So, I’m going to just jump ahead and assume you’re ready to publish. You’ve done all the formatting from last time, picked out your style and all sorts.

First things first – congratulations. Proud of you.

So, setting up your KDP account.

You’ll need an Amazon customer account. The joy of Amazon is it’s pretty easy to navigate so, if you don’t already use Amazon to shop, you can set up an account pretty quickly.

Either hit the old ‘Sign in’ bit, or ‘New customer? Start here’.

SettingUpAmazon


Okey-cokey, so once you’re signed in and Amazon has all your information (name, address, etc), scroll to the very bottom of the home screen and find this bit:

quickkdp

Click away, my friend. You’ll need to supply some additional information to set up a publishing account.

Now, I’m going to level with you: it’s a couple of years since I set mine up but, from what I remember, it’s all pretty simple information you’ll need to supply. The most important stuff is the banking information – Amazon needs this in order to pay you.

If you partake in online banking, it’ll be easy enough to find your banking information and, if you’re in the UK, you’ll need to include your National Insurance number when prompted. (Frankly, we all keep our fingers crossed for the day when we’ll earn enough to have to pay taxes, but regardless, Amazon needs this info to keep everything above board and legit).

With your account all set up, there are other apps you’ll want to get hold of to keep track of your sales.

The best ones (at the time of writing) are: 
Kindle Direct Publishing: kdp.amazon.com

startkindleebook

This is where you upload your manuscripts from, where you’ll be able to track your sales internationally, and your KDP Select enrolment.

Author Central: authorcentral.amazon.co.uk

Screenshot 2020-07-30 at 18.43.06

Once published, you’ll manually add your books here, track sales via occasionally exciting charts, and keep up to date on customer reviews. Through this page, you can add to your author biography, photos and videos, which will show up on your Amazon Author page – so when people search your name on Amazon, it’ll show your books, your photo and whatever you’ve chosen to say about yourself.

Book Report: app.getbookreport.com

Screenshot 2020-07-30 at 18.45.08

This one shows you how much you’ve earned, you can narrow your search so that you see what you’ve earned on one book in particular, or between specific dates. You can see a bar chart of your earnings/sales per month, a pie chart of sales per book (which is pretty useful once you have a back catalogue), percentages of sales by marketplace, and details about sales numbers, page reads, and giveaways.

It’s worth getting yourself a Goodreads account at: Goodreads.com
Having a personal account with Goodreads is a great way of sharing your reviews of other people’s books. Having an author account with Goodreads will show you reviews, ratings, how many people have added your books and that sort of thing.

goodreadsauthorprogram
Again, you’ll need to add your books manually, and sometimes, the covers don’t quite come through – I still haven’t worked out why. But people can add you to lists.
beingagoodreadsauthor
Now, lists are pretty great. People scan through the subjects and add books to their To Be Read lists, so it’s a pretty reliable way to get new readers. Also, people who might never have heard of you can see which writers you are most like. This can throw up some frankly amazing results.
SimilarAuthorsToMeApparently

There are new apps being developed all the time so, there’s every chance some of this information will go out of date at some point, but, for the time being, this is a reasonable place to start.

Okay. Having done all this, you’ll want a cup of coffee and a hug before the next bit – Uploading an Ebook to Amazon KDP.
I swear, I’m not stalling. There are just a lot of screenshots to sort through. I’m on it.
Rock on.