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Sign in You will be signed in using our secure server. Don't have an Amazon account. Learn more about publishing popular genres on KDP: Amazon and Kindle are trademarks of Amazon. KDP Select Earn more money and reach new readers. KDP Community Connect with experts and fellow authors. Besides, you can hardly beat the cost of printing on Amazon KDP, and the quality of print is pretty good too.
There are quite a few additional benefits of publishing with Amazon KDP as well. Here is how my book looks on Amazon: Despite being a beta project in development, the benefits outweigh the downsides. The team is sincerely and diligently working on solving any issues you could run into, and I was able to reach a satisfactory solution to all of the problems. Go back to Part 1 or continue to the next post in the series. The Writing Cooperative is brought to you by Tony Robbins.
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Sign in Get started. Pros Obviously, your book will be available globally. You can thus easily create ads for your book and target the right readers. You can alter it here if you want to.
I always make the project title the same as my book title. So in this example, my title is: It will appear when you sell your book on CreateSpace or Amazon. The subtitle is a second opportunity to entice users to buy your book. The maximum length of the subtitle is characters, including spaces. This book contains easy to follow instructions that show you how to self publish a book on Amazon using CreateSpace.
Author Chris Fielden has self published many books. He walks you through the setup process giving lots of practical advice along the way. The book can have one primary author. It should be the person who wrote the book, or put the book together. The name has the following fields:. In this case I have used my name: Here you can add details of anyone who has contributed to the book. This can include illustrators, translators, writers etc.
There is a list of around 70 options in the dropdown menu. Just pick the most relevant. This is because I originally approached Matthew about writing a post regarding how I grew the audience on my blog. Given my background, he suggested writing a post about self publishing on Amazon instead. There is a tick-box option to indicate if this book belongs to a series. Rowling did with Harry Potter. If you do select the tick-box you can give the series a title and then give this book a volume number. Volume numbers must be numerical EG, 1, 2, 3 etc.
Later, if you make substantial updates to the content, the edition number should be changed accordingly. This means readers know if they are buying the book in its original format or whether it is a later version with edits. This indicates the date the book was first published. For new books, you should leave this field blank.
The publication date will then be assigned automatically on the date you approve the book for publication. If you are creating a printed book, the publication date is highly unlikely to be the same date that you go through the setup process. It is advisable to order a printed proof to review, prior to publication and this takes about a week.
I will talk about this in more detail later. In this example I have left the publication date blank as this is the first time this book will be published, so it will be assigned automatically. Put simply, an ISBN is a unique stock keeping identifier that allows your book to be distributed and sold.
CreateSpace offers a good resource that explains the difference between the different options available. You can go on and create your book without assigning an ISBN at this stage if you want to. But you will need to assign one before you can publish your book. I always use black and white, despite featuring author photos in my short story anthologies.
This is because full-colour interiors can be way more expensive to print. This is the base cost of printing, before any profit is factored in. You can still have a full-colour cover at no extra cost. You can choose white or cream. Or you could just create two versions of your book and order a copy with white paper and a copy with cream to compare.
Again, this is subjective. It fits on most bookshelves.
Page count is an important consideration. CreateSpace has a really useful book order calculator that can help you make decisions about all these different options. The book has pages. The book I am creating as an example is 11, words. The book has 90 pages. I would strongly recommend doing this. There are two options:.
I always use the formatted template. The title page, copyright page, dedication, contents, acknowledgements, introduction, chapters, correct margins for print etc. The only thing I change is the font. This is completely subjective. Once setup, you can use your first book as a template for your second, which speeds the process up for your future books. Anyone who has basic knowledge of Microsoft Word can do this themselves using the templates that CreateSpace provide.
If you have the budget, you can pay CreateSpace to set the book up for you. In this example I have created the interior for the book myself. As you can see, the Interior Reviewer shows you print borders and accurately illustrates how the book will look on paper when printed. I always go through the entire book using the reviewer and then make any edits that might be necessary and upload the file again. At the end of this process, I strongly recommend ordering a printed proof of your book prior to publishing. That is the only way to review the print quality accurately. I will cover this in more detail later.
This is because a good cover makes your book look professional, it builds trust in your buying audience and good cover-art is appealing to the eye so it can aid sales. CreateSpace offer a professional cover design service. There are some useful resources on CreateSpace to help you with cover creation, dimensions and formatting:.
I usually order 2 proof copies of a book to see if I prefer the matte or gloss finish. To date, I have always published using a matte finish — I think the colours have more depth and the quality is better. But this is my personal opinion.
I would usually upload a print-ready cover, supplied by an artist. The templates are good fine for this example , but in my opinion they look like templates and your options are limited. Employing an artist to create a full cover can add a quality feel to your book and aid sales. You could also ask an artist to create the imagery and insert it into a cover template. You will be presented with self-explanatory options that allow you to select:. These options will differ, depending on what is included in your selected theme. There is a fairly extensive image resource in CreateSpace, so you can use their images on your cover for free.
Or you can upload your own. In this example, I have uploaded an image I found on Pixabay that is free to use commercially with no attribution required. I tend to use imagery that supports the subject matter of the book — hence an image of books on a shelf in this example. This can simply help browsing users identify your book as something they might be interested in and aid sales. This is the text I have used in this example:. This book contains a detailed, easy to understand guide that walks you through the entire process of using CreateSpace to make a book and self publish it on Amazon.
It covers how to make printed books and eBooks for Kindle. It is written by Christopher Fielden, an author who has published all his books through Amazon and CreateSpace: Chris gives practical advice and talks candidly about his real-life experiences with self publishing. This includes details of how to price your book and how much money you can expect to make by selling it. The review process takes up to 24 hours. You will be notified by email when the review process is complete.
If there are any problems, they will be highlighted. You can then review them, make any necessary edits and resubmit the file. In the screenshot above, you can see that a warning about image quality was highlighted after my files were reviewed. CreateSpace advise using images with at least DPI dots per inch to make sure the pictures print clearly. I have found that even images under DPI usually print well.
In this instance, some of the screenshots I used are below DPI. I decided to order a printed proof of the book and review how they look before publishing. They will probably look fine in print. You can also download a PDF proof of the book. The PDF will not contain the cover, but allows you to review the rest of the interior. However, as I mentioned before, I strongly recommend buying a printed proof to review before publishing your book. You will be presented with three options.
Two of them are somewhat archaic and remind me of delivery times available in ancient history. You might as well strap the book to a raven and see what happens. I always go for the fastest delivery time possible. For some reason, I always pick typos up better when reading words in print than I do on a computer screen.
Should I add headers and footers in the Word doc. Great stuff, good luck with your book Paul. However, it is worth noting that if you sell through expanded distribution, the minimum price threshold for your printed book will be higher. I believe the potential is huge, especially from electronic copies where the production cost is minimal. The review process takes up to 24 hours.
I then fix typos and errors, resubmit the updated files and go through the review process a second time. Unless there were any major problems with the printed proof, I just use the digital proofer the second time round. I simply fixed typos and resubmitted the book. I used this option the first time I went through the process, after receiving a printed proof of the book. To my mind, the more readily available your book is, the more exposure it receives.
This creates more opportunity to generate sales. However, it is worth noting that if you sell through expanded distribution, the minimum price threshold for your printed book will be higher. This is because the printing and distribution costs increase when more companies are involved in a sale.
This does not mean you can sell the book at a lower price through the first three sales channels and make more money per-unit. It just means customers can buy the book at a lower price. For some reason, CreateSpace seem to have the order of this part of the process a bit backwards, so you just have to do it in the wrong order. The Discount Codes option is self-explanatory — you can create discount codes that can be applied to all your books on this page. You can read a recent resource about CreateSpace discount codes here. You can learn a lot more about the eStore here.
This is based on the selections you have made during the setup process and includes print and distribution costs. They then calculate your royalties in different currencies as you alter the sale price. Far more detail can be found on the CreateSpace royalty advice page. This resource covers royalty splits with retailers and the costs of print in different formats and countries. You can also use the CreateSpace royalty calculator. This includes printing and distribution costs.
This means the royalties I will receive every time a customer buys a printed copy of this example book are as follows:. This means that the prices of books in different countries will alter as currency exchange rates fluctuate. With my other books I do not do this. This is because I want to offer a set price for my books in the UK to match with my marketing efforts.
If the UK price changed every time the exchange rate altered, it would be very difficult to offer consistent pricing information and discounts when advertising. As an example, take a look at the page for my book on Amazon in Canada. In my opinion, if you are offering a book that contains lots of information, value, entertainment, etc. It should be priced based on how much work went into it and how much the buyer will gain from it.
Do NOT undervalue your product. There was a lot of research involved.
You can get your book onto Amazon in 3 easy-peasy steps! made it possible for authors to affordably publish their own works in print form. You can order author copies of books in "Live" status: Go to your Bookshelf and find the paperback you would like.
I needed to take time to gain the relevant experience to write the book in a way that would offer value. I dread to think how many hours went into it. If you only select the three main distribution channels — Amazon. To sell the book in the UK and Europe, I would have to change the individual minimum pricing in those territories, like this:. The more astute among you will have noticed that this gives me exactly the same royalty amounts as not having Expanded Distribution channels selected. Well, a writer might want to offer their book to family and friends at the cheapest price possible.
This option appears here to make it easy to order proof copies of the book with a matte or gloss cover without having to go back through the review process. It allows you to add more detail for prospective customers to help them decide if they want to buy your book. The description for your book can be up to 4, characters in length.
It will appear on the sales page in online shops. You could use the blurb from the back of the book, but this is your chance to give prospective customers more information and entice them to buy your book. It covers how to make printed books and eBooks in Kindle format and contains links to many useful online resources that can help you research the implications of choices made through the creation process.
It is written by Christopher Fielden, an author who has published all his books through Amazon and CreateSpace and runs a popular writing blog that offers lots of free resources for short story and fiction writers.
He includes details of how to price your book, how much money you can expect to make by selling it and gives his expert opinion on the different decisions you will have to make while creating your book. Chris also talks about the pros and cons of using Amazon and CreateSpace to publish and distribute your books.
Matthew asked Chris to write a post about publishing books on Amazon for his audience. To do this, Chris had to go through the publication process to create examples readers could learn from. So this book was created for that reason. It is sold at a cheap price as it was not originally created to make money — just to be an informative resource for other writers and entrepreneurs to learn from.
You can see all the rules for product descriptions here. In this example, I need to show that my expertise qualifies me to write about the subject matter of the book. After the band stopped being a profession and became a hobby, I worked as Operations Director at an award winning digital agency in the UK. During this time I started writing fiction. I self published my first book, Wicked Game, in I used Lulu to create the printed book and CreateSpace to make the Kindle version of the book to sell and distribute on Amazon. It uses my published stories as case studies, so writers can see how all the different tips and advice in the book were used in practice to achieve publishing success.
I run a popular writing blog. My website contains many free resources to help authors develop their short story writing and see their words in print. All the advice I give is practical and based on real-life writing and publishing experience. I have a lot of experience using different platforms to self publish my stories and books.
I now publish all my books on Amazon using CreateSpace. I wrote it as I thought other writers might find it helpful when considering self publishing their own work.