Publishing on Kindle Direct

HOW TO PUBLISH ON KINDLE

1. Finish your manuscript and thoroughly edit it. I use Grammarly, and it does a fine job, but only numerous read-throughs will catch everything.
2. Establish a KDP account. This is necessary to receive royalties. Go to  https://kdpreports.amazon.com/dashboard. To right you will see Your Account. Click that.
3. You will fill out all the required information and you should then have an account.
4. You'll be asked for the business type. I chose Individual. There is banking information you will want to enter for your royalties. There will also be entries for tax information, e.g., your social security number. All this information is secure and kept at Amazon; you need not worry about identity theft.
5. You may have a few more screens to go through; they should be self-explanatory.
6. As regards the manuscript itself: KDP states that PDFs are preferred; however, I found that Word-formatted documents work just fine. There are some steps you must take, though:
   
   • One of the most vexing things I found when uploading a manuscript is that there was an odd grey bar on the right that would have shown during a publish. The solution to this was to go into Word's Review tab, change the Markup dropdown to No Markup, and click the Show Markup dropdown beneath it and unselect Comments, Insertion and Deletions, and Formatting
   • Another important factor is to ensure you have embedded fonts in your Word document (or if you are choosing PDF, in that as well.) Consult ChatGPT or Google to find out hwo to accomplish this. THIS IS IMPORTANT. If you find during the Quality Check that it cannot find certain fonts, IT WILL SIMPLY NOT PUBLISH THAT PAGE. Not good, right?
7. Finally, you will get to a screen that says you have no active titles. Somewhere on that screen will be the ability to upload your manuscript. Start, first, with your eBook. You'll be asked certain questions about your eBook.
   
   • Language: Obvious.
   • Title: Obvious.
   • Subtitle: This one is a little less obvious. This will appear after your title and a semicolon and can be used to drive discovery and interest. Certain guidelines apply, however. You may not mention here that the book is on sale or discounted, or anything related to time frame. If you elect to use a subtitle, make sure it applies to your book and the topics around it.
   • Series: A later consideration, when you have more than one book. Ignore for now.
   • Edition Number: Start with 1.
   • Author: Obvious.
   • Contributors: List your co-authors and the like.
   • Description: Give a nice summary of the contents of your book. Remember, this is what potential buyers will see most prominently, so be sure to sell it here. Here's what I wrote for mine:
     
     A mysterious alien artifact. A secret CIA project. A world on the brink of transformation.
     
     When a shimmering disk appears in rural Ohio, the CIA covers it up. But as scientists decode its strange signals, a far greater mystery is revealed: a transformative technology. One that could change everything.
     
     Dimensions of Essence is a rapid-fire, high-stakes political and sci-fi thriller where trust is dangerous, power is corruptible, and first contact may be humanity's last chance to get it right.
     
     
   • Publishing rights: Obvious.
   • Primary Audience: No for sexually explicit material, unless you have some. BE CAREFUL with the age range. I wanted my book to be accessible to 10-year-olds and up, but it ended up showing as 10 to 18 years old. It became a young-adult book. I had to go back and make the minimum age 18+ to fall into the adult category.
   • Primary Marketplace: I went with Amazon US.
   • Categories: You can choose three categories. Look them over and see which ones apply best to you. I chose:
     
     • Kindle Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Science Fiction › First Contact
     • Kindle Books › Mystery, Thriller & Suspense › Thrillers › Technothrillers
     • Kindle Books › Mystery, Thriller & Suspense › Thrillers › Political
     • (Note that the categories available for e-books and paper books differ greatly.)
   • You will then want to put in your keywords. These are important; these are how some readers will find your work. I went with:
     
     • First Contact
     • Teleportation
     • Political Intrigue
     • Treachery and Betrayal
     • Technothriller
     • Political Thriller
     • ...and in my case, because I was entering a contest, I also entered StorytellerUK2025
   • When you are ready with a prepared manuscript document, you will go through the process of uploading your first manuscript. As mentioned, they talk about how a PDF is a superior choice, but I submitted in Word document format and it worked just fine. IMPORTANT NOTE: WHEN UPLOADING YOU MUST WAIT FOR THE DOCUMENT TO PROCESS. It will let you know when it is ready in that entry on the screen.
   • Then you will build your book cover. You can either use their built-in creator or do what I did, which was to generate the book cover offline using whatever graphic tools you are proficient in. Note that the eBook version differs from the printed-book version. In an eBook, you will only have one graphic to work with. In printed books, you will choose a layout, upload the cover art, enter the spine text, and enter the back-of-book copy.
   • You'll indicate whether or not you have any AI-generated content. I chose "No", since I do not.
   • Then you will launch a previewer. This will show you exactly what your book will look like on an e-book viewer. Wait until the previewer says it's ready or you will be previewing an older version (when you edit). Sometimes it gets stuck, though, so if you are waiting an inordinately long period of time, launch it anyway. BE VERY CAREFUL and check every page. It will indicate if there are any problems, such as missing fonts. If you have a missing font, it is extremely important that you go back and remedy that. Failed fonts will cause dropped pages, outright. You do NOT want that. It may talk about misspellings, but in my case, I allowed some misspellings for literary license.
   • There is a section for entering your ISBN numbers. It's not required, and getting a true ISBN costs some coin. I went with an Amazon-created ISBN for free. If I get very popular, I will purchase a Federal ISBN. They are costly, at about $125.00.
   • There is one last checkbox about accessibility issues.
8. Proceed to the final page, where you will decide on going with the Amazon Select program (I did). If you choose to be Amazon Select, you will get double the royalty -- from 35% to 70% -- but you CANNOT offer your work electronically on any other platform, including a website. Amazon is strict in its enforcement here. You can get your book pulled off their system if you are noncompliant.
9. Primary Audience: No for sexually explicit material, unless you have some. BE CAREFUL with the age range. I wanted my book to be accessible to 10-year-olds and up, but it ended up showing as 10 to 18 years old. It became a young-adult book. I had to go back and make the minimum age 18+ to fall into the adult category.
10. Decide on your primary market. I chose Amazon.com, which is the United States market. Choose your price point, and click the remaining steps to submit your book for publishing.
11. The first submission takes about 3 days for them to review the work. Subsequent edits are quicker, usually taking only 24 hours at maximum.
12. Page numbers are not necessary for e-books, but I'll put together a post about how to do a good job with page numbers for your printed versions. I'll post that at a later date.

This post only truly covers e-books. A later post will cover paper-copy books.

Happy writing and happy publishing!