The main sites for direct self-publishing are Amazon KDP, Kobo Writing Life, Barnes and Noble Press, and iTunes Connect for Apple Books.
The main ebook aggregators are Draft2Digital, PublishDrive, StreetLib, and Smashwords.
Each of the platforms has a similar set of fields, even if their look and feel is slightly different.
It's important to note that none of the platforms require programming or any kind of technical ability. If you can use Google and MS Word, you can self-publish an ebook!
The best way to learn is to set up an account on the various stores and have a go. If you have all the relevant information ready, it shouldn't take too long to get your book out into the world. Exciting!
In this section, I will briefly outline the information you will need.
Book Title
You need to enter the exact title as shown on your cover. This is because people used to 'stuff' keywords into the title field e.g. "Paranormal romance with a noir detective twist." If it's not on the cover, you can't include it here!
You can change your title if you want to rebrand the books later.
Sub-title
Optional. Often used for non-fiction books, the sub-title may contain some of the keywords discussed earlier.
Series title and volume
Books in a series are often linked together on the online stores and customers are notified at the end of one book about the others in the series. You can also use series for non-fiction in order to group books for a similar audience.
Edition number
If you substantially update a book over time, you can use different edition numbers.
Publisher
Optional. This can be your company name or an imprint name that you decide on, or you can just leave it blank. After all, readers don't generally shop by publisher.
You don’t need an imprint or a company to self-publish, but it’s something to consider later if you turn your writing into a business.
Description
This is the sales description or the back blurb, as described in the previous section.
Book contributors
This is your author name, which may or may not be your real name. I publish under Joanna Penn for non-fiction and J.F.Penn for fiction. You can also add co-authors, translators, editors and other parties here if you want to credit them.
Language
As a reader of this book, I assume that most of your books will be in English, but I have self-published books in French, German, Italian and Spanish. Indies are moving into translation as new markets open up, plus many authors are now self-publishing from other countries. The indie movement is growing!
ISBN
Optional. You don’t need to use an ISBN for your ebook as all of the sites have options to use free ones or Amazon uses their own ASIN for Kindle books. If you do have your own ISBNs, you can enter one here.
For more detail on ISBN, check out this article from the Alliance of Independent Authors: www.TheCreativePenn.com/isbn
Verify your publishing rights
Public domain books are out of copyright. So, say you wanted to publish Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, you could publish it but it's likely that one of the official versions would sell better and it's available for free everywhere anyway.
For your own books, select "This is not a public domain work and I hold the necessary publishing rights."
Categories
As covered in chapter 1.1, you should already have done your research and chosen the appropriate categories. Now you just need to add them here.
For Amazon, you get two choices, Kobo allows three and Apple Books allows more, as does Draft2Digital.
Age range
Optional. This is mainly for children's books, which are becoming more popular in digital format.
Keywords
As per chapter 1.1, you should have done your research on the type of thing that your customers search for and then enter them here.
Book release option
Do you want to publish now or have the book up for pre-order?
Pre-orders are especially good for books in a series, as readers are often ready to order the next one as soon as they finish the one before. You can set them up to a year in advance on Apple Books and Kobo and three months on Amazon. On Apple Books, you get sales rankings for the pre-order period and for the actual sales day, so it's well worth doing it there. For Amazon, you spread your sales over the pre-order period, so you'll need to weigh up what's best for your book.
If you don't want to do a pre-order, just select "I am ready to release my book now."
Book cover
Upload your high-resolution book cover design. You can always replace this later if you want to rebrand.
Upload your book file
This is mobi for Kindle or ePub for other stores.
If it works, the upload will be shown as successful. You may get a notification of errors or spelling mistakes. Just fix them and re-upload another file if you need to.
Most indies upload new files periodically to update back matter. This is why control of your own formatting is so useful.
DRM
Digital Rights Management is a way of locking a book to a specific format.
I don't enable digital rights management on any platform. As far as I'm concerned, if readers want to read my book on another device, they should be able to. So, I always click, "Do not enable digital rights management." It’s your choice.
Preview your book
Most of the publishing platforms offer a way to preview your book file as the customer will see it. Amazon's preview tool offers a view per device, e.g. Kindle Fire vs. iPhone, which is great, especially if you have specific formatting/tables/images.
If there are problems, no worries. Just fix the file and re-upload.
If you're going to self-publish ebooks or you are already selling them, then I recommend that you buy an ebook reader or at least try reading an ebook on one of the many free apps on your phone or tablet. You need to understand the mindset of an ebook reader as well as their online experience.
I read ebooks on the Kindle Paperwhite and my iPhone Kindle app. I mostly download samples before buying, unless I know and trust the author when I will often pre-order the ebook when I hear about it. I also have preferences around pricing, and you will pick these things up if you try reading digitally.
Verify your publishing territories
If you are self-publishing and you hold all the rights, just click, "Worldwide."
If you are traditionally published, you may own rights in other territories. For example, say you published with a publisher in the US and sold only the US rights, you could self-publish in the UK or Australia or any other country. You can select individual territories and deselect the ones that you have licensed to someone else.
Set your pricing
Most of the stores have country-specific pricing and it's well worth setting these individually instead of relying on an automatic exchange rate calculation.
For example, if you price at US$4.99 and just leave it to automatically calculate for GBP, then readers in the UK might see £3.21, which is an odd price.
It's best to change the UK price to £2.99 or £3.49 which is a price that readers are more used to seeing. Amazon has specific price bands for royalties, so you need to price between US$2.99 and $9.99 if you want 70% royalty. If you're pricing below or above that, then it's 35%. Other stores do not have these restrictions.
Kindle MatchBook
Amazon-specific field. If the print book is available and the customer has already bought it, they can get the eBook at a reduced price. I always select this.
Kindle Book Lending
Amazon-specific field that allows readers to lend books to friends and family in specific territories, which I think is a good thing, so I always select this too.
Click Save and Publish
The ebook will go through processing and within 4-24 hours, it will appear on the online bookstores. Super exciting!
A few more thoughts on pricing
New authors often agonize over pricing, so here are some tips:
You can change the price anytime, so start with something and change it later if it's not working for you.
Consider the value to the customer and what they can get for that price within the same genre.
For example, if John Grisham's latest legal thriller is $4.99, you can't really price your first legal thriller at $9.99. I have fiction at free, $2.99 for novellas, $4.99 for full-length novels, $6.99-$8.99 for boxsets, $7.99-$9.99 for non-fiction and higher prices for other items.
The more books you have, the more flexibility you have with pricing, and you won't be so emotionally attached to any individual book.
It's hard to put up a book for free if it's your only one, but when you have multiple books in a series, it's not hard at all to put the first at permanently free (permafree) as any authors do. If readers enjoy that, they might consider buying the rest of the series.
Free is a marketing strategy, in the same way that offering samples of cheese or wine in shops helps people to discover new tastes, so they might go on to buy the rest of the product.
It's very useful when you have a series, as it can lead people into buying the rest of the books. If you want to make a book permafree, then you need to price it for $0 on other stores e.g. Kobo, Draft2Digital, PublishDrive, and then report the lower price to Amazon so they will price match it to $0.
Kobo and Apple Books both have the capability to schedule pricing promotions so you can set and forget, and the price will revert after a discount period.
KDP Select does have some price scheduling tools, but if you’re not exclusive with Amazon, you have to change it to the discount price and then go back in and change it back after the discount period is over.
A word on EU VAT tax:
In Dec 2014, a law was brought in across the EU that meant sales of digital products, including ebooks, would now be subject to Value Added Tax based on the country of the customer, not the supplier.
The law was aimed at stopping companies like Amazon, Google and Apple from situating their companies in countries with specific tax breaks to lower their tax in other countries. But of course, it hit every author and small business selling digitally. This tax is now spreading to other countries, so we can assume it will be part of the global digital marketplace going forward.
It affects you because this tax is now included in your list price so you will be paid less per book, but all the technical stuff is handled by the distributor, so you don’t need to worry about doing it yourself.
If you want to sell direct from your own website, you can use PayHip or other services that handle EU digital VAT for you.
You can find my tutorial on selling direct at TheCreativePenn.com/selldirecttutorial