How to Publish on KDP

Taken from https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/19/we-made-a-book-and-you-can-too/

How to Upload your ebook

• Go to kdp.amazon.com (google it!)
• Sign in with your amazon account (or create an amazon account if
  you don’t already have one).
• And now you’re at your kindle dashboard. Click on + to create a
  new book, starting with ebook.
• And then…

Things that you will need

• Title
• Subtitle (these will be passed on to the print book and become
  unchangeable so get them right)
• Series title if it’s in a series (we’re not)
• Author names – there’s a limited number (a problem for
  anthologies) so have an ordered list AND
  • They’ll check the first name; make sure the name you’re going to
    use on the cover is the same.
  • For which reason, we list “The Writers” “Mill” as our first
    author. He’s a wonderful guy!
  • But please keep reading to learn how Amazon will let you add
    your name if you were one of the unlucky ones who got left out.

Things you will do

• Don’t add protection
• Do say you have the copyrights
• Create a nice blurb (and save it to use on the back of your
  paperback)
• Upload your kindle file (the one created when you asked kindle
  create to “publish”)
• And make the cover while it’s processing

Once the cover’s made and the file has been processed you get to preview the results. You may have wanted to download them as well. You may be disappointed.

Then you save and move onto to setting the price. I recommend using the 35% option but I can’t remember why. I like to allow lending. I like to publish to all markets. I suggest you make your own choices. And then you push the button to start your paperback.

How to use Amazon’s Cover Creator (part 1)

Unless you have your own suitably sophisticated program at home, use Amazon’s cover creator. It’s limited, complicated, and frequently buggy. But the rules for covers are seriously obscure and hard to obey. The cover is designed in three steps.

• Use one of their pictures or upload your own. We uploaded our
  own.
• Choose a style from various options. Don’t panic. You can change
  the colors, fonts (to some extent), font sizes, and even the style (within
  limits) later. But you can’t drag things around, shrink and enlarge boxes, or
  do any of the things you didn’t realize beforehand that you’d really really
  want to do.
• There are three buttons (today… who knows—fewer, more,
  completely different ones tomorrow). One is for colors. Choose the primary and
  secondary colors for any boxes that appear over your image. You can choose from
  preselected pairs of colors, or click on primary and secondary to select them
  individually. It looks like you’re being offered a wealth of colors, but bear
  in mind, the one you want almost certainly won’t be there.
• The second button would let you change where text boxes etc
  appear.
• The third lets you select a different “font family”
• Click on the text to change its size, color, font, etc
• But be careful about deleting anything… deleting the author can
  upset the system unexpectedly, for example.

 

How to Upload your Print book

DON’T let KDP create a paperback from your kindle file, or you’ll be inundated with unwanted widows and orphans! (This is why you make your own pdf)

• Most of the pre-publishing documentation carries over from the
  ebook, but you’ll need an amazon ISBN
• Add the ISBN to the Word doc and remake the PDF straight away or
  you’ll forget.
• Check, change and add whatever info is needed, but be careful of
  making changes. I’d love to have added the missing authors at this stage, but
  anything you change can cause your book to be rejected.

Then make the cover (again) while it’s processing. Afterward you’ll preview it again, save and move on to setting prices. Amazon will tell you the print price (this is the author price, but you should add at least $1 per book for postage—more like $4 if you’re unlucky). They’ll also tell you a minimum “list price” which is higher. This is the price at which you (or the library) don’t get paid for sales. Set your price somewhat higher so you at least get some royalties!

And you’re done… oh, except for the trials and tribulations you suffer in creating that print book cover and having it rejected.

How to use Amazon’s Cover Creator (part 2)

Ebooks only have front covers. Print books have fronts and backs and even spines!

Our trials and tribulations may give you a hint as to what can go wrong. They went as follows:

• Amazon kept the cover picture but spread it across the front and
  back, which made us lose what attracted us to it in the first place. Solutions:
  • Our first solution was to drag, resize, drag, struggle, scream,
    etc until the image appeared sort of okay on the front.
  • Since that first cover got rejected by Amazon after the meeting,
    I made a double-image version of the original picture (using Microsoft Paint –
    just drag the edges to make the size bigger, and cut and paste to add a
    reflected version of the cover image next to the original version) and uploaded
    that.
• Amazon not only didn’t retain our color choices from the kindle
  version, but also seemed to invert and combine the primary and secondary
  colors. Solutions:
  • We selected the closest approximation we could from the pairs of
    colors offered, since every change we made seemed to end in disaster.
  • Again, since our cover was rejected, I played with combining and
    recombining colors until I got a pair that look sort of the same as the kindle
    version. Here’s hoping they look good in print!
• The formatting of text on the back can be a pain. They offer
  left and right justification, but it would be much better if we could enlarge
  or shrink the boxes. They offer font sizes, but only limited choices. And they
  insist on telling you things don’t fit even when they do, or choosing automatic
  sizes that don’t work. Just go for it.
• Text on the spine is even more of a pain. The default font
  looked way too big so we tried smaller fonts until we found one we liked… and
  our cover got rejected because even that font was too big. Then…
  • I tried the smallest fonts. It looked okay until I asked for a
    preview. Then the title disappeared from the spine.
  • After failing to get the title back (except when I used a huge
    font size that clearly wouldn’t work), I tried deleting all the spine text.
    Then Amazon also deleted the title and author from the front cover!
  • So… I’ve left it with an invisible title on the spine and I’m
    hoping, desperately, they won’t reject us on the grounds of invisibility.

So yes, it was buggy, and it changes day to day. But don’t let that scare you off. What doesn’t work today might work tomorrow, and what you can’t do today just might be possible tomorrow. In the meantime, be glad they give us a program that mostly works for something most of us would never have dreamed of attempting only a few years ago. The world isn’t perfect, and neither is the self-publishing world, but it’s FUN.