One of the most nerve wracking part of being a self-published author is… well, the publishing! Pressing that button to put your work out there for the whole world to see. But even before you can press that all-important button, you need to put in all the information you want the world to see and ensure that they do, in fact, see it. And to do that you’ve got a bunch of decisions to make and information to gather.
One of the most important decisions is where you are going to publish.
Are you going to put your book into the Kindle Unlimited program (called Kindle Select on the author side of things) and be exclusive to Amazon? Are you going to publish wide, and if so where? The biggest online stores are Apple, Barnes & Noble (US only, but there’s a work-around for that), Kobo, and Google Play. If you do decide not to publish only with Amazon, I’d recommend you publish absolutely everywhere else because — why not?
There are pros and cons of putting your book into Kindle Select so I’m not going to go into them here (that’s a whole blog post on its own). If you do decide to publish wide, here are some pointers:
- DON’T PANIC!
Honestly, people get really nervous when it comes to uploading their book, but all it is is filling in some forms online. Yes, every single retailer has to do things a little differently, but it’s pretty easy to follow the prompts and make your way through them.
- Create accounts at all of the e-retailers where you will want to publish your book. To do that you’ll need to have:
- Your legal name
- Address
- Phone number
- Bank account number with routing number (so they can pay you your royalties)
- Your social security or tax id number
Most e-retailers will ask you to fill in a tax form (Kobo doesn’t because it’s a Canadian company).
- Have everything you’ll need to publish your book at your fingertips.
I said this at the beginning and I say it again here because it’s important. It will make the whole process so much easier. Here’s what you need to have:
- The epub of your book (that’s the ebook version).
- A JPG of the front cover for the ebook.
- A PDF of your book for the print-on-demand version.
- A PDF of the entire cover flat (including front cover, spine, and back cover) for the print-on-demand version.
- Your book description.
- Any reviews you’ve received already.
- An ISBN for the print version and optionally for the ebook. (If you don’t want to pay for an ISBN from Bowker, you can get a free one from Amazon but then Amazon will be the publisher on record for your book.)
- Know how much you want to charge for your book.
- Seven keywords which readers may type into the search bar to find your book.
- The BISAC categories your book fits into (at least 3)
I know that this can be a nerve wracking and exciting time, but if you stay calm and are prepared it’s really very simple and then all you have to do is market what you’ve published—easy-peasy! 😉
To upload to Amazon, there are three pages you need to go through:
Page 1 is the book’s basic information:
Book Title and subtitle
Author name
Book description
The Categories and Keywords you’ve chosen
You can choose (but you don’t have to) to put in an age-range for your book. This is really only important for children’s and YA books.
Page 2 is where you upload your files
If you are uploading for print-on-demand you need to know the size book you are publishing, whether it will be in black & white or color, and whether you want “bleed” or not. (Bleed is where the image goes right to the edge of the page. For text, you do not want bleed. Your cover image does have bleed.)
Do “launch previewer” so that you can make sure your book looks right.
You have the option when uploading an ebook to put in an ISBN and Publisher name. You don’t have to, but it does look good to at least put in a publisher. Make one up if you haven’t already, but be sure it’s something you’ll want to use for all of your novels.
Page 3 is where you set the price of your book and tell Amazon whether your book will be in select or not. When you put in the price of your book, it will automatically convert that into all the different currencies. Please go through and make sure they all are either a round number or end in .99. It will look lazy to people if they see the price is 3.74.
Uploading to Barnes & Noble
There is nothing tricky to these forms. B & N is the one retailer that asks for any reviews you might have, so don’t forget to have some handy (if you’ve got any).