Sharing your thoughts with the world via a book is easier than it has ever been. With Amazon having established itself as the primary go-to platform for publishing eBooks worldwide, sharing your written work with people from all over the globe is just a few clicks away. And as a freelancer, you stand a lot to benefit from that.
In this article, we’ll share the best tips for freelancers looking to publish their book on Amazon.
Why publish an eBook?
As we’ve said before, publishing an eBook can be the best marketing move you’ve ever made. It puts your name out there, boosting your reputation and making future clients more receptive to your ideas. What is more, successful eBooks are an extra source of income. And it’s the best kind of income – the passive kind – which you don’t have to work for.
Last but not least, the process of writing a book can help systemize your own knowledge in once concentrated bundle.
Why Amazon?
If you’re sold on the idea of publishing an eBook, the next question you should ask yourself is the one about the proper platform. We chose Amazon for a reason. Three reasons actually. I like to call them the three F’s: publishing through Amazon is free, it’s fast and it’s far-reaching. There are no costs before you sell a copy of your work. It’s available in just a couple of days after submitting. And you are reaching a huge portion of the reading world.
Convinced? Great, let’s jump straight to the tips then:
1. Use the extensive arsenal of tools Amazon offers
Converting your written file into a proper eBook format, formatting it so it looks nice and finding professionals that can help you design a cover or edit your book are some of the biggest concerns people have when creating their first book.
Amazon has tools that help you take care of those issues with ease. The Kindle Textbook Creator turns your PDFs into properly formatted books. There’s even a Kindle Previewer that lets you see what the published eBook will look like. And there’s a vast community behind it all, one that is also full of professionals willing to help you out with the publishing process. Here’s a list of all Amazon-provided tools with links to them.
2. Add relevant targeting categories
When you publish a book on Amazon’s platform, you get to select categories that best describe it. Amazon uses this data to determine what users get a recommendation to check out your book. Depending on who you expect to buy your book, you might want to go for niche categories or broader ones. But make sure to pick them carefully. There’s a lot to choose from – if you’re publishing a book about HTML, for example, you can go to Nonfiction -> Computers -> Programming languages -> HTML. So take your time and explore the list to give your eBook the appropriate metadata.
3. Pay special attention to the cover
The cover of your eBook is one of the things you might want to consider investing money in. People are able to intuitively identify a cover made by an amateur in Paint. That leads them to the conclusion that the book was also written by an amateur. And you don’t want that. You can check out sites like freelancermap.com or 99designs, to find experienced designers for affordable professional book covers.
4. Stay within the 2.99$ and 9.99$ range
Determining your eBook price with Amazon is pretty easy, especially if you’re writing a regular-sized eBook. In the range between 2.99 and 9.99 US dollars (or your country’s equivalent), you’ll be getting a royalty of 70 percent. That is a pretty amazing percentage, especially compared to the numbers authors get from publishing houses. If you dip below or above that price range, you’ll be getting just 35 percent in most cases.
5. Write a good book
At the end of the day, no amount of great advice and ingenious marketing is going to turn your eBook into a bestseller if it’s not any good. How do you write a good book? That’s a complicated question and one that has a lot of right answers – they all depend on what you’re writing about and who you’re writing a book for.
If you’re a freelancer and are trying to answer your knowledge, there are three basic things that you absolutely have to cover:
– Have something relevant to say
– Make sure they are people who want to hear it & can benefit
– Say it in a precise and interesting manner
Are you thinking of publishing an eBook and have more questions? Ask our great community in the comments below this article!
