Upload to Amazon

Better Than Great Minimum Valuable Asset_ Book

We have done the thinking about value for you and value for them. We have outlined the book, and received a peer review. We've written to the outline. We've written our first draft, we've done our own talk out loud editing session, we’ve also asked our peers to edit it. We have designed our digital prototype. So we've done a cover of our book. We have the PDF inner, and we’ve asked for feedback on them and started using it for credibility clues. So today, we are now ready to think about uploading it to Amazon. That way we get our printed prototype. I'm going to show you my own Amazon back end so you can see it in action.

First of all, I strongly suggest that you get yourself prepared. Get all your documents, everything ready. You will need the following.

Files:

Inner for print
Front cover
Full cover
Inner for kindle
Cover for kindle

Information & Data

Description
Series Name
Categories & Keywords
Author
Pricing

You will need the inner ready for print. So it's a PDF with the right form factor and the right margins ready for Amazon. You can make your front cover, and you will need a full cover which we haven't talked about yet, which we're going to talk about next. So you're going to need that full cover—it’s the wrap around the spine and everything you're going to need to enter for Kindle. You're going to need a cover for Kindle, which can be different from the one for print, depending on what form factor you've chosen for print. Just get all those files prepared.

First, the information that you're going to need is your description of your work, you can change this later so don't get too hung up about it in this first upload. But get something in there. You should have been writing this description, it's the information you've been collecting and pulling together over the course of writing your book. If you've got a series, you can put the series name in. You're going to put your categories and keywords in, you're going to put a little bit about you—the author— in who you are, your name and that sort of stuff. You're going to select some pricing options.

Make a KDP account. If you've already got an Amazon account, that's really super easy. Even if you haven't, it's very easy. So you go to kdp.amazon.com. There, they will ask you a few questions like: “How do they pay you?” They’ll ask about your tax information. They will help you through the whole process.

When you're in your KDP account, It's very simple. It has big buttons with a lot of descriptions and help files, so it's easy to follow.

I want to see you have a physical product in your hand, that’s why we’ve been talking about print a lot. But at the same time, we can go the Kindle route. There is a moment in time, if you're doing this yourself in particular, where you split the print and Kindle because the print goes to PDF and the Kindle goes to the Mobi or ePub file. They have different formatting characteristics. So before you go to this next stage, just make sure that you are 95% happy with what you've got. If you're not 95% happy with what you've got, if you like only 90%, and you just really want to see a printed version, then don't do the Kindle for now. Just go straight to the print route, get printing, handle your edits afterwards, and then do the Kindle later when you've had some reviews. Otherwise, you have to kind of make the same edits to both lines. So my advice is, especially for your very first book, just get the print done first. Actually physically seeing something in your hands is really helpful for any edits that you want to do moving forward.

The one thing we haven't done yet is our back cover. And the reason we didn't do that back cover until now is because you have just sent off your digital version and you've asked people to give you feedback and to give you quotes and testimonials. A lot of my clients, and it seems to be very popular at the moment, now use those quotes as the back cover. Big publishers don't put any blurb on the back, they just put excellent testimonials from useful people.

So you've got two options for the back cover, you can put the reviews, testimonials or endorsements on the back, or you can put a description. You’ve been writing the description, you've been collecting the description, you've been thinking about this as you've gone along.

The best thing to do about back covers is to have a look at the back covers in your category, your genre. See what everybody else is doing. Do they do mostly reviews, or descriptions? You can do a bit of both as well. Your cover design needs to match the back cover design. It needs to obviously fit with the styling of the front cover.

If you're going to write a description for the back cover, go back to the keywords that you looked at in the category words for your book. Make sure that in that description on the back cover, you're using all these different keywords. The keywords you used in your title and subtitle, you can use them again as well. But make sure you're getting those extra keywords in. These are the ones that you couldn't squeeze into your subtitles. That way you get a lot of chances to catch people's interest in your book.

Remember, the description on Amazon could be the same as the back cover, but you can update the description on Amazon as frequently as you want. But on the back cover, you'd have to change the back cover design to change it. Remember, your goal is to say to the reader: “Look, this book is just for you, this book is specially written for you. This is the promise I'm making for you, this is where you are now and this is where you're going to be. This is the value you're going to get from it.”

So you can do a bulleted list of the values. You can use snippets from your outline from the table of contents. You can do whatever you need to do for whatever you need to put in there that you think is going to help the reader make the decision to buy your book.

Then you upload it to Amazon. It's like, seriously, all you do is go to kdp.amazon.com, you remember your constraints. So you're going to be selecting the book, the size. You're going to select what paper to use. You will then upload your PDF inner which has been designed to Amazon specs. You also upload your PDF cover which has been designed to Amazon specs for the PDF cover. You download a cover PDF, which is a specification, it shows you exactly what Amazon is expecting in each of the bits and how to do it. You just pull up your images. If you've got a designer, they can do all that for you. I suggest you use Amazon's ISBN unless you want to buy your own. If you're planning on going outside of Amazon in the future, then it's a good idea to buy your own ISBNs. If not, just use Amazon's free ISBN. Write your book blurb, this is the description that we've just talked about. You set your price and your territories where you're going to sell it and how much you're going to sell it. After all that, you then upload all those files, and click Preview. Then you wait 10 minutes or so. And then you can see what Amazon thinks you want to print, and also for Kindle since they have the same process.

Here you can fix any problems, because Amazon will have comments on the images. Perhaps they’re not the right scale etc. Amazon will tell you all of the problems and you just need to fix them. When you’ve done all of that, you wait for approval.

Then order your printed book.

You just follow the Amazon process, it’s really easy. They make it as easy as they possibly can for you to do the things you need to do without being a book designer. Like I said before, for your prototype, don't worry about it, just go for it. Amazon will even allow you to use their cover designer from the software. So you can just do a cover design there if you just want to get something in your hands fast. So you don't have to go the full design route to get something in your hands. But then once you've seen your prototype and you're happy with it, then you might go the full design route.

Why Amazon? Amazon gives you an ISBN, it’s a cost you don't have to take on. And depending on your territory where you are in the world, ISBNs are priced differently. Basically, Amazon’s easy and forgiving. So you can get your prototype done really fast and then you can fix it. It's print on demand. You have control, within Amazon's constraints obviously, but you have control. You can change the pricing, you can change the availability. You can do Kindle, you can do print, you can do hardback, it's a large audience. Around 60 to 80% of books are sold through Amazon. You can't really ask for more.

Like I said, you can do Kindle paperbacks and hardbacks, and a series. Amazon loves a series. They want you to do a series, they will usually promote it if you've got three books in a series. Amazon will help you and help your audience find your books.

Let’s talk about pricing strategies. You can price high or price low. And it's entirely up to you. You can change the prices in the future, as long as you don't put the price on the cover. So pricing strategies high or low, you get to decide. I've had some of my books that are priced high because I wasn't planning on selling them through Amazon. I was planning on doing different marketing tactics. But I've also priced really low because, why not? You get to decide the pricing strategy. It depends on what you're doing with the book. We will talk about that more when we talk about marketing. Remember, this conversation started about what you are doing with the book. We started talking about moving people through the relationship stages. Whether they are suspects, prospects, expects or they will be referring your book.

Sample pricing / costs

Kindle

70% between $2.99-$9.99

35% all other prices

Amazon

60% after print cost

Amazon has a great little calculator that will show you your profits. The Kindle option is the easiest, you get 70% if you sell the book Between $2.99 and $9.99 This is Amazon's modern day Goldilocks zone of pricing for authors.

Normally, you're going to get 70% of the royalties, they take a tiny bit off for the size of the file in megabytes, but you don't really tend to notice that unless you've got a map, a picture book, and it's got loads of images in it. So you only get 70%, more or less anything outside of those prices. So for example, if you did an ebook, at £50, you are only going to get 35%.

On print book, you get 60% after print costs. So now let's have a look at that. You can go directly to Amazon as a help topic. It basically allows you to put in prices and then estimate how much you're going to get as a royalty.

Let's assume you're going to do paperback, it's 128 pages, and you stick it in at $5.99. Entering all that data in the calculator, it will look like this:

Better Than Great Minimum Valuable Asset_ Book (1)

So you can see as your price goes up, your estimated royalty goes up as well. But, will the number of sales go up? So you have to find your Goldilocks of pricing. Like I said earlier, it depends on what your pricing strategy in general is, and the reason you're doing the book and what you weren't planning to do with the book.

So for example, if your goal is to sell hundreds and thousands and millions of books, you probably want to go with a lower price strategy and go for volume of sales. But if you're going for high end, and want to be exclusive, you might want to go for a higher pricing strategy.

KDP Select

For your first run through, I recommend just getting your print book and getting something printed in your hands. But if you're going for the ebook, this is what you need to consider. You enroll yourself in KDP Select for 90 day periods. This means that your ebook is exclusive to Amazon, it's narrow. What does that mean to you, that means that you can't sell it on Kobo or you can't sell it on Google Play. You can't sell it on Apple books nor on the Apple Store. You can't sell it as an ebook in other places. So you are restricting where you can sell it, but it gives you some benefits.

The benefits are in the marketing strategies. One of the benefits is Kindle Unlimited. Now if you’ve a subscription to this, you get 10 books at a time for free. And you pay $9.99 in Spain. This is like a 10 book library. So if you've got that your book will be enrolled in that lending library. You get paid based on how much of your book people read.

If you want to sell on other ebook platforms then we use something like Draft2Digital or Smashwords. I personally use Smashwords to distribute my ebook to the other ebook platforms.

A strategy for marketing your ebook is going narrow first; and in the last couple of quarters while you're doing some promotion, you then go wide. One of the reasons you might NOT want to go narrow, is you might not want to add extra money into the Amazon monopoly. However, Amazon does represent around 60% to 80% of all books, it depends on who you speak to. If we are speaking to Amazon, they would say, 99%. if you speak to other people they would say 60% to 80%.

I've got a couple of tools for you.

Description Generator LINK
Calibre (for ebook) LINK

I love the Amazon book description generator, and it creates the HTML, just how you want it to look. So you can make it bold and you can make bullets. It just makes life really easy when you upload your description. For creating your ebook or for seeing what your ebook looks like try Calibre.

A printed prototype, a real book in your hands is our goal. Now you can do the ebook at the same time, but if you've got to do one thing, it's the printed real book that you should focus all your attention on. That way we can fix any problems with your book and we can fix any typos, and get some more feedback.

The Mom Test

It’s basically, being proud of what you've created. I've actually booked champagne celebrations for my clients. Suddenly they've got a book after all of their handwork and efforts. They've actually gone from an idea in their head, they've broken the brain / world barrier, and they've got something physical in their hands and created an asset.

Do:

Finalize your documents
Upload to Amazon
Order a copy!
Send a copy to someone you love

Writing Tips and Techniques

Think: Value to you & value to them

Write to outline

Design Your Prototype

Upload to Amazon

Ship & Share