Publishing Your Book on Amazon: What You Need to Know
I wrote a book! It’s super dumb, but thanks to Amazon, it’s in print form. I can hold it in my hand, and see it up on my bookshelf. (How cool is that?!)
With it out in the world, the big question now has been how I made it happen. How did I dedicate time? How did I get it designed when I don’t know how to design anything? How does it work publishing with Amazon?
Well, I’m not going to get into how to write your book. That’s on you. But, my book does offer the exact writing process I used, sooooo….order it now, dummy!
Whether you’re using the old school method of literary agents and publishers, or the new school route of Amazon that’s disrupting the dinosaurs, getting a book out to the world is both easier than you thought and also a huge pain in the ass.
I did try the old school method first, through open publisher submissions and websites that list agents’ emails. That process was slow, and I couldn’t find a reason to wait for them. What was the benefit? More money? Better distribution? These are nice, but not why I wrote the book. I’d rather make less and only be on digital stores if it meant I could have it out in the world immediately. I believed in my book, but I didn’t know if agents and big publishers would, and I wasn’t willing to wait the months and years it takes to find out. So, I went to Amazon.
Amazon self-publishing pays you as much as 70% of the book sales, which no big publishers offer. And, it comes with tutorials and templates for making and publishing your book. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that it’s all a disaster, and I wouldn’t want you to have to go through it alone, as I did. So, here are some tips for navigating the Amazon Publishing world…
Look at that idiot…reading during his dumb photoshoot.
Dumb Tips for Publishing on Amazon
1) Be Patient With the Templates (They Kinda Suck)
When you’re ready to print your book, the friendly folks at Amazon will give you plenty of templates to match the book you imagine. The problem is none of them are any good. While helpful, they’re all wrong. Be prepared to adjust margins and print guidelines on your templates because everything shows up differently in the preview. That means, if your experience is anything like mine, it’ll take about 30 tries to get it right. I’ve joked that it took longer to get the paperback finalized than it did to write it, but it’s only funny because it’s true.
2) Get a Designer
There’s a cover maker option within Amazon Publishing, but it delivers the kind of covers you’d expect from a self-publisher (shitty ones). By using their design templates, you’re also bound to them. If it has a photo frame, you better have a photo to put there, regardless if you wanted to put book reviews in that spot. Don’t want a giant, random stripe across the front of your book? Tough. If that’s the template you use, you have no choice; it’s hard-coded in there. This means you’re likely to find that many of the templates are fine, but none are what you actually envision for your book; none are perfect. Having a designer will allow you to not just have a cover but have a cover that reflects the book. (I did my best to avoid the “Don’t judge a book by its cover” cliche this whole time. Be proud of me. I’m a hero.)
3) Watch out for Kindle
Getting your book up on Amazon in Kindle form is far easier than print, probably because Amazon wants to direct eyeballs to their Kindle devices. However, the Kindle Create program is not very friendly to formatting. When transferring your document, it removes much of the nice formatting you’ve created, including line spacing, font type, and font size. On some Kindle pages, the perfectly sized paragraphs I wrote became one giant block of unformatted words. Then, the next page would be an entirely different font, with entirely different line spacing, and it would be blue for some reason. Prepare yourself for not only going through the entire Kindle file to reformat it, but also for not being able to format it the way you want. With only 3 fonts, and a series of pre-sets, your book will not look the way you want it, and you’ll just have to deal with that.
4) Utilize Amazon’s Support Services
The process isn’t easy, but you’re not alone. Amazon provides the templates, along with countless tutorials, guides, FAQ pages, and community message boards. Take advantage of all that stuff or else the creation and submission of your book could quickly become overwhelming. Plus, when all those other help options don’t work, they do respond quickly. For my publication journey, once everything failed, and I was left worried and clueless, Mohana from Kindle Direct Publishing responded immediately and solved all of my issues, even offering to jump in and make the necessary tweaks for me.
5) Make a Website
Unfortunately, there is not a lot of opportunity on your book’s Amazon page to tell the story. There’s real estate within the Overview and About Author, but it’s collapsed and therefore easily overlooked. If you have background for your book, or want people to do more with it, like hire you for speaking engagements, it’s useful to add a website for support. Mine is WriteDumb.com and it’s a simple Square Space template that took only a couple of hours to set up. With the website up, it was far easier to direct people to “WriteDumb.com” as opposed to having to find me “on Amazon.” It’s more specific, more direct, more actionable, more branded — especially since there are seven other James Dowds on Amazon Publishing, and none as good.
6) Don’t Overthink It
It’s not going to be perfect, no matter what you do, and you have to live with that. The templates are wonky, the printing is erratic, and whoever is proofing your book is guaranteed to miss typos. But, who cares? Most people don’t notice typos when they read, and far fewer care when they find them. In fact, after around five professional writers read through my book, I went ahead and published through Amazon, and the next reading — reading on a freshly printed paperback — someone noticed a typo on the first page. THE FIRST PAGE!!! Every set of eyes, no matter how experienced at spotting mistakes, missed that error on the very first page. Oh well. Just enjoy the fact you wrote a book and in a few days you’ll be holding the printed copy. That’s a magical feeling. Plus, a benefit of Amazon Publishing is that you can just go back on and update the file, so the next order already has the error fixed. That means, if you ordered my book on the first day, you might have the true first edition with a typo on the first page. Keep in mind though, all of the other typos are still unaccounted for. See if you can find all 12!
So, that’s it. That’s all you need to take your finished manuscript and get it out to the world. Well, obviously there are many more steps, like...how will you promote it? How will you know who to target? How will you get reviews? How will you optimize your SEO? How will you build your social community? But, all that’s for next time.
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