're going to scroll down here maybe you want to read a thriller but within mystery thriller and suspense kindle books maybe you're kind of in the mood for well i don't know let's say 1970s that is a keyword 1970s is a keyword that you would put here and then it would show all of these other books right see let's do another one let's actually do time travel see now you have all these books that's a key word not to be confused with a category which we'll look at here in a moment so um i have not done the official research yet for missy's book on keywords but i do know that if i wanted to i could come up here and i could go into let's go let's actually backtrack this takes a lot of time for you to sit down and do your market research so again we're not going to cover that but just another quick trick to help you guys so let's say that we click romance we're under kindle ebooks here we scroll all the way down these are our categories and then you go more niche and you get into like sub genres well they actually literally have time travel romance because it's such a popular category so it's going to list all these things right well if i wanted to i could come up here and type in that keyword 1990s see and it's gonna give me a list of time travel books using that keyword however there are only eight results that is way too narrow way too specific okay so instead let's try something else from misty's book let's try the word new orleans and still pretty low okay so let's try louisiana well maybe helpful if the editor knew how to spell it only 13 results still not that great okay so what we'll do is we'll come up with a string of keywords that we think would work for misty's book you don't want them to be too high and you don't want them to be too low like for example if it said 50 000 results i'd say whoa that's way too um that's way too broad if it's at 100 results i'd say oh that's way too low so maybe like around a thousand that would be really good so we're gonna have i'll have to sit here and come up with keywords you're going to have to do that yes you can use this and it will help okay but still you need to think about what's in your actual book so this has thirty thousand that's pretty high um that means you're literally competing with thirty thousand other people that's what you have to think about um all right let's back up so we'll come back to keywords categories so this is what you would think of as genres when you're walking into barnes noble or half-price bookstore or the library or whatever these are your categories so um i've already done some research on this and we're going to click fiction and i actually went ahead and put it up here because remember we found it earlier but i need you guys to see the string so you have time travel right but how did how do you get to that point all right so you we know that it's romance so we're going to scroll down until we see the main genre of romance and then within that is going to be the sub genre of time travel so this is your string here fiction romance time travel okay that's what you do and then um another thing that you would you you could only click uh two here but once you guys get all set up with amazon author central um i can definitely that will give you a whole lot of ideas you can add up to eight more giving you a grand total of 10 categories so let's go ahead and do paranormal for her because there is kind of some paranormal elements and if she wants to change that and do an entirely different um category she can't because she may not want to be in romance solely she may want to do one in romance and another in something else you know she might want to come up here and you have fiction here right and then she may want to kind of play around and decide well maybe i want to have something different maybe i don't want it to just be romance maybe it would fit under something with i don't know sci-fi or something there might be something in there like there's sci-fi and time travel so like it might make more sense for her to try to compete in both romance and sci-fi which are two totally different categories even though they have the same sub genre so we're going to click save and does this book contain language situation or situation or is inappropriate so technically i have to click yes because there's cursing in the book and so what will happen is if i were to say no and then somebody were to read this and amazon had told them no there's no language in here that would be inappropriate for someone under 18 which i don't think cursing counts for this but whatever we're playing it on the safe side if you do that and a reader gets a hold of it and they're ticked off because you said there wasn't any language they're gonna leave you a terrible review so you don't want that okay so we're going to click save and that takes us to the second tier which is our paperback content now you can get a free kdp isbn i don't usually recommend it but you can however misty opted to use one uh that she purchased through bowker so we're gonna go ahead and grab her isbn and then her imprint i will have to go back and double check the name of that we'll double check the name of that in just a moment um for the publication date basically what this means is if your book has already been published you know elsewhere originally you would put a date here because you're publishing this book for the first time leave it blank leave it completely alone now i have her specs over here so she did a five by eight so we're going to select a different size all right there's five by eight and then i'm just going to check and see if she got her margin no bleed so we're going to make sure that's selected as no bleed i always recommend a matte finish instead of glossy the reason for that is kind of funny but when you take a picture of your book for social media purposes there's a reflection in the glossy cover and it's very annoying so i always recommend that you make sure to do matte this is where you upload your manuscript this will be a pdf okay so we want to make sure that you have that available now there are it's very important that you have this set up the right way you know you guys want to make sure that you've had it professionally formatted and that it looks amazing and then you'll go ahead and upload that so i'm going to go ahead and upload her pdf right now okay and this takes a while to upload so while that is uploading um we'll go to the next slide and i'll see in a second okay so next up imprint in misty's pdf here the formatted pdf that we'll use for paperback her imprint is mystic press as a self-publisher you are the publisher so you need to come up with a name for your quote-unquote publishing company and that's the name that she chose all right if we go right here i have successfully uploaded the pdf now you do have to upload your book cover we are going to upload a professional cover that is also a pdf it looks like that while that's uploading i'll show it to you real quick beautiful cover here so this has the front the spine and the back cover with the barcode and isbn looks amazing and so that is already done because missy hired a professional cover designer to create that for her now of course she'll also have a front cover only which is called your epub cover that will upload when we set up her ebook now some of you may not purchase a barcode so um you would leave this unchecked but because misti did purchase a barcode and this has been part of the design we want to make sure that we check this box because our design does include a barcode now the last thing that you're going to do is you're going to launch previewer the only way that you can do that is once all of this has been processed so you can kind of look back up here and make sure that everything has been done and if it hasn't amazon will notify you okay so while we wait on that i wanted to just kind of show you guys a few cool little tricks while we're waiting so amazon author central will be the next thing that you guys set up it's pretty easy to set up it's very self-explanatory i do think that the website needs a major overhaul but that's okay so when you guys are ready to set it up you just go to authorcentral.amazon.com and you're going to have to join so you can click join now and it's going to use the information that you have from the kdp now don't ask me why on earth amazon author central is not set up with amazon kdp but it's not and that's that now right here they want you to confirm your identity but if your book has not been published yet it's not going to be able to do that so i still i wanted you guys to at least see it but it's not going to be able to confirm your identity until your book is up on amazon that can be kind of frustrating when you're in the middle of launching you're trying to rush everything so believe me i understand but once your book is up on amazon and you type in this name or the name of your book it'll show up and you'll say this is my book and you'll click it and then it'll take you to the third step to verify everything so right now there's nothing we can do to actually have misti join amazon author central but once that's done i'll i'll show you guys my side of it and it's really great okay so it looks like we're done what we have to do is launch previewer this is going to help us ensure that there are no quality issues one thing i've noticed when you're uploading this and you're doing the launch previewer really take a look at every single page really make sure that it looks the way that it's supposed to if you hired a professional formatter and cover designer chances are especially if they're really familiar with amazon kdp self-publishing chances are you're not going to have any issues when you're doing the launch previewer but it might help to have your formatter and designer kind of close to their email or messenger or something in case you need to shoot them some messages and say hey i'm trying to upload and i can't get past whatever because the bleed is messed up let them know that okay so what we're going to do is while that's uploading we're going to launch a different browser here and we're going to go ahead and sign into my amazon author central account because i want you guys to be able to see what that looks like okay so many options well we might go to somebody else's today let's see who we got there i am all right i thought some of you guys watching this are like shouldn't she just be editing this out why do we have to watch her do this because i don't have time to edit out all of my mistakes guys all right so here is amazon author central this just if you just are bored and you want to read that go for it here's the author page so what this means is i have an actual like amazon.com like author profile so if we open up a new tab and i paste that in it's going to show you my author profile on amazon so it's going to have my bio here my headshot i put my links at the bottom and then it shows the books that i've published okay you have to do this because if you don't when people go to look at your book like let's say that they find your book on amazon sometimes people want to see what other books you've done sometimes they want to read your bio they want to be able to see the person behind the book if you don't set this up on amazon author central then this right here doesn't exist and you want that also it gives us this handy follow button so when people click that anytime that you publish something they get an automatic email from amazon so that's kind of cool so you can upload everything here i'm not going to do a how-to on that but these are your books one once those are on here this is where you can come in and start having a bunch of fun this is how you're able to bold things italicize this is where you can do it from the author section i was able to do endorsements so let's go look let's see what that actually looks like see there's the from the author here are my endorsements here it is bolded okay i was able to do that because i went in here and edited things in amazon author central remember we cannot do that in kdp so make sure that you get this set up now you'll have to do it for the kindle and for paperback two different things all right we are in our print preview and there are no errors if there were any errors you would see them right here on the left hand side how cool is that so this looks really beautiful it looks great so you're going to click this arrow here and we're going to make sure that everything looks good now i'm not going to make you guys do this the entire time but i still just want you to see what it's going to look like the formatting was done by sarah bale and it just looks really really amazing now again you guys are responsible for checking every single page and making sure that it looks great i'm not going to go through all 280 on this video but that's what it looks like so you can hit approve and then once we do that it'll finally take us to our third and final tier this also gives us the printing cost okay so you might want to take a note of that you can also just kind of recap black and white interior cream paper no bleed matte 5x8 all that looks great so we're going to save and continue and then this is the the last part it's not too hard if you've done your market research but this is where you're going to price your book now some authors when they do the pricing misti didn't but sometimes they'll have pricing on the barcode here but you don't have to do that i don't personally do that i'll just tell you right now i'm a fan of seeing paperbacks in between 1599 to 1999. that's just what i prefer as both a reader and a marketer when we're talking about paperback so whatever price that you have decided on will go right here okay so just remember you guys can change this at any time it doesn't matter you can change it at any time so we're going to go ahead and just put hers at let's say 1997. okay and then you can see where how much her royalty is going to be we already knew what that printing cost was so that's already there for us you can also see what you'll make in other countries like the uk and france and canada and so on now this is really important so please pay attention do not click publish your paperback book not yet you have to click this tiny thing that says request printed proofs of this book when you do that it's going to give us a pop-up and it's going to say that it's going to take well let's just go and click it it's going to take four hours for amazon to approve our request so we need to get a proof copy and you can say however many you want and then you want it to come from amazon.com if you're in the us and then it's going to tell you how much it'll cost but we have to submit our proof requests once we do that um they'll get you'll get an email from amazon kdp saying we've approved your request and you can go ahead and make your purchase you do not make your purchase in kdp kdp.amazon.com you think you would but you don't actually make it at amazon.com and i'll show you what that looks like here in just a moment let's go ahead and click confirm proof request and that is that i always like to click save drop just in case so misty will have an email within the next four hours saying that her request has been approved so we can see that our paperback is in draft mode now what about when it's approved how does she finalize paying for it well sh like i said she's gonna have to be redirected to amazon.com they'll redirect her and i'll show you guys what that looks like there's where i ordered 50 copies of the ten commandments of author branding okay now remember i'm paying the wholesale price i'm paying at cost right so it was 318 plus you know shipping and tax so that's where you pay for it you pay for just as if you were buying anything off of amazon i hope that makes sense now what about your ebook this is really cool once you set up paperback or ebook vice versa everything else is pretty much filled out for you so that makes it really really nice so go ahead and click create kindle ebook and then all of our information will already be filled out hooray time saver that is always nice so don't forget you have to do your keywords here um too now if i had already done them then they would be here but that's that's fine that's not a big deal because we can come back and do that later right now we're just trying to focus on getting misty's proof copy ordered now she can come in here and do an age range and a grade range this is optional and i really don't even recommend doing it unless you're writing children's picture books middle grade then you can do it this is also the option where you can come in and set your book up for pre-order there are a lot of controversial statements over whether or not you should do pre-order for your e-book remember pre-orders are for e-books only at this time you cannot do pre-orders for paperbacks as a self-published author but there are a lot of pros to doing pre-orders there are a lot of cons to doing pre-orders i talk about them in my book but for now we're not going to get into that just know that you can click this and you can select a date meaning that my book i want i want my ebook to be available for pre-order and that means that you know i'm going to publish it on such and such date but we're going to click i'm ready to release my book now we're going to click save and continue and it's going to take us to the second tier where we upload everything this is your digital rights management you can either enable it or disable it another very controversial topic that you can google and spend some time researching essentially if you say yes i want to enable digital rights management you're trying to do everything you can to make it as difficult as possible for people to share your ebook when you say no you're saying hey i don't want to make it that difficult because i want people to share my book i want people to lend it you can make that decision on your own i personally do not have it enabled if that helps you at all now when we're doing our ebook upload and we're doing our cover upload we have to make sure that we have everything we need now you have what's called a mobi file and you have what's called an epub file when you are uploading to amazon i recommend that you use the epub and that is pretty simple you just click upload ebook and there it is and then you also have to have an epub file excuse me front cover so what you see here this is actually a 3d cover but where it's just the front cover you want to make sure that you have that uploaded as well so because it takes a moment to upload things i will make sure that this is uploaded but because it takes a few minutes i'll go ahead and go to the next slide because i'm about to run out of time alright guys see you in just a second okay i'm back so everything has been uploaded successfully hooray hooray covers there remember this is not a pdf this is a it was actually a png but this is just the front cover so that's different for an ebook now the last thing that we need to do is we need to launch our previewer because we want to make sure that the ebook looks good this is something that i did not stress the first time that i did this video either out of ignorance or what i don't know every ebook looks different on every e-reader device and i think that a lot of authors when they're doing their very first book they just naturally assume it's an e-book therefore it'll look the way that i want it to look across all boards right no no no no we wish that would be amazing somebody might be reading your ebook on a kindle paperwhite while another person may be reading it on an ipad and then another person on an iphone and then another person on like the fire or whatever that's called you have no control over that and it is really frustrating so i do just want to note that when you're working on an e-book and you're thinking but i had it formatted this way for e-book and why didn't it do it there and blah blah because technology is just a really big jerk sometimes and we have to just kind of work with what we can when we're dealing with e-readers so right now from what i'm seeing this looks really good um also don't forget like another thing that authors do not realize people have control over font sizes and all sorts of stuff so that might throw you off sometimes too but nonetheless so that was a tablet let's see what it looks like on a phone pretty handy dandy and everything seems to be looking really good so far nothing is sticking out you know and telling me oh everything's a mess you can also look and see what it would look like on let's say like a kindle e-reader now another thing to remember when you have a kindle e-reader don't forget that your cover is going to be in black and white like i own a kindle paperwhite and that cover is going to be in black and white whereas if i open this on my iphone it's going to be that dropjet gorgeous cover where it's full color so just remember that again guys things are different depending on what e-reader you're using but i love this it looks really great sarah bell did a really wonderful job i'm not seeing any red flags i'm not seeing anything that tells me this is an absolute hot mess looks great so we're gonna go and back up and we're gonna click book cheat beat uh wow book details and we're gonna scroll back down the last thing we got to do we got to put our isbn in here because she went ahead and got an e-book isbn so we're going to go and grab that and that goes there and then her publisher mystic press and then we're going to click save and continue and again that takes us to the third tier i talk a lot about pricing ebooks everywhere whether we're talking about social media my newsletter my book it is such a big conversation because it depends on so many things you know if you're going to be enrolled in kdp select that's a different conversation than if you tell me i'm going to go wide regardless if i'm in charge of launching a book i want my authors to do a 99 cent release for launch week many reasons for that um the main reason for me is going to be quantity i want you to sell as many books as humanly possible because i want to see your ranking soar i want to see you get that best seller banner i want to see a lot of publicity and buzz around your book also if you're a new author 99 cents is like no risk compared to you having your ebook at 499 when i don't know who you are you got to think about the risk factor also it's not permanent it's just for the time being it's just for launch and you can put it back up to you know 399 499 whatever one other quick tidbit if you are doing book promotion newsletters such as book gorilla book bub the fussy librarian open road media uh bargain booksie they want you to have a bargain okay and that is not a 499 book all right so you really really want to consider launching this at 99 cents there as a caveat oh but of course there is if i want a 70 royalty plan i cannot do that for 99 cents it has to be 299 to 999 if i want 70 royalty therefore during launch week this would be a 35 royalty you may be thinking why on earth would i do that long game it is about the long game you will not have your book at 99 cents forever it's just for a week or for however long you run that promotion for you know the newsletters or ads or whatever it may be your job is to get as many downloads as possible because that means as many readers as possible which means as many reviews as possible you and i both know that reviews are extremely difficult to get and you want to do anything you can to make it more convenient for somebody to do so which means you have to increase the chances of there being some buddies right i feel like i could belabor this for a really long time and this is not what that video is for but we are going to launch this at 99 cents 35 royalty after launch she can put this back up to i recommend like 3.99 4.99 for fiction yes you can do 2.99 not a problem but i think she could do just fine with 3.99 or 4.99 now she can decide if she wants to allow lending or not for this book basically it just means that somebody think of it like a library where i can say hey i'm reading this ebook i think you might like it i lend it to my friend or family but they only have 14 days to read it now the last thing is she would click publish kendall ebook which we are not going to click because she is not ready to launch so we're just going to click save as draft if we had clicked publish your kindle ebook then she would be told that she has up to 72 hours before it will appear on amazon i've never seen it go over 24 knock on wood if you are interested in doing kdp select you can learn more about it through the wonderful world of google but essentially you as an author are enrolled in kdp select meaning that for 90 days you are exclusive to amazon your ebook not paperback do not get that confused your ebook cannot be on apple books it cannot be on barnes and noble nook it can't be on kobo it can't be on any of that meaning your book is wide it must remain exclusive to amazon during the 198 90 day period this allows you to do some cool stuff like there's free book promos you can do and kindle countdown you are paid per pages read meaning that when your book is enrolled in kdp select if i am a reader and i have a 9.99 a month subscription to kindle unlimited then i can read your book for free you get paid by every page that i read lots to learn about that don't worry and if you do want to understand more about how on earth the kindle uh select works how how those things work you can go to shaylorraquel.com and select how-to videos under resources and then of course there's lots of cool stuff here but look at the amazon kdp select versus going wide video and i explain everything in detail there thanks so much for watching guys i hope that this has been helpful to you if you have any questions or comments feel free to comment here in the youtube channel i do respond to youtube comments and i do try my best to help and give guidance thanks so much again this is shayla raquel bye guys