How to Publish Your Ebooks

Ebooks have been regarded one of the easiest, simplest and most effective ways of generating money online without actually having to do any work. Now don’t get me wrong here – I’m not suggesting that writing an ebook doesn’t require any work. Of course you’ll need to put in a fair amount of elbow grease for at least a handful of weeks before your book is finished and finalised. What I’m saying is that, once your book is written and out there, it will generating endless amounts of money without you actually needing to put in any more hours. An ebook can sell an unlimited number of times and does not cost require publishing fees, thus acting as an infinite source of income if utilised correctly. This article will run through how exactly you can tap into this resource and get started with writing your ebook.

First Steps

To begin with, and you may be relieved to hear this, you do not need to be a professional writer to publish a book. Yes, that’s right, writing a book does not require any expert knowledge – no English degrees nor writing qualifications are needed, simply the ability and motivation to learn.

The first and most daunting step that, unfortunately, many potentially very successful writers fail to make is to pick up a pen and actually write. Your book will not write itself – how can it? If you want to write a book then you’re going to have to start at some point, so let’s start right now.

1. Verbal Diarrhoea. This is exactly what it sounds like – you’re going to pull the plug from your bath of ideas and let them spill all over a page. You don’t necessarily need to write the words either, a G Doc will do just fine, just get your ideas down on a page. This is literally your very first draft of your writing career and it will by no means be perfect (or even close) so don’t worry about things being coherent – nobody will see this other than you.

2. The Review Process. Next you’re going to want to draw some links between your jumble of ideas. See what you’ve written down and try to make connections – are any ideas consistent? Can you see a potential plot forming out of anything you’ve written? Even if these links are tenuous, they may form something decent further down the line. At this stage you want to come up with a loose plot, a storyline of some sorts that could be the backbone of your book. Give yourself plenty of room for improvement – this is still just the planning stage of your story and will be rusty at best. At this point you may wish to share your plot ideas with some close friends and listen to their feedback. Maybe they’re intrigued by your plot or have a suggestion on how it could progress. Use this feedback constructively and allow it to shape your story without detracting from your ideas.

3. The Editing Process. So you’ve got a few ideas laid down and you’ve had some useful feedback. Maybe at this point you’ve even drafted a couple of chapters. The editing process will follow your story throughout its growth. As you write, keep reading back through your words and fine tune them. As you implement new ideas into the story you may want to check back to earlier points, making sure everything is consistent and flowing nicely.

4. Keep Writing. The most important step of all is to keep writing. I can’t stress the importance of consistency. If you wish to succeed in any area of any field you’ll need to persevere and stick at whatever it is your doing. In this case, you may decide that you’re going to write at least one page of your book every single day. Maybe you’re going to write ten a week. Whatever it is, be true to your words and stick at it.

Formatting and Design

So you’ve written your book. Perhaps it’s taken you a month, maybe two, maybe even a year since you started but you’ve finally made it to a point where you feel you’e ready to publish your book. Thankfully, doing this is easier than its ever been. You don’t even need to go through a publisher any more either and can simply publish your book independently using the following steps:

1. Format your book for Kindle. This simply means making your book readable on Kindle and there are a couple of ways of doing this. Firstly, you could try doing it yourself using Calibre but this may be difficult to do with no experience. Alternatiely, you could pay somebody else to do it for you and this is usually recommended as it’ll be done correctly.

2. Designing your book cover. It’s best not to cut back on your expenses for this. Of course, avoid being ripped off as in any case, but don’t be shy to pay for a top quality cover as it’ll significantly affect the number of people that decide to view your book

Actually Publishing

Once all of the other steps have been completed you should be just about ready to launch your book into the publishing world. To do this, simply:

1. Visit kdp.amazon.com and sign in (or sign up) to your Amazon account.
2. Input your tax details so that you’ll receive royalties for your sales.
3. Go to ‘add new title’ in the ‘bookshelf’ section.
4. Fill in your book’s information including its title, description and any words you want to direct people to your book. These may be words like ‘psychological’ and ‘thriller’ – words that capture the themes of your story.
5. Upload your image and the book itself.
6. Make sure everything looks right.
7. Click ‘worldwide rights’ in the ‘rights and pricing’ page.
8. Choose your royalty rate as 70% and decide on your price (somewhere in the £3-£10 range).
9. Save.
10. Wait for a confirmation email from Amazon.
11. Promote

(more on step 11 in the next article, ‘How to Boost Your Ebook Sales).