you finally finished your book now it's time to upload it to Amazon though the process to uploading your book can be kind of confusing and it's really important and there are some key steps that you need to know to ensure that your book does well on the Amazon website if you miss them or you don't put the right effort into these steps your book might have some problems but by the end of this video I'll have shown you all the things that you need to know to confidently upload your book to KP and give your
book the best chance on Amazon I'm Zach damanti for Kindle let's get into it the first thing you'll need to do is sign into your Amazon KDP account with an existing Amazon account if you don't already have an Amazon account make sure to create one before moving on the next screen is going to be the user agreement make sure to fully read through this before selecting agree upon agreeing you will be prompted with this screen and may notice that not all your account information is complete make sure to fill in the rest of that necessary
information or else Amazon May not allow you to publish your books after uploading for this video we will be going through the exact steps to creating a Kindle ebook however when you're ready to upload your paperback and hard cover files make sure to select the proper one here luckily most of the steps will discuss here are the same there as well but also once you have the ebook uploaded you can add a paperback or hardback for that book in your dashboard here's an example from my own dashboard you could see the ebook for garden the
garden is already uploaded and and in order to add a paperback or a hard cover I can start the process by clicking one of them here the process for uploading the other editions is virtually identical and you'll have no problem uploading those ones once you have your ebook one in there on the Kindle ebook details screen we'll have a few things to fill out first we select the language our book is in under book title we will type in our book title and subtitle if there is one the series section is only necessary if your
book is a part of a series if this does not apply to you leave it blank if this does apply here you can see an example from my stone and Sky series where we add the series and then add the book number for where it falls in the series addition number is only used if you are uploading another rendition of a previously published book under author make sure to type in your name or pin name as you would like it to appear when it comes to contributors this includes any other authors editors illustrators or anyone
else that you may want to highlight for helping out with the book for description you would enter in your book's description however if you just copy and paste your words into this your book description will look like a giant block of text and that's not good instead you need to make sure you break up your paragraphs and bold or italicize as needed to do this you need to be able to use special HTML coding to make your book description look better with larger words bold italics bullets and more but wait Zach I don't know how
how to write HTML code don't worry I've got you covered there's actually a free tool on kindlepreneur decom that will allow you to put your book description into it then you can highlight sections and click formatting buttons to make it look exactly how you want when you're finished just click to get your code and paste it into this box this is pretty cool because it helps you see exactly what your book description will look like before you publish it plus there's an optional free AI feature you can use and it will try to help you
improve your book description as well but that's up to you and don't worry I've got a link for that in the description below or you can Google book description generator and choose the one by kindlepreneur publishing rights is where you will select whether or not you own the book or if it's in the public domain most of the time you will choose the first option which is where you own the publishing rights the keyword section is where things get a little nerve-wracking because the keywords you select are so incredibly important here you have the ability
to tell Amazon exactly what phrases you'd like your book to show up for on their store when someone searches for your book most authors make the mistake of coming to this section and just typing in random words that they think will work however doing this will hurt your book's chances of success no matter how much thought you put into these words therefore you should take the time to research what words or phrases will be best for your book the best way to do something like this is a software like publisher rocket it will not only
show you what words or phrases people type into Amazon when buying a book but also how many people type it in and how much money other books are making and not to mention with Rocket's new reverse Asin feature you can also check on what keywords your comparable titles have been using to rank this feature is super cool and will help you narrow down your search for the perfect keywords so don't gloss over this step you really want to make sure you have the right keywords the next thing we come to is categories now we recently
did a video where we did a deep dive on categories and how to select the best ones for your book and I'll make sure to link that one at the end of this video for you but for now let me give you a quick rundown you need to select up to three categories your book should be placed within in the past Amazon would allow you to submit requests and add your book into 10 categories in total but sadly this is no longer the case so we need to be very particular with the three we choose
now selecting categories may seem easy just pick three categories that your book fits in and there you go well not exactly there are actually a couple of things you need to consider and pitfalls you may want to watch out for first you want to find categories that give you the best chance of hitting bestseller with over 14,000 categories you can find categories that fit your book but might only need three sales in order to be a bestseller instead of a thousand if you'd like to learn how to figure this out check out the article on
kindlepreneur docomo categories which I've got Linked In the description below but the second thing is you you want to stay away from Ghost categories ghost categories are category strings your book can be placed under but aren't findable for Shoppers without a direct link and this inevitably makes your book nearly impossible to find if you select ghost categories Shoppers can't find your book through the category system and you can't be a best seller no matter how many copies you sell what's worse is that 25% of the categories listed are actually ghost categories yikes let's avoid those
at all costs in order to do this you need to try to find the category through the Amazon store category tree if you can't then it's a ghost the much easier way is to use publisher Rockets category feature not only will it show you how many sales a book needs to make in order to be number one in a category it will also show you which categories are ghosts and thus which ones to avoid now back to our Kindle ebook Details page after we select our categories we come to the age and grade range section
this is mainly for authors who are publishing children's books make sure to select the proper age range if this applies to you and finally you need to select pre-order status make sure to select the option that fits your needs when it comes to your release date and whether or not you want readers to be able to pre-order your book which for the record we highly recommend why not get orders on your book before it even comes out once you complete this page make sure to hit save and continue and we're on to the next page
Kindle ebook content Page look at that we're cruising along and that first page might have seemed like a lot lot but it's really the toughest part on this page we're going to be uploading our actual files under the manuscript section you select yes or no for the digital WR management section if you're unsure as to what that is and need a bit more information hover over the blue text here and in the Amazon description will appear I typically choose no in this section we will also be uploading our manuscript by selecting the upload ebook manuscript
button here find where your manuscript is located on your computer and select choose for it to start uploading this could be a simple Google or Microsoft Word document that's been converted to an UB file or one created with professional formatting software like attakus with attakus you can actually format and create some really nice ebooks I'll drop a link for that in the description below in the Kindle ebook cover section we have two options to select from the first is to use kp's cover creator to create your own book cover or we can upload our own
cover although the cover creator gets the job done there are limitations and your books cover is one of the most important features for your book so you want to make sure to take your time and create something that stands out now I highly recommend uploading your own and using a professional Creator from elsewhere you'll have much more freedom and be able to create a unique cover that you can be really happy about and hopefully it'll draw the right readers to your book Kindle ebook previewer gives us the option to launch the previewer and see what
our book looks like on a Kindle or through the Kindle app make sure to to use this tool when uploading to check yourself and ensure there are no outstanding errors when uploading your book the ISBN number is where you're going to type in your book's ISBN number if you aren't sure where to get your ISBN make sure to check out the resources down below so you can get yours squared away once you're done here make sure to hit save and continue and we're on to the last page Kindle ebook pricing if you don't know what
KDP select is I recommend you learn a little bit more about it before choosing whether you want to enroll your book in it or not I've enrolled books and I've chosen not to there are pros and cons to choosing either way and it'll be really important for you to choose which one makes the most sense for your goals territories is where you will select which territories you want your distribution rights to be held the royalty and pricing section is very important and may require some research to ensure that you are pricing your book properly you
can also use the KDP pricing support service here you can see what other books similar to yours have been sold for in the past and make a judge call from there as another option you can see what the typical price point is for books in your genre in Publisher rocket to get a good idea select the royalty plan you wish to use and type in your book's price here if there is some account information missing at any point during your upload process you will see a warning sign here go back and correct or fill in
that information before publishing then hit submit for pre-order or publish and that's it you did it you nailed it with all that done it can take up to 72 hours for Amazon to publish your book live but it also could be up sooner make sure to check your email Amazon will contact you when your book is ready and published be sure to check your book's Amazon page once it goes live to ensure that there are no mistakes and everything is in order if everything is correct you're good to go now that might have seemed like
a lot but if you followed along and took all the steps you're better off than a majority of authors who don't know anything about keywords or categories or even ghosts for that matter and you've already got a competitive of Advantage I'll see you in the next video and until then ever onward
