How to Self-Publish a Book on Amazon

What Amazon self publishing actually is

Amazon self publishing means putting your book on sale in the Amazon store yourself, without a publishing house, using Kindle Direct Publishing: the platform almost everyone shortens to KDP. You upload a manuscript and a cover, set a price, and Amazon lists the book. There is no gatekeeper, no agent, and no advance.

Three formats run through the same dashboard:

• Kindle eBook: a digital file. No printing, no inventory, and it can be updated after publication.
• Paperback: printed on demand when a customer orders. Amazon deducts the printing cost from your royalty, so you never buy stock.
• Hardcover: same print-on-demand model, higher unit cost, higher price point.

Each format is uploaded separately and gets its own list price. Most authors publish an eBook and a paperback; the hardcover is optional and works best for nonfiction and gift-oriented titles.

One thing, many names

The terminology is a mess, and it confuses people who are searching for help. Amazon self publishing, Amazon KDP self publishing, Amazon Kindle self publishing, Kindle self publishing, KDP self publishing and Amazon book publishing all describe the same thing: uploading your own book to Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing. There is no separate programme behind any of these names.

The only distinction worth keeping straight is between KDP (the free platform this guide covers, where you keep your rights and your royalties) and Amazon's paid or agency-style publishing services, which are a different proposition entirely. If someone is charging you a fee to "publish you on Amazon", they are charging you for something you can do yourself, free, in an afternoon.

The thing to understand before you start: KDP is a distribution channel, not a publisher. Nobody is going to edit your manuscript, design your cover, or tell you your pricing is wrong. Every decision in this guide is one you make alone, and several of them are difficult to reverse.

Self-publishing on Amazon vs. traditional publishing

The trade is straightforward. You exchange support and prestige for speed, control and a much larger share of the revenue.

The honest summary: self-publishing on Amazon wins on economics and control. Traditional publishing wins on physical retail distribution, editorial support and the credibility that still comes with an imprint. Neither one makes a book sell. That part is the same either way.

How much does it cost to self-publish on Amazon?

KDP itself is free. No account fee, no listing fee, no annual fee, and no charge to update a book after publication. Print books are manufactured only when ordered, and the printing cost is subtracted from your royalty rather than billed to you.

So the real question is what you choose to pay other people for. This is the range most authors land in:

You can publish for effectively nothing. Whether you should is a different question, and it comes down to what the book is for. A memoir for your family does not need a $2,000 edit. A business book that exists to win you clients probably does.

We break the numbers down properly in our full guide to Amazon self-publishing costs.

What you actually earn, and the $9.99 cliff

This is the section most guides get wrong, and it is worth more to you than everything else on this page.

eBook royalties: 35% or 70%

You pick one of two royalty options for each Kindle eBook.

For almost every author, 70% is the right answer. The exceptions are real but narrow: you need to price below $2.99 or above $9.99, or your book is primarily public domain material.

Paperback royalties: 50% or 60%, and your price decides which

Nearly every self-publishing article online still tells you paperbacks pay a flat 60%. That is no longer accurate. KDP now applies either a 50% or a 60% royalty rate, determined entirely by your list price.

On Amazon.com, the boundary is one cent wide:

Work through what that actually means. Take a 300-page black-ink paperback at regular trim, sold on Amazon.com. Its printing cost is $1.00 + (300 × $0.012) = $4.60.

One cent on the price. Three and a half times the income. Charge a penny less and you hand Amazon almost your entire margin, permanently, on every copy sold.

Two more facts that most guides state incorrectly:

• Bleed settings and cover finish do not affect printing cost. Matte or glossy makes no difference to what you pay.
• Expanded Distribution pays 40%, not 60%, minus the same printing cost. On that same $9.99 book, an Expanded Distribution sale earns (0.40 × $9.99) − $4.60 = −$0.60, which is why KDP enforces a minimum list price. Expanded Distribution only makes sense at a higher price point.

The full breakdown, with every rate table and worked examples for each format, is in Amazon KDP royalties explained.

Writing your manuscript

Nothing on the publishing side rescues a book nobody wants to read. The platform is trivial; the manuscript is the work.

Three things separate books that finish from books that do not:

• A defined reader. Not "people interested in productivity": a specific person with a specific problem. Every structural decision gets easier once you can picture them.
• An outline you are willing to break. Chapter-level, not sentence-level. Its job is to stop you staring at a blank page, not to bind you.
• A schedule measured in output, not hours. A daily word target you can actually hit beats a vague commitment to "write more". Most nonfiction books run 40,000-60,000 words; a novel, 70,000-90,000. At 500 words a day, that is roughly three to six months.

Write the draft badly and fix it later. Editing a weak page is achievable; editing a page that does not exist is not.

The essential parts of a published book

Readers judge a book's professionalism in the first ten seconds, and most of that judgement happens in the front matter. Open any traditionally published book on your shelf and you will find the same skeleton.

Front matter

• Title page: title, subtitle, author name.
• Copyright page: copyright notice, year, ISBN, and any permissions you are required to print. If you quote song lyrics, poetry or scripture, check the licence terms before you publish; many require an explicit attribution statement here.
• Dedication: optional.
• Table of contents: essential for nonfiction and eBooks. In a Kindle eBook it must be a linked, navigable TOC, not a typed list of page numbers.
• Foreword or preface: optional; a foreword is written by someone else, a preface by you.

Body

• Chapters, with consistent heading styles and clean chapter breaks.
• Images at sufficient resolution for print: 300 DPI at the size they appear.

Back matter

• About the author: short, third person, with one line on why you are the person writing this.
• A call to action: the single most under-used page in self-publishing. Ask for a review. Point readers to your next book or mailing list. This page is free real estate and most authors leave it blank.
• Bibliography, appendix, glossary or index: as your subject requires.

Proofreading your draft

Proofreading is not editing. It is the last pass, after the structure is settled, hunting for typos, inconsistencies and formatting errors. Do it properly, because a review that says "riddled with typos" will sit at the top of your product page for years.

• Leave it alone first. A week away from the manuscript will show you errors you have read past twenty times.
• Change the medium. Print it, or push it to an e-reader. Errors that are invisible in the document you wrote in become obvious in a different format.
• Read it aloud. Slow, tedious, and by far the most effective way to catch clumsy phrasing and dropped words.
• Run the tools, then ignore half of what they say. Grammarly and ProWritingAid are good at mechanics and bad at voice.
• Check consistency deliberately. Character names, place names, capitalisation, hyphenation, number style. Find-and-replace is your friend.

Do you need an editor to self-publish on Amazon?

Amazon does not require one. Your readers effectively do.

The useful distinction is between the three kinds of editing, because they cost very different amounts and solve very different problems:

If you can only afford one, buy the developmental edit. It is the one you cannot do for yourself, because you cannot see your own book from outside. A copy edit on a structurally broken book just produces immaculate prose nobody finishes.

When hiring, look for someone who has worked in your genre, ask for a paid sample edit on 1,000 words before committing, and be wary of anyone who quotes without reading a word of your manuscript.

Do you need a formatter?

Less often than you think. KDP's own tools handle most books:

• Kindle Create (free, from Amazon) turns a Word file into a properly formatted Kindle eBook with a linked table of contents.
• KDP's Word templates for paperbacks come pre-set with the correct trim, margins and gutter.
• Vellum (Mac) and Atticus (browser) are paid tools that produce genuinely professional interiors for both print and digital.

Hire a formatter when your book fights back: heavy illustration, tables, footnotes, poetry with fixed line breaks, textbooks, cookbooks, children's picture books. Straight narrative prose almost never needs one.

The specifics (file types, trim, bleed, margins and the Kindle Previewer check) are covered in our KDP formatting guide.

Creating a book cover for Amazon publishing

Your cover does one job: convince a stranger scrolling a search results page to stop. At thumbnail size, on a phone, in about a quarter of a second.

Which means the criteria are brutally practical:

• The title must be legible at 100 pixels wide. This eliminates most script fonts and most "clever" layouts. Shrink your design to thumbnail size and look at it: if you cannot read it, neither can a buyer.
• It must look like its genre. Covers are a signalling system. A thriller that looks like a literary memoir will not sell to thriller readers, however beautiful it is. Study the current top 20 in your category and match the visual language.
• An eBook needs only a front cover. Print needs a single wrapped file: back cover, spine and front, sized to your exact page count.

Spine width depends on page count, so your interior must be final before the print cover can be built. KDP's cover template generator produces a correctly sized template once you enter trim size, page count and paper type.

A common rejection: designers download the KDP template, build the cover on top of it, and forget to delete the template's own guide text and pink margin layers. Those layers print. Amazon catches it, and your launch slips by a few days. Delete every template layer before you export.

Full cover specifications and the trim-size decision are in our guide to Amazon book covers and trim sizes.

Setting up your Amazon KDP account

Do this weeks before you plan to launch, not the night before. The tax step involves a verification process that is not instant, and an unverified account cannot be paid.

1. Sign in at kdp.amazon.com

   An existing Amazon shopping account works. You do not need an Amazon Seller account. KDP is a separate system, and no monthly seller fee applies.

2. Complete your author/publisher details

   Individual or business, legal name, address, date of birth.

3. Add your bank account

   This is where royalties land. KDP pays monthly, roughly 60 days after the end of the month in which sales occurred.

4. Complete the tax interview

   Amazon will withhold tax on your royalties until this is done. Non-US authors in a treaty country should complete a W-8BEN to reduce withholding from 30% to their treaty rate, often 0%. This step routinely catches people out; start it early.

Publishing a Kindle eBook, step by step

From your Bookshelf, click + Create and choose Kindle eBook. You will move through three screens.

1. Kindle eBook Details

Language, title, subtitle, series, edition, author and contributors, description, publishing rights, keywords, categories, age range, and whether to publish now or set up a pre-order.

Two fields here do far more work than the rest. Your description is your sales page: write it as copy, not as a synopsis, and lead with the reason someone should care. Your seven keyword fields and three categories determine where Amazon's search engine files your book, and most authors fill them in carelessly. See KDP keywords and categories.

2. Kindle eBook Content

Upload the manuscript (DOCX, EPUB or a Kindle Create file), upload a front cover in JPG or TIFF, then open Kindle Previewer and actually read through it. Check the linked table of contents, the chapter breaks, and how images render. Do not skip this.

3. Kindle eBook Pricing

Choose KDP Select enrolment (or not), select your territories, pick the 35% or 70% royalty option, and set your list price.

Then publish. Amazon reviews the file and the book normally goes live within 72 hours.

Publishing a paperback on KDP

The flow mirrors the eBook, with print-specific decisions.

Paperback Details

Same fields as the eBook, with two differences: there is no pre-order option, and instead of an age range you confirm whether the content is suitable for readers under 18.

Paperback Content

• ISBN. Take the free KDP ISBN, or supply your own. A free KDP ISBN lists "Independently published" as the imprint and can only be used with KDP. Your own ISBN (from Bowker in the US) lists you as the publisher and travels with the book to any printer. For most authors the free one is fine; if you intend to distribute beyond Amazon, buy your own.
• Print options. Ink (black or colour), paper (cream, white or the newer groundwood stock), and trim size. This is a cost decision as much as an aesthetic one.
• Manuscript. Upload as PDF for print.
• Cover. A single wrapped PDF, or build one in Cover Creator.
• Previewer. Check every page.

Paperback Rights & Pricing

Territories, primary marketplace, list price, and whether to enable Expanded Distribution. Set your list price with the 50/60% threshold in mind: see the cliff above.

Order a proof copy. It costs a few dollars and it is the only way to see what your reader will actually hold. Every author who has skipped this and shipped a book with a misaligned spine has regretted it.

Publishing a hardcover

Hardcover uses the same process with a different cost base. Printing a 300-page black-ink hardcover on Amazon.com costs $5.65 + (300 × $0.012) = $9.25, roughly double the paperback equivalent. Hardcovers require a minimum of 75 pages, and the format has no Expanded Distribution option.

It is worth doing for nonfiction, business books, gift books and anything a reader might buy for someone else. For a mass-market novel competing on price, it usually is not.

KDP Select: should you go exclusive?

KDP Select enrols your eBook in a 90-day exclusive arrangement with Amazon. In exchange, the book enters Kindle Unlimited, and you earn from pages read rather than copies sold. You also unlock Kindle Countdown Deals and free promotion days.

What you give up is everything else: no Apple Books, no Kobo, no Google Play, no selling the eBook from your own site. Print editions are unaffected. You can always sell paperbacks anywhere.

The honest heuristic: Select suits genre fiction that readers consume quickly (romance, thriller, fantasy, cosy mystery) because Kindle Unlimited subscribers read voraciously and page-reads compound across a series. It suits nonfiction, literary fiction and anything with an existing audience far less well, because those readers buy rather than borrow and you lose real revenue from other stores for nothing.

The full trade-off, including how page-read payouts actually work, is in KDP Select vs. going wide.

Keywords, categories and getting found

Amazon is a search engine that happens to sell books. Once your title is live, your visibility is decided by metadata you set in about ten minutes and then usually never revisit.

• Seven keyword fields. Not seven keywords: seven fields, each holding a phrase of up to 50 characters. Use phrases a reader would actually type, not single words, and never repeat words already in your title or author name; Amazon already indexes those.
• Three categories. Specificity beats size. Ranking in a narrow subcategory earns you a visible bestseller badge; drowning in a huge one earns you nothing.
• The description. Indexed by Amazon's search and read by every potential buyer. Two jobs, one field.

This is the cheapest lever in self-publishing and the most consistently wasted. How to choose KDP keywords and categories covers the method.

Why Amazon rejects books

Most rejections are mechanical and fixable within a day. The usual causes:

• Template guide layers or crop marks left visible on the cover file.
• Cover dimensions that do not match the page count, usually a spine width error.
• Images below 300 DPI in a print interior.
• Content extending into the margin or gutter.
• A missing or unlinked table of contents in an eBook.
• Metadata problems: keyword stuffing in the title field, misleading subtitles, or claiming a series that does not exist.
• Undisclosed AI-generated content, or an account exceeding the daily upload limit.
• Public domain material republished without substantial original additions.

Amazon emails you the reason. Fix, re-upload, resubmit; the clock restarts at 72 hours. The full list of KDP rejection reasons and fixes.

Launching your book

Publishing is not launching. The book goes live and, by default, nothing happens, because nobody knows it exists.

What actually moves copies in the first month:

• Reviews, early. The single strongest conversion factor on a product page. Ask everyone who reads an advance copy. You may not pay for reviews or trade them, and family reviews are frequently detected and removed.
• Author Central. Free. Claim your author page, add a bio and photo, and link all your editions together so the eBook, paperback and hardcover appear on one product page rather than three.
• A+ Content. Free. Adds formatted images and comparison tables to your product page. It measurably lifts conversion and most self-published authors never set it up.
• Amazon Ads. The only reliable paid traffic source that puts your book in front of people already shopping for books. Start small, expect to lose money while you learn, and judge by whether the whole campaign is profitable rather than by individual clicks.
• Your next book. Unromantic and true: the most effective marketing for book one is book two. Backlist compounds.

Frequently asked questions