Part 3: Create Your 1st Ebook to Sell or Give Away

byMelWaller

13.7K followers

2 years ago

(Cover Photo: You Can Do It)

Hi Everyone,

Are you still with me?

Congrats on coming this far and building perhaps your first ebook to sell or giveaway!

::: Mel hands out Organic Sugar Free Cookies and Milk to Everyone! :::

What about promos?

There is nothing to stop you from promoting yourself or your business in your ebook and/or book.

(See my update near bottom of this page regarding advertising in your book on Amazon)

You could place it in the front, a third of the way in the ebook or halfway inside and/or at the back of the book or a combination thereof.

I have read somewhere that nearer the front is better in case the reader does not read the whole book, he was still able to catch your promo/advertisement.

You could add an author's page and list any other ebooks/books you have published.

If I am just going to give it away then I don't worry about creating a cover for the ebook.

If you are submitting it to Amazon, they can take your Word document and convert it to an ebook and on their site you can create a cover with one of their many templates or you can create your own cover and submit it according to their guidelines.

99% of the time, I have used a cover template from Amazon and I use the same one each time as a way to brand my books so they may recognize it as one of mine when they see the cover even if its a public domain book by a different title/author. That's just how I do it.

If you submit it to Amazon as your own work, Amazon may challenge whether this belongs to you or not. They did that on one of my Quote ebooks submitted a few years ago and we just go round and round until they accept it. :-) Their customer service is not highly trained at all in my opinion and they don't understand public domain very well either. That has been the most frustrating part of dealing with Amazon for me.

But you can certainly give away your ebook. Since you have the copyright for this work you can also submit it to other sites.

I have thus far only sold ebooks on KDP Amazon.

But if you search: "submit your ebook to sell" you will find many sites that you can submit your ebook to sell on. Be sure to read their rules so you don't have any conflict between sites. I know amazon has rules about pricing your ebook anywhere else so check that out first.

If you created your ebook on Word, you can have it converted to a PDF so you can distribute/send the PDF file to others yourself.

You should now once you have completed these steps and put together your work have an ebook that you can use however you wish to.

To me, more importantly, you can move forward and create more ebooks to use.

There certainly are things I did not cover in this tutorial such as if you had an ebook with a table of contents and chapters, hyperlinking them to the chapters in the ebook.

Believe it or not, I have never done that for the reason that my previous 10 year old laptop could not do that.

In the future, I will incorporate that into my future ebooks as it certainly is convenient for the reader.

Even if you don't submit to KDP Amazon, they have a lot of good information about how to do the various steps and that info is FREE. Take advantage of that if you will.

Well it took me just over a full day to create this.

I hope it is of benefit to you!

UPDATE: I started my book for this and after pasting from here to Adobe Indesign some spaces disappeared connecting words and such so its important to proof your work again in such cases.

Also if you are considering publishing as a book, my book here for example would only be about 36 pages but by spreading out the quotes I can create a book about 100+ pages. Its something to consider.

Newer UPDATE:

I'm also using Font Size 24 with One Quote per page Centered on the page.

That gives me a 108 page book which I just submitted to Amazon to be published.

Sept 11, 2020

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Another legal update concerning KDP Amazon:

Last Updated: August 14, 2020

This agreement changed on the date listed above.
See an explanation of the changes at the end of this document.

Kindle Direct Publishing Terms and Conditions

5.1.2 Content Requirements.

You may not include in any Book any advertisements or other content that is primarily intended to advertise or promote products or services.
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That sounds vague to me. Are they saying no ads? Or are they saying the book just can't be about promoting things?

I have hundreds of books were in the back pages I list other titles I have published. That's never been a problem. Mel
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Thank you so very much for the opportunity to serve you!

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Yet Another Update for you.

KDP Amazon Challenged my paperback version of my Quotes book that I did here.

This is part of the email they sent me:

In order to publish the book(s), please complete one of the following options within 5 days:

Option 1: If you hold the publishing rights for the book(s), confirm your rights by resubmitting the book(s) for publishing.
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So that's all I did. I re-submitted the book and it was accepted. See below.

Your paperback book is available in the Amazon store!

I did some checking on this particular quotes book since it was published a year ago on Amazon.

I sold one ebook at 0.99 and 4 book at $9.97

Not bad for something that was just started for training purposes and of course it can continue to sell indefinitely. :-)

Please let me know if you publish your own quotes ebook and/or book.

Thanks!

To Our Success!

Mel Waller