First Lesson

Welcome to the first lesson in the Kindle Publishing for Beginners.

Over the next few days, you will receive several lessons that will help you learn the ins and outs of publishing on the Amazon Kindle platform.

In this first lesson, we are going to go over some of the basic information you’ll need to know before you begin publishing your own Kindle books.

As most of us know, Amazon is an extremely popular online marketplace that provides a wide variety of products including digital books that are meant to be read on an ebook reader.

Amazon’s popularity has skyrocketed with the development and sale of the Amazon Kindle. This small and lightweight device pushed ebooks to the next level. Readers no longer need a computer.  With the Kindle, they can cuddle with a good (digital) book anywhere anytime, without worrying about where the closest wall outlet is.

Along with that boom in popularity came the massive opportunity for profit. Soon writers, publishers and entrepreneurs all flocked to Amazon to take advantage of the Kindle self-publishing platform.

Before you can begin taking advantage of the self-publishing tools provided by Amazon you will need to get a free Amazon account, that is if you don’t already have one.

For publishing purposes, you can use the same account, so there is no need to create a separate one to start publishing books on Kindle. If by chance you don’t have an account, don’t worry, creating one is quick and easy!

If you’ve only been using your Amazon.com account to make purchases, some additional information will be required. Amazon will recheck your email address, ask for your social security number, and your bank account information. As concerning as this sounds, it is totally above board. They require this information in order to provide you with reports, earnings and (most importantly) to pay you your share of the profits.

On the Kindle platform, you don’t sell traditional ebooks. Unlike selling ebooks online, you won’t be creating your document in Microsoft Word and selling it as a PDF file. The books you create must be in digital text format and Amazon will handle the conversion during the upload process.

Don’t worry Amazon has taken online publishing to a whole new level by providing you with a suite of tools and all the help you need to start publishing right away.

To access the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) platform you can visit Amazon.com, scroll to the bottom and click on the link titled “Self-Publish with Us.” or you can visit the website directly at: https://kdp.amazon.com there you will find everything you need to get started publishing on the Kindle platform.

Myth: You don’t need an ISBN number to sell books in the Amazon Kindle Store. When listing your book for sale you will be asked for an ISBN number, but one is not required, so you can simply skip this field and move onto the next.

Amazon.com pays you a 35% royalty fee for each sale made. While this amount seems relatively small when compared to other selling options, you must remember that you are getting access to Amazon’s massive customer list so the potential profit can be far greater.

To ensure you make a profit, set a fair selling price. Remember, a good selling price translates into more sales. When pricing your book be sure to consider the big picture. More sales at a lower price than less sales at a higher price will help even out your profit margin. In fact, most make more money with they are lower priced Kindle Books then they do with higher-priced ones.

Keep in mind that prospective buyers can preview your book with the“Look Inside” feature, which is automatically enabled when you publish your book with KDP. So before uploading your book be sure to review “Look inside” FAQ section.  This will be your second chance, aside from the product description, to make a sale.  If the first pages of your book are uninformative or uninteresting, the chances of making a sale will decrease.

Don’t feel like you have to write a new ebook to begin publishing on Amazon. If you are already an established ebook author you can upload your existing ebooks to the digital text platform and convert them into the Kindle format for increased profits.

That’s it for today’s lesson. We have a lot to go over in the next few days if you want to learn how to use the Amazon Kindle platform to publish your own books. In your next lesson, we will be talking about

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