Publishing as a Paperback
Hopefully, the first section of the book will have given you everything you need to know about publishing & promoting on Amazon Kindle. Your next step is, if you haven’t already done so, is to finish your book and publish it as a Kindle book on Amazon. You’ll feel great when you do. But you know what will make you feel even better? Holding a paperback book that you wrote! That is what we are going to do now.
Why a Paperback?
I sell more paperbacks than Kindle editions of my books. That is common for non-fiction writers, less so for fiction writers. However, creating a paperback from your existing Kindle manuscript is easy, so why not? Until recently, Createspace was Amazon’s print-on-demand service, but they’ve now moved it all under the one “KDP” roof. Having both kindle and paperback publishing in the same KDP account makes things even easier. Let’s get started.
If you are creating Kindle books, it’s relatively easy to convert those books into physical paperback versions without having to pay anything upfront. It works like this:
1.
Create your book in the “paperback” format.
2.
Submit it for publication.
3.
When approved, promote your book.
4.
Let Amazon do the rest.
If you make a paperback sale, Amazon prints a copy of your book, then packages and sends it to the customer. At this point, Amazon takes its cut and adds your royalty to your monthly income report.
As you can see, this is pretty much hands-off on your part. All you need to do is promote your book, but Amazon will also do that for you. You don’t have to worry about taking orders, shipping, refunds, etc. All you do is collect your royalty payments every month.
This section of the book will take you through the complete process.
You’ve already created your Kindle book from your Word document, and we’ll now use the same Word document to create the paperback version. Most of the work has already been done. All we really need to do is decide on page size, create a cover, and then do some final checks of the document.