Hey, do you have a book that you'd like to publish, but you don't know how, or you're worried it might be too expensive? My sister-in-law was telling me over the holidays that she had a really cool book that she wanted to publish, but naturally, she figured it's probably pretty expensive and probably pretty hard, and there were just a lot of other unknowns that were holding her back. And so, of course, I was very, very excited to tell her, No, no, no, it's actually possible to publish for free in as little as 15 to 30 minutes, I promise you. And when I boiled it all down, it's really just five simple steps. So, Cassandra, this video is for you and for anybody else who is in the same shoes and wants to know how to publish a book for free really quick. Let's make it easy. I'm going to start by sharing number one, the print-on-demand company that I most recommend you work with when you're starting out. Number two, the types of files that they'll require.

for the inside of the book, known as the interior, and there are specific files for ebook versus print books. Actually, number three, we'll talk about the cover file for your book and how you can potentially make that for yourself using Canva, which again is free. Number four is uploading your book to that print-on-demand company. So, I will show you my screen. There are three sections: metadata, the book files, and then pricing and distribution, and I'll walk you through all of it. And then last but not least, number five is pressing publish. See, it's easy. So, let's get into it. Step one is to choose your print-on-demand company. And so, print-on-demand is exactly what it sounds like. They print your book only when there is a demand. So, gone are the days where you had to order a thousand copies to yourself to keep in your garage and then send them all out yourself. Now, these companies do all of that for you. They do, obviously, take a percentage of the profit to cover their cost, but you have to do zero shipping or

if it's an ebook, they will deliver that to the person's email as well. And just like it sounds in the name, they only print books when there is a demand. So, you just put your book up online, let your readers know it's there, and as long as there's a demand, you can just sit back and let them do the work and make the money. I'm going to pop a list of companies that I prefer on screen and walk you through it super fast. KDP, which is known as Kindle Direct Publishing, is my personal favorite, but it only publishes to Amazon, so just keep that in mind. Draft2Digital is another favorite of mine. They used to be ebooks only, but they have recently expanded into print as well. And the cool thing about them is that they publish for at least ebooks to all vendors. So, we're talking about not just Amazon, but also Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, places like that, and even some libraries. IngramSpark publishes to all vendors in all formats, but I would recommend caution with this because it's

not quite as user-friendly for beginners, and I also would personally only recommend print for this because I've heard their distribution for ebooks is just not as strong. Before we keep going on this list, just know that I have videos on all three of the companies I just mentioned, so if you want help with your research, I will link those videos below. Next, we have Barnes & Noble press, and they publish in all formats. They have ebook, paperback, and hardcover, but of course, it is Barnes & Noble specific because it's their store, and so it is also US-only as well. There's a company called Lulu that I wanted to give an honorable mention, even though I've never used them. And then for ebooks only, you can go direct to Apple. I think it's called Apple Books right now, and you can go direct to Google Play and direct to Kobo Books as well. And all of these vendors reach different groups of readers in different parts of the country, things like that, so it can be nice to have that extra exposure if you

want to, but you don't have to do all of them at once. You can start out on one and then add more as you feel comfortable if you want to. For the sake of this video, though, I'm going to pretend that you chose KDP or Kindle Direct Publishing because that is what I would strongly recommend to my sister-in-law and also honestly to you. For step two, you obviously need to have your book, but more specifically your book files if you're going to be uploading those files. So, we're going to start with your interior file, which again just is everything beneath the cover from front to back. Doesn't matter what type of book it is, if it's a children's book or a planner, doesn't matter. Everything under the cover is the interior, and the interior file needs to be one big file. And depending on which company you work with, it has to be a certain type of file as well. I'm going to assume if you're here that you already have a finished book that you

totally understand this is not a writing tutorial or an editing tutorial, but I did want to mention that I do have playlists on both writing and editing that I'll link below if you did want help with those things. For the sake of this video, again, I'm assuming you have a finished book, which means you technically already have a book file. So really, this step is all about converting that file to the required file type for the print-on-demand company. Kindle Direct Publishing, for example, wants your ebooks to be an EPUB file, if at all possible, and your print books to be a PDF file, if at all possible. And that's a really good thing to know, just really quick, is that ebooks do need a different file than print books, and we'll get into that, don't worry. KDP does have a list of different file types that they'll allow for ebooks, but the one that they most recommend, that I would recommend as well, is an EPUB file. And the idea behind the EPUB, or at least one of the reasons behind it

is that people are reading on devices in all different sizes. So depending on like how big the screen is or how small your page formatting is going to be completely different, and the ebook has to naturally shift and fit the page depending on the size of the screen without messing up the formatting. My favorite way to change my word document into an UB file is just to use a website called draft to digital. It's super easy to use, so you're going to have to make an account just like you did with KDP. It should be pretty quick. You don't actually have to sell books on here, although you can as well. Remember we mentioned this is other ebook companies if you would like to have expanded distribution, but you don't have to. You don't have to do anything fancy. You can just make your UB file here. So I will go to my books. This is what your page will look like if you've uploaded your books, and you'll just click add new book, start ebook. You can see they have three options there now when it used to just

be ebook. I love that the reason you'll want to upload your cover art is because they're going to most likely include that in the ebook file itself. So, I'm going to go ahead and upload it super quick. Ignore the Apple-specific cover art section. It should be fine to be the exact same. You're going to input the metadata about the book, but honestly, if you're only using them to get the Epub file, you don't have to do a lot of work with this. You could just skip through it really quick, or you could fill it out the way that we will be filling out the metadata for KDP a little later on in this video, so you can kind of come back and compare notes. You'll see that I'm doing the bare minimum. I've got one keyword, I've got one category, and I'm going to click Start ebook 'cause that's all I need. I'm not actually publishing on this platform right now. I'm just getting the ebook. Now we can upload our Word document, so hit browse. This is my

personal ebook file for this book, and then it just needs a quick second to upload the book. While it's doing that, you can move on to this section. So again, if you're not actually publishing the book on here, you can just leave that as is, or you could set a future date and do a pre-order if you know you want to do that. We'll talk about all of this metadata a little bit later on in the video when it comes to pre-orders and writing a description. Since I'm again just getting the file, I'm not going to write hardly anything 'cause I'm actually not using this. I'm going to skip the short description 'cause it says it's optional. It's not a collection 'cause that means multiple books. I don't have any collaborators, AKA co-authors, to add to this project. And last but not least, I'm just going to click the give me a free ISBN number. This is an International Standard Book Number. It's just an identification number for your book, and they offer free ones, so I'm

going to click that and save and continue. Oh, apparently the book description actually has to be longer now. I think they must have caught on to people like me who are doing that. We'll talk more about the description later on, but I'm just going to go ahead and paste mine in for right now, and then we're going to click save and continue. If you hadn't yet added a title page or copyrights or dedication, any of these things on the left side, you could use Draft to Digital to add that, but I've already added it in my Word document, so I just skip the section and click save and continue. And here we are. This is the page where you can get your ebook, so it's going to show you a page in your book. I think it's really good to scroll to the front and then scroll through and make sure everything looks good. You can scroll through chapters like this and go all the way to the end of your book, make sure everything looks beautiful. Let me show you all this amazing extra formatting stuff on the

right side. It's right now. Sounds simple, but you could add these cute corner decorations. This is the more really simple side. If you have a specific genre, you could add in like mystery and thriller kind of vibes or romance vibes with a little heart. I really love this fantasy one. I use this a lot, but I've also used the crown and I've also used the dragon. And then if you wrote non-fiction or poetry, they have those options as well. And you can see how they add that to every single chapter header, which is super fun. But you might not need that. That's okay if you don't need that. And you can also add this drop caps, which is just that very first letter being larger, or you can skip it if you'd rather not do any of that. Once you love how this file looks, you are ready to get your UB version of that file. So you just scroll down to the right. They actually have three different types, so you can get a PDF here. You can get a Mobi file.

but right here in the middle, if I click this, it's going to let me download an Epub file that looks exactly like that, and that's what Amazon requires. So, I just download this file, and then I'll bring it over to Amazon and use it there. If you wanted to also publish on Draft to Digital, you could click I have reviewed and move on. I have this whole uploading video there if you want to know more about uploading to Draft Digital. But for today, we are only using it to get an EO file. So, that is how I do that. That's how to do an ebook interior. But we still need to talk about the print book interior. For those of you who would like physical copies in your hands of your books, it's actually not that hard. It's easier than the e-b, in my opinion. The file type for print books that KDP most recommends is called a PDF, and a lot of you are already familiar with this. You might even know how to convert a Word doc into a PDF already.

if you don't, there are three ways that I know of. First of all, apparently Word itself can convert to PDF. Now, if you have a Word doc, I believe it's pretty easy. You might have to Google it. I've actually not done this in years, but I know it's possible. The second option that I've seen people use, and Ed myself, is actually Canva. We'll talk about this more in a second, but I have used this for my children's books. So, when I was designing pictures of my dog Penny, putting a filter on them, putting words on them, that was all in Canva. And then I put it all together as a PDF file. And that's one of the options that Canva will let you download is a PDF. So, that's another option. Not so great for novels, though. So, the third option, which is what I use, is actually Adobe Acrobat. And I'm sure there are other options out there as well, but that has a really nice file converter from Word to PDF. So, however you get your document from one file to

another the goal is to get your Word doc to be a PDF when it's for print books. I'm excited for step three. We're going to talk about your book's cover file. So, the cover itself for ebooks. You obviously just need that front cover. That's all people see online. That's all you need. But for print books, you obviously need not just a front cover but also a spine and a back cover as well. This is the more complicated one. Let's start with ebooks first. You know that saying don't judge a book by its cover? That is 100% false. Everybody judges books by their covers. And in fact, what I want you to do when you're thinking about your cover is put yourself in your target reader's shoes. Picture them browsing Amazon. What types of books are they looking for? Because if your book isn't what they're looking for, they're not even going to see it. They're going to just browse right past it. So, a cover is extremely, extremely important. No pressure, but it's pretty

much the number one factor of whether or not they're going to buy the book. In fact, that's my first tip: treat your cover as seriously as you treated the book itself, meaning do multiple revisions. Don't just settle on your first cover and be like, Hey, it's good enough, good to go. Try to make a first draft and then tweak it, and then run it by people for feedback, just like you would with your book, and you know, fix it some more, run it by more people, people especially your target audience. I think this will really, really help you make sure that you make a really good cover. Number two: compare it to other covers in your genre. So, we already talked about this. I won't harp on it too much, but I think it's important to see: does your book look like it fits in with the other books in its genre on Amazon? That's a good sign that your target reader will be like, Yeah, I could read that book. My next tip, I think this is number three, is to use Canva to make your cover. If you

want to get a free cover. I actually already did an entire video on that, so I'm not going to break it all down again. I'll just link that below. But I really think that you can do a lot of great things with Canva at this point. And if you have a bit of a budget for it, or if you would like to put a little bit more money into it and have somebody else do this, but you're like, I just don't really want to pay that much. I'm still on a budget. You can actually get pre-made book covers from a lot of different places. A lot of different cover designers have made kind of a collection of pre-made covers that they're like, Whoever wants it can come buy this one, and it's pre-made, so it's cheaper versus one that's made specifically for you and your book, if that makes sense. And then my last tip for this section is to use KP's cover template. What is it called? Cover Creator by just putting in the front cover that you're making in Canva and then

letting them create the spine and back cover because sometimes figuring out the dimensions for that, although you can if you want to try doing it in Canva, it can get a little bit intense and a little bit confusing. So, it's really nice to just plop in a front cover. I did this for my notebooks. I had the front cover that I designed in Canva, then I just used the cover generator for the spine and back cover. It was really handy. All right, my last tip for this section, I don't even know what number we're on anymore, is that covers are actually changeable. If you feel like, Oh, I've got an awesome cover, and you upload it, but then maybe a month later or a year later or two years later, you're like, Yeah, I could have done better, then just change it. That's totally okay. I've done this myself multiple times. In fact, sometimes I even just change covers for fun because the book's been out for a few years and it's reached its intended audience, and a new cover can breathe

fresh life into the book. All that to say, covers are changeable. Oh my gosh, I almost forgot to mention the file type, which is extremely important when it comes to uploading your file, your cover file on KDP. They want an ebook to have a JPEG file. It's super easy to convert to that on pretty much any computer these days and probably your phone too. So if you don't know how, that's probably a really fast Google search. But hopefully, you might even have a JPEG file already if you download it from Canva as a JPEG. You're good to go. And then for the print book, if you have the entire cover, front, spine, and back cover, they want you to have a PDF file, which actually you can download PDF from Canva. Remember we talked about that? But if you're using your front cover and then you're going to use a cover generator to make your entire print book cover with the spine and the back, then you can actually just use a JPEG as well, that same one that you

used for your ebook cover. Step four, we're finally here to the uploading process, and this actually has three sections. In a second, I'm going to actually show you my screen and walk you through uploading the book in these three sections. But just so you know what we're getting into, the first section is metadata, which is essentially just your book's title, the description, everything about the book, all the data. The second one is book files, and good news, we already have those ready to go. I love it. And then last but not least is pricing and distribution. That's exactly what it sounds like. You're going to set your book's price, figure out where you're going to sell it. All right, it's time to actually go to Kindle Direct Publishing and upload your book. So just in FYI, before you can do the uploading process, you do need to make an account. It should be pretty quick. We're not going to be doing that here today, but I'm sure there's videos on it if you want a little walkthrough of that as

well, but today we're going to start on this bookshelf page, and you can see along the top where it says create a book. Click that, and your next option is, of course, going to be what format of book, like we talked about. You could start with ebook or paperback. Either way, it doesn't really matter, and then you can link them later, but the ebook is just slightly easier, so I'm going to recommend starting there. So, we're going to click on that. It's going to bring you to this page, and this is where I talked about those three sections. So, your book details is what's often called metadata. It just means all the data about your book, like the book title, the description, etc. Then, you're going to have a Content page that you'll go to next, and that's where you're going to upload your files. Last but not least, you can see that pricing page that we talked about, and on this page is distribution as well. If you're not writing in English, you're going to want to change this to whatever

language you're writing it. Otherwise, you can just leave it alone and go straight to the book title and plug in the title of your work. If you want to, you can put a subtitle, but you can also just skip this if you don't have one. That's totally okay. You can also skip the series section unless your book happens to be in a series. My book is in a series, so I'm going to show you what this looks like now. I technically already have this series on Amazon, so normally I would click existing series and select that. And I guess I can show you quick if you want. There's the Queen's Rise Series right here. Or if I was starting from scratch, I would click new series right here and click create a series and most likely main content and then go ahead and fill in the series information there. This edition section you can ignore. This is only for if you've published the book before. In the author section, you'll put your first and last name right here. I will note that if you wanted to use a pen name for any reason.

you would put your pen name here instead, and then this contributor section right here is just if there were other authors that you actually worked on with this. If there were, definitely include it if you have a co-author, but normally you're probably just going to skip this section. You'll notice there is a drop-down to include other people as well, like if it's a children's book and the illustrator had a really, really big role, you might want to include them here. But typically, in my experience, I just skip this section. Then next, we have description. So I would recommend spending a little extra time on this if you have it, and also you can fill it in but then come back and rework it later as well, which I also would recommend. So you could literally, if you want to keep going, put about the book here and then come back to it before you press publish if you wanted to. But once you have a good description that you feel confident about, you can paste it in like this, and if you don't have it already formatted.

you could add formatting using these up here at the top. If you have a non-fiction book, you can use bullet points even, but for fiction, don't do that. And then this next section here is the publishing rights. And so unless you actually went out and like downloaded Jane Austen or something like that, you should be the copyright owner. So you should be clicking this button 99% of the time. The primary audience section is next. So if your book has any explicit images in it, then you need to let them know that. That needs to be very, very clear on Amazon. And I always click no. And then this reading age right below that is technically optional. So it really depends on if this would help you to target your reader. So say, for example, you're writing a children's book. This would actually be really helpful because you could click the minimum age and then the maximum age here as well. And that will actually help them, help Amazon target that age group, or really technically the parents of that age group in most cases, under the primary

Marketplace. I personally sell from amazon.com, but there's this drop-down list you can see here. If you were in a different country, you would want to make that accurate to your country, or technically it says where you expect to sell the majority of your book sales. These next two sections are important, so we're going to dive into this a little bit more. Categories is essentially if you picture a bookstore. This is where a reader would be looking within a bookstore. So, for example, if you have a self-help book but you put it over with the novels, people who are browsing the self-help section are never going to look over there. They're not going to find it, and vice versa. If you wrote a novel and you're putting it over in that self-help section, that's not where people are going when they want to read a good fiction book. So, this is really important because this is like the shelf in the bookstore that you're putting your book on. Mine is in teen and young adult science fiction and fantasy. You can see

how it keeps having more and more subcategories, sometimes called sub-genres. Mine is fairy tales and folklore adaptations. I could also click royalty or G General, and you can see down here on the bottom it says there's three categories allowed, so I'm going to go ahead and save my categories. But I definitely would recommend that you browse, and especially if you have a specific age group, like I have teen and young adults, or there's children as well. Make sure you browse that correct age group so that you're on the right shelf in the store. Even though it says keywords are optional, I think they're really, really important, so I would recommend you at least fill something in here and to describe what these do. This is what people are typing into the search bar when they're on Amazon. So if I went to Amazon right now, this is my book, but if I go up to the search bar here at the top, first of all, you can see how I have the Kindle Store highlighted, so that's going to help me not, you know.

get really random stuff like shoes or purses. I don't know when I start searching young adult, say fantasy. Look at all these other keywords that come up, and because they're more than one word, they're called long-tail keywords. So, am I writing a romance? Perfect. Am I writing a free book? Book? No. Am I writing one with an academy in it? What if I start typing fairy tale? Look at that. It's right there. Retelling, 'cause that's what I'm personally writing. But look how many different options there are here. Then you could also write other things. You can picture people typing like villain and origin story. And if you're ever in doubt, you can go and type it in right here. A towel? Great. That might not be the best keyword. Villain books? Okay, check that out. For the sake of this video, I'm not going to do all, but I would recommend that you do all seven. It's worth it. This last one is really, really fun. So if you want to, you can just keep it at I'm ready to release now. And when you get to

the end of these three pages. You can press publish done, and your book will go into KDP submission. And as soon as they approve it, you're published. It's really that fast. However, I think it's really fun to do pre-orders 'cause it kind of builds up the excitement. So, you can go ahead and click a calendar, and you could do a pre-order at the end of the month, month or two away, 3 or 4 months away, up to an entire year from now. And here at the bottom, click save and continue, and you're done with page one. Congratulations, you're a third of the way done. All right, so the content is, like I said, the book files. It'll say manuscript here at the top. That's your interior file. So, you can click upload, and this is the ebook. So, like I talked about earlier, you need an EB file. I have mine right here, so I'm going to double-click it, and it's going to upload. One Mississippi. Okay, cool. That's how fast it

is it is extremely fast to upload. It's looking good. The one thing I'm going to say about this before I move on, because I personally have uploaded files and then been like, you know what, actually, I'm going to make this one change, okay, I'm going to re-upload it. If you do that, if you decide to update your file, make sure you change the name in some way, shape, or form. Otherwise, Amazon's KDP will not realize that you've changed the file, and they won't change anything. That's why I put the date in mine, so that way if I update it on, you know, December 2023, January 2024, I'll update my file with a new date, and that will let Amazon know to change the file. Next, we have the ebook cover cover. Alright, so this is exciting. I actually do already have a cover, so say you made it in Canva, then you could go and grab your cover file right here and upload it, and it's also going to be really, really quick. Oh, it's already done. I was going

to say while it's going. You can also use this cover creator if, for some reason, your file is not working right here. Like, for example, maybe you have the wrong file type, or you just, it's not quite the right size for some reason. You can click this cover creator on top to actually just kind of adjust and make the cover directly in KDP. I think this cover creator is a little more useful when it comes to the physical books, but you could potentially use it for ebooks. This section is brand spanking new AI-generated content. Hopefully, you can answer no to that. If, for any reason, you did use AI, I think it's important to click yes and let them know. And they're not penalizing you for anything, but it's just important to be honest about that. Last but not least, it lets you have a preview. So, I'm going to click that. This one is slow. Oh, just kidding, it's not that slow. And you can click through and see exactly what your book looks like and see if it looks good.

and up here on the right side, you can change to what it looks like on the phone. Make sure everything is still formatted nicely. You can switch to a Kindle e-reader. Check that out. You can even switch right here the angle that the screen is, so it's really good to make sure that it looks nice before you go back and approve it all right. Scrolling down, we did the previewer. We liked it. The last section on this page is the ISBN, and this stands for International Standard Book Number. You don't actually have to have one of these for Amazon because Amazon uses their own identification number called the ASIN, Amazon Standard Identification Number. You can read up on it if you want to, but you can actually just skip this section completely. They're both optional, as you can see. I actually do have a Publishing Company, Grace House Press, so I'm going to fill that in and click save and continue. And now we're 2/3 of the way done. This section is actually really, really simple. It's mainly just pricing.

so we are near the Finish Line. Okay, this KDP select enrollment is actually the author term for Kindle Unlimited. So, have you ever seen on Amazon where books are in the Kindle Unlimited program? And so, essentially, if you pay for that, you get an unlimited number of free books or something like that. Yeah, I think the books are free if you join that program. You pay like a monthly fee or something like that. Can you tell? I don't use it, but if you wanted to, you could enroll your book in KDP select. And this is ebook specific. So, instead of people paying to download a whole copy of your book, you're going to get paid per pages read. So, Amazon has a way to track that. They know if people are flipping through the book, and for each page, you get a teeny tiny little bit of money. And um, I don't know much more than that, but you can definitely research it if you want to. And honestly, it might be worth trying because you can always take your book out of the program if you want to. It's

not a permanent thing, and you can read up more about that as well right here. Next is territories, so this is specifically for people who have sold some of the rights to their book already, like if you're a traditionally published author and they purchased your US rights, but you have rights to Germany yourself, then you could select that individual territory right down here. But if you're an indie author like me and you have all the rights, then I would select all the territories. Your primary Marketplace is something we already selected, and now we're finally at the pricing, royalty, and distribution. So obviously, you know what pricing is about, but royalties refer to basically your cut of the profit, how much do you personally make whenever you sell a book. If you click the 70% option here, you'll see you have to price the book $2.99 to $9.99 within that range. If you wanted to go cheaper than that, you would have to select 35%, or if you wanted to go more expensive as well. Obviously, we want to make a higher

percentage 70% royalty is a 70% cut. That's a lot more, and typically I put my books at $3.99, sometimes $4.99, depending on what my competitor's books are priced. I think it's really smart to go on Amazon, look at books in your same category, and see what do they price, what are their eBooks priced, what are their print books priced, and then try to price competitively. Once you plug in your listing price for the book, which is what readers see on Amazon, then you're going to see your royalty pop up over here on the right. So, if you wanted to play around and see it change, you can just click boom, it changes, and you'll notice all of the other Amazon sites in the different countries change as well. Now, you could go in here and actually manually change this. I personally don't. It's totally up to you, but I like to just kind of leave it. Then, we are at the end. There's that publish button right there. I'm going to be very careful to

not press it because this particular book that I'm putting in to show you guys is already published. If you're interested, I'll link it below. I just wanted to point out one last thing where it says it can take up to 72 hours for your book to be available for purchase on Amazon. In other words, if you have a specific date where you want your book out, like I am letting the world know on Friday, maybe publish the book on Tuesday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 72 hours. You should be good to go by Friday morning. But if you're not super concerned, it's not a big deal either. And honestly, in my experience, I'd say 90% of the time the book is up online in about 4 hours. They're really, really fast. However, when it's slower than that, a lot of times for me at least, it's been because there was some minor issue with the book that I needed to take a look at. So it can be nice to have a little bit of buffer time too, especially if you're about to start.

promoting the book and telling everybody and being super excited. Then you want the book to actually be live, so it's good to give yourself some buffer time and just sneakily publish it a little bit early just in case. Roll, you did it, press publish, you are at the end. This step is really just here for the excitement because it's one click and you're done. It's so exciting. We already talked about how it might take a tiny bit of time for the book to be reviewed, but pretty shortly after you press publish on KDP, your book is out in the world. Are you excited? I'm excited for you. I can't wait to see your book on Amazon. If this video was helpful to you, give it a thumbs up and let me know in the comments. Does it feel easier to you now? I really, really hope that it does, and I hope this video was helpful to you. And if you liked it, you can definitely subscribe for more videos like this. I hope you have an amazing publishing experience, and I'm wishing you the best.

I hope this video was super helpful, and I'll talk to you again soon. [Music] Bye.

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