Kindle Publishing: A Step-by-Step Guide for Selling Your Book Through Amazon

   The following post was given to Alexis, head of the editorial team at ThePennyHoarder.com, by Heather van de Hoop when she planned to self publish her first Kindle book.The result is this fabulous blueprint for Kindle publishing. Enjoy!

  

   While self-publishing through your own site has its benefits, the massive audience of Amazon's Kindle store makes it appealing for authors looking to share their work with new readers. Publishing for Kindle comes with its own challenges, especially in the design and formatting departments.

However, if there's anything we all know Alexis loves, it's experimenting with new systems, methods and technologies. While writing her most recent book, You Deserve to Love Your Job, she knew she wanted to test the Kindle marketplace for herself.

Here's how we took the book from manuscript to finished product, including lessons learned along the way.

1. Decide on KDP Select vs. KDP

   Your first hurdle is deciding between Kindle Direct Publishing and KDP Select. Both connect your work with the millions of Kindle owners and readers who use Kindle apps on their smartphones and tablets. Both offer 70 percent royalties for books priced $2.99 to $9.99

   The big difference is that KDP Select requires 100 percent exclusivity — your digital book cannot be sold anywhere else.

   While there's a lot of debate about the merits of KDP Select, it was the clear choice for this book for several reasons:

• Experiment: Alexis wanted to see whether KDP was a worthwhile complement to her own online store, with the goal of gaining exposure to a new audience of Kindle owners and using the Amazon algorithms to boost sales. Rather than dilute the test by publishing on a variety of platforms, we opted to go with KDP alone, so the exclusivity clause didn't bother us.
• Effort: Instead of spreading our efforts across several platforms, we opted to focus our energy on only one to maximize the returns.
• Promotion options: KDP Select allows you to either offer the book free for five days or discount it for up to seven days through a Countdown Deal, which appealed to us — especially since during a CD, you still earn 70 percent royalties. You can run promotions manually if you're in KDP, but once you price your book below $2.99, you'll only get 35 percent.
• Lending Library: All KDP Select books are included in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, which is free for Amazon Prime members. Every time your book is borrowed, you earn a share of a monthly fund ($1.2M in April 2014). While the fund wasn't a huge draw, we were curious to see how many times the book would be borrowed. No earth-shattering results here: we only had five borrows in February and March 2014.

   Choosing whether to use KDP Select or publish on more than one platform is an individual decision; you'll have to figure out what makes sense for your work. One author who has made KDP Select work well for him is Steve Scott, who has had 39 books in the program. One benefit he mentions is that with so many books, he could choose to constantly run Countdown Deals, which leads to greater exposure for the rest of his catalogue.

2. Design and refine your cover

   Your cover is a crucial element of your ebook; it's all that Amazon will show potential buyers who scan Top 100 lists and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought.” While we have a designer on the Socialexis team, we've also had good experiences using crowdsourcing sites like 99designs or Crowdspring.

   Your cover must look good even when it's tiny: your book's page shows a 160px by 250px version, while the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” covers measure only 60px by 90px. Bright colors, bold text and a defined image help create an appealing cover. You'll need a 1563px by 2500px image; Amazon recommends a 1.6 height:width ratio.

   One way to make sure your cover resonates with potential readers is to have your designer create two or three options, then ask your audience for feedback. This not only lets you see whether there's a clear preference, it also clues you into small details you might not have considered. Alexis' readers chose the final design and shared valuable feedback that helped us make the cover more attractive.

3. Convert your manuscript to mobi

   While you can technically upload formats including .doc, RTF, PDF, txt, ePub and HTML, most experts recommend uploading your book as a mobi, a format specific to Kindle. DIY'ing the conversion can be time-consuming — you want to make sure everything's perfect! — but it's worth it to learn the process so you'll save time on future books.

   First, download Amazon's free programs KindleGen and Kindle Previewer. KindleGen converts HTML files to mobi, while Kindle Previewer shows you how your book will appear on different versions of the Kindle.

   Next, open Scrivener and get ready for it to blow your mind. Once you tell Scrivener where to find KindleGen, its Compile function handles the conversion for you — all you have to do is specify formatting choices.

   While there will be lots of trial and error — I went through at least 25 test conversions — it's worth it to play with different settings and see what looks best for your book. Each conversion took fewer than 10 seconds; most of your time will be spent reviewing in the Kindle Previewer and tweaking Scrivener's Compile settings.

   A few tips: don't include a cover in your Compile, since you'll upload it to Amazon separately. Scrivener can automatically create a Table of Contents that links to each chapter during the Compile; just check the box under HTML Settings. Choose whether you want it centered, which is the default, or left-aligned; if the latter, go to Layout and uncheck the box next to “center the TOC.”

   If your chapters have complicated names and structure like Alexis' book, make a TOC manually using Scrivener links, which you'll find under Edit –> Scrivener Link –> New Link; then check the “Convert Scrivener Links to HTML links” box under HTML Settings to turn these into regular hyperlinks when you hit Compile.

   For a detailed walk through the process, read Patrick Hester's Scrivener Quick Tips Series, especially the posts on Building an Ebook. Ed Ditto also explains how quick and easy the process can be in his guest post on The Book Designer, and the Google+ Scrivener Users Community is extraordinarily helpful. If you don't have Scrivener, its creators offer a 30-day free trial (that's 30 days of use, not 30 days from download) and it's available for both Windows and Mac users.

4. Publish and set price on Amazon

    Before you get to the technical aspects of uploading and publishing your book, consider the strategic side of the process. Upload your book at least 48 hours before you plan to launch — though Alexis' book was ready within eight hours, you'll want that buffer time if anything goes wrong.

   In How to Start Publishing for Kindle, Jeff Goins recommends publishing your book on Amazon a few weeks before your ideal launch date, then sending free copies to friends, family, colleagues and bloggers in your field and asking them to leave a review on the book's Amazon page. 

   That way, when you tell the world about your book, prospective buyers will see lots of positive reviews — a big factor for those who may not be familiar with your work. 

   While Jeff recommends sending out 150 to 200 free review copies, we only sent about 20, which resulted in 11 reviews by launch day. We probably could've spent more time on this, but those reviews seemed to do the trick.

   Uploading your book is actually quite simple. Choose your two categories carefully: these sections of the Kindle bookstore help potential buyers find your book while browsing and on Top 100 lists. We chose Careers –> Job Hunting and Careers –> Guides and have seen a marked difference: the book has consistently ranked higher in Job Hunting because Guides includes more heavy-hitters in the career advice world (think The 4-Hour Workweek and The $100 Startup). We did hit #1 in both categories, though.

   Add up to seven keywords that will lead readers to your book. Be thoughtful about this: What terms will potential buyers search for in the Kindle store? What questions does your book answer? Upload your cover and choose whether you want Digital Rights Management protection for your book (Alexis chose to decline this).

   Congratulations, you're ready to actually upload your book! Click “Browse” and select your mobi file. Once it has loaded, check it one more time with the Online Previewer, then click “Save & Continue” to move on to the Pricing section.

   Your royalty options depend on the price you choose. Since we listed You Deserve to Love Your Job at $4.99, we chose the 70 percent royalty, which applies to books priced from $2.99 to $9.99. As Jeff Goins says in How to Start Publishing for Kindle, why would you pick 35 percent and give Amazon the majority share in your work?

5. Reward your loyal audience

 

   Your first buyers on Kindle are likely part of your existing audience: blog readers, social media followers and friends. Reward these people who know, enjoy and support your work by giving them a great deal.

   You Deserve to Love Your Job launched at $0.99 before jumping to its $4.99 regular price, so the 123 people who bought in the first 24 hours got a great deal. Alexis also offered a bonus to anyone who emailed her a screenshot of their honest review on launch day: a coupon for 20 percent off any of her courses or guides, which resulted in seven new reviews.

   Incentivizing early purchasers also has another effect: when lots of people purchase at once, Amazon's algorithm picks up on your book and promotes it, exposing it to more potential buyers and helping your book climb the ranks.

6. Promote your book

   While Amazon will help your book reach new readers, its algorithm requires the book to first hit a certain (mysterious) number of sales. To earn support from Amazon, you need to spread the word about your book yourself.

   Alexis detailed our marketing and promotion plan in her launch analysis post, and we executed it well. However, your efforts can't end after launch: plan to continue marketing your book for as long as you want to make sales.

   What's the best way to do that? Write and submit guest posts that support your book. Share important quotes on social media; we created quote images for several of the book's sound bites. Continue to link to your book in your blog posts, social media updates and email signature. Plan promotions: remember that for each 90-day KDP Select cycle, you get either five Free Days or one seven-day Countdown Deal. Get creative to market your book to new buyers.

7. Track your metrics

   You want to see results from all this hard work, right?

Use a simple spreadsheet to track your book's performance (we use Google docs). Here's what we measure:

1. Sales: Your KDP Report only shows month-to-date sales; if you want daily sales, track them yourself by checking this report every 24 hours. Since this is an experiment, we track sales in all countries, and we've been surprised at the numbers from outside North America — hello, buyers in the UK, Denmark, Spain and Australia!
2. Borrows: Because the book is in the Kindle Owners Lending Library, it earns a portion of a monthly pool based on its number of borrows. Borrows also contribute to the book's rankings; Amazon's algorithm treats them like sales. Borrows appear in the same month-to-date sales report and we track them monthly.
3. Reviews: Check your book's sales page to see how many reviews it has earned and what readers think. We track the number of reviews of each star rating and note any recurring feedback on a weekly basis.
4. Rank: While some Kindle experts like Steve Scott discourage tracking rank (in his Kindle book Is $.99 the New Free?), we consider it part of the experiment. Check your book's sales page under “Product Details” to see its rank overall in the Kindle store and in each of its categories. Rankings are updated hourly; be careful not to get sucked into hitting Refresh every few minutes!

   Alexis covered the results of our launch in an earlier blog post, but the final tally for February 2014 was $200.24 from 168 sales.

   While You Deserve to Love Your Job isn't raking in the big bucks, as Alexis wrote, “[the] goal here wasn't immediate revenue. The goal is to help people approach work differently. And just think: after only [10 days] of sales, [168] people might now feel motivated to make a change so they feel happier with their jobs.”

    And if you want a copy of You Deserve to Love Your Job, it's available on… you guessed it… Amazon.

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Publish your Ebook and Earn Money: How I Made $2,000 from a Kindle Ebook

When I lived in Colorado, I took a break from exploring the mountains to write a little ebook about ultralight backpacking. I wrote it in a few days, which is possible when you write about a subject you know and love, and then published it on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform (KDP), along with a few other ebooks I had written. Having once self-published a print book for $850, I liked the zero-cost aspect of going this route.

   Soon I was making as much as $350 per month on KDP without any promotion, and about a third of that was from the backpacking book. Although sales have slowed now, in total I’ve made almost $2,000 from my little Kindle ebook about ultralight backpacking and thousands more on the other books.

Interested in publishing your book on the Kindle platform? It’s free, and you might even make some money.

   How to Get Started

   You don’t have to write a book in a week, although it might not be as difficult as you think when you consider than many ebooks are as short as 6,000 words or consist of a collection of articles previously published by the author. Whether it takes a week or a year to write your book, focus on quality. Edit, edit, edit, and find a volunteer to read your work and offer an objective critique. Then get ready to publish.

   Detailing every technical aspect of the publishing process might intimidate some readers into inaction. Instead let’s take an overview of the process and point out some good resources for information about publishing on Kindle that cover various aspects in more detail. But believe me, if I could figure it out in an afternoon or two, you can, too — after ten years of making a living online, I still don’t own a smartphone and I struggle to download programs.

   To begin, you need to convert your book to the proper format. Amazon supports a few different file formats and published a handy guide to creating ebook files. Some file types allow more flexibility, like being able to link to chapters from the table of contents. Several authors recommend converting to Amazon’s mobi file format, but you can always try different file types to see which work best for your purposes. As for my preferred method, they say, “Microsoft Word with limited formatting translates well to the Kindle device.”

   The real test comes when you upload your file and check it in the Kindle Previewer. Go through the entire book. If there are formatting issues, fix them and upload the file again. You’ll be uploading and previewing quite a bit before you get it right, and in the process you’ll learn what to do and not do the next time.

   Of course you’ll need a cover image, which you can make yourself if you are creative, or pay to have one made. My wife made some of my covers, and I’ve had nice ones made for some of my books for $15 through Fiverr. Amazon even provides a free cover-making tool if you have an image to work with.

   You’ll also have to decide whether or not to make your ebook exclusive to Amazon Kindle through their KDP Select program. I’ve done it temporarily (you enroll for 90 days at a time), and there are some advantages, like special promotional and pricing opportunities. But eventually, you might like to offer your book through other channels (more on this below).

   How Much Can You Make?

   You’ll probably want to price your book between $2.99 and $9.99. In that range, for sales in most countries, Amazon pays a royalty of 70%. Otherwise, you get 35%. At a price of $16.00, for example, you’ll make $5.60 (35%), but if you price you book at $9.99 you’ll be paid $6.99 per sale (70%).

   The best price point for small books is often right at $2.99, where you get a royalty of $2.09 per sale — which isn’t bad considering that for each $19.95 sale of my print book on weird ways to make money, my publisher pays me just $1.50 (and that’s normal).

   The Importance of Marketing

   Contrary to authors’ fantasies, books don’t sell themselves. It is true that ebooks are easier to get in front of potential buyers than print books, but I consider myself lucky to have made decent money and to still have Kindle income every month (even if it was only $104 last month). To really hit it big, you need to learn about marketing, which is beyond the scope of this article (and mostly beyond my skills, which explains the $104). Fortunately, there is a lot of good information about marketing Kindle books online.

   How much does good marketing help? In “How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!,” John Locke admits that his murder mysteries on Kindle were so successful because he is more of a marketer than an author. Not mentioned in that book is the fact that Locke paid for 300 reviews. Fortunately there are other ways to boost your book in the rankings.

   Beyond Kindle: Other Ebook Formats

   If you don’t choose KDP Select, or use this program temporarily (you can get much of the marketing value in the first 90-day enrollment period), why not consider publishing your ebook on other platforms as well?

   NookPress.com is the publisher site for Barnes and Noble’s Nook device. You may have heard rumors that they plan to discontinue it, but Barnes and Noble will keep making the Nook for now. In any case, too many people are still buying books on the ereader for them to close up the publishing side of the business.

   I just earned $27 from last month’s Nook sales of the few ebooks I have on their platform. It isn’t much, but I haven’t even looked logged into my account for many months, and it was minimal extra work to load up my ebooks on the Nook platform once I had them ready for Kindle. Like KDP, publishing on Nook is free.

   Smashwords is a different kind of ebook platform. With proper formatting of your ebook you can have more-or-less automatic conversion into many formats, making it available as a PDF or an Apple iBook, for example. If you’re already published on Kindle or Nook, be sure that in your Smashwords settings you opt out of having them sell in those formats, because they take their cut in addition to the amount Amazon or Barnes and Noble keep from each sale.

   In addition to being free like the other platforms, one nice touch here is that you get a free ISBN number for your book. On Kindle or Nook, if you’d like an ISBN, you have to buy it — though most writers simply go without.

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   I haven’t done so well with Smashwords, but I suspect it’s partly a matter of chance. I base this speculation on the fact that some of my ebooks do better on Nook and others on Kindle, even when I don’t promote them at all, so any particular ebook must get better or worse placement in the search results for each platform for reasons that won’t always be decipherable.

   In other words, once you’ve gone to the trouble to write your book and prepare it for publishing, you might as well roll the dice and make it available on other platforms. That little bit of extra work might double or triple your sales.

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Steve Gillman - Contributor for The Penny Hoarder

Get Paid to Test Websites for Usability

Paid Testing Jobs

   Among various online income opportunities, website usability testing stand prominent because doing these paid to test jobs is both fun and rewarding. A normal online or offline job usually requires you to accomplish a specific task within a specific time. For instance, in an image editing job, you need to follow instructions and make specific edits/changes to the images. 

   Unlike such traditional employment, testing websites online involves doing no tedious work as there are no specific goals to achieve. Users have much more freedom and there are no tiring constraints. 

   Needless to say, a website usability or user testing job demands no special skills or any experience. To qualify, a user just needs the following:

1. A computer
2. An internet connection
3. Little creativity can be a bonus
4. Some curiosity will surely help
5. Expressing your true opinion is must

   Usability testing jobs 
 

   Some companies require users to give live feedback to an analyst. Website testers connect to a server using a software; they then start the website usability test and give their opinion using a microphone and webcam. 

Website tester’s role is of a commentator and the analyst will be the listener. The analyst then creates a report based on all the information that he gathers from different paid testers. Website owners then use this report to make the necessary improvements. The user’s role in this process ends after he finishes giving his opinion. He does not take any part in building the report.

Online website testing jobs may require a user to analyze one or more of the following elements:

1. Design and overall website look.

2. Usability test; your goal is to browse through different pages in the website and check all the main features. You will then comment on how easy it is to find the information, which the user is looking for. You will also test how good the navigation links are.

3. Content quality is one of the main ingredients for a successful website. In some usability testing jobs, you need to check the quality of content of different pages. If the website is about “Cooking Tips,” then how good is the content? Are the recipes worth trying? How well is the content written? Is the content interesting or boring?

  Users website testing work

   Some companies do not require live feedback. They will send the website URL and other details to user’s email address. He then conduct the tests for a specific time-period. The user then writes his feedback in a file, which is then sent to the company by email.

   This work usually pays well; there are no fixed rates, though. The money you can earn depends on the amount of work you are given and the company for whom you are working. Additionally, you can make more money if you become a trustworthy tester. 

   If you complete the first few jobs with honesty and provide some vital information, your rank as a tester will increase. The higher rank you have, the more money you can make.

   Can you do website usability testing as a full-time job?

   Consider this opportunity more of a part-time job. Website testing jobs are a real deal, but you cannot depend on them for making a full-time income.

List of websites where you can get paid usability testing jobs: 

WEB APPLICATION TESTING 

WEBSITE USABILITY TESTING 

On this page are listed more than 10 companies who offer website-usability testing jobs. Some of the sites mentioned below, allow users to make money in some very interesting ways.

   You can earn cash by doing very simple tasks; you can easily build a steady monthly income from this. You can start making money in less than 5 minutes by doing simple work such as playing online games, completing surveys, visiting websites, and more.

 

1. ClixSense

2. Points2shop

3. Whatusersdo

4. Userfeel

5. Trymyui

6. Guru

7. Userlytics

8. Youeye

9. Usertesting

10. Clicktale

11. Opinionlab

12. Analysia

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25 Ways You can Legally Make Money Online

Every time I think about making money online, I remember those attractive banners I’ve seen on numerous websites, often quoting international media houses like MSNBC, some times CNN and the like.

    A lot of my friends usually fall for such, and attempt to sit at home and make thousands of dollars per month – by doing nothing. Because the Internet is such an open platform, to a very large extent, no one controls what gets posted there. As long as someone can afford a few tens of American dollars per year, then they’ll be able to buy a domain such as http://msnbc.single-mom-kampala.com. 

 

   They go ahead and show logos of the reputable media houses like those mentioned above, and voila! They’ve multitudes fooled. But in this article, we’ll show you real ways to make money. Online.

1. Start a website or a blog and earn revenue through advertising networks like Google AdSense and BuySellAds. You can even sell your own ads directly through Google DFP.
2. Launch a curated email newsletter using MailChimp and find sponsors or use a subscription model where people pay a fee to receive your newsletter.  HackerNewletter, Now I Know and Launch.co are good examples.
3. Create your own YouTube channel
   
   and become a YouTube partner to monetize your videos. You may use Oneload to distribute the same video to multiple video sites.
4. Make something creative – like handbags, jewelry, paintings, craft items – and sell them on Etsy, ArtFire or eBay.
   
5. Build your own online store with Shopify or SquareSpace and sell both physical goods and digital downloads. Sell everything from furniture to clothes to food.
6. Create t-shirt designs and put them on Threadless, Zazzle and CafePress.
7. Write a book and publish it on the Kindle store, Google Play and iBooks. You can also sell your ebook to other retailers through services like Smashwoodsand BookBaby.
8. Become an instructor at Udemy and SkillShare and get paid for teaching your favorite subjects – from guitar to literature to yoga to foreign languages – to a worldwide audience.
9. Learn coding and hunt for freelance software development projects at Guru,eLance or Rent-a-Coder (now Freelancer.com).
10. Become a virtual office assistant and offer administrative or technical assistance to clients remotely from your home office. Head over to eLance, TaskRabbit andoDesk for finding work.
11. Offer one-on-one help to anyone worldwide over live video using Google Helpouts. You can do live cooking classes, teach maths or even offer fitness and nutrition tips.
12. Write scripts, browser extensions, plugins or mobile apps for iOS and Android and sell the source code of your software on CodeCanyon, Chupa or BinPress.
13. People are outsourcing petty computer jobs – like data entry work, transcribing text from business cards or performing web research – and you find these jobs at Mechanical Turk, an Amazon service.
14. Creative professionals can scan marketplaces like CrowdSpring, 99Designs andDesignCrowd for projects involving logo design, web design, brochures and other marketing material.
15. Do you have a good voice? Sign-up as an audio narrator at Umano or become a voice over artist at VoiceBunny and Voice123.
16. Record your own music and sell it on music stores like Amazon MP3, iTunes, Pandora or Spotify through DistroKid, Tunecore, loudr.fm and CDBaby. You can also sell your audio files directly on marketplaces like AudioJungle, Pond5 andBandcamp.
17. Become an affiliate for Amazon and various online stores and earn a commission on sales. You can use programs like Vigilink, ShareASale, CJ or LinkShare to know about the various vendors that offer affiliate programs.
18. Educators and teachers can help students with homework or offer on-demand teaching class over the Internet. Apply to become an online tutor at Tutor.com, InstaEdu and TutorVista.
19. Got an empty room in your apartment? You can list the property on Airbnb, host people and make some money. The other alternative is Couchsurfing but the service forbids from charging guests.
20. Sell photographs that you have taken on Creative Market, PhotoDune, iStockPhotoor ImgEmbed.
    
    The latter lets you easily license photos you have uploaded on Facebook, Flickr or Instagram for online use.
21. Sell the stuff you no longer use – like old books, children’s toys, gadgets, DVDs, furniture, etc. – on sites like eBay, Craigslist or, if you are in India, OLX.
22. Apply to become a website tester at UserTesting and get paid to review and test websites from the usability perspective.
23. If friend’s look at you for tech support, there’s no reason why you can’t offer similar services on the Internet. Get Skype (for calling) and Chrome Remote Desktop (for screen sharing) and you are all set to offer remote tech help from anywhere.
24. Create an account at Fiverr and PeoplePerHour and offer a wide range of services from translation to graphic design to writing to SEO.
25. You can make money by flipping websites. Flippa, GoDaddy Auctions and Sedo are popular marketplaces for buying and selling registered domains whileLeanDomainSearch is a good tool for finding available domain names.

Credit: Digital Inspiration
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