The Kindle, Amazon’s digital eBook reader, and the associated Digital Text Platform—the user friendly tool that helps writers upload manuscripts and then put them into the Kindle Store for direct sale—has helped writers wary of the insanely difficult to break into traditional publishing business. Along with immediate publication, writers earn 70% royalties on their work.

So how do you go about this? We’ve broken things down into 10 easy-to-follow steps:

1. Write a book, which goes to say rewrite the book and don’t move to publish it until it’s been revised to a shine. Using the assistance of both friends and family for critical eyes and rereading, we wouldn’t shirk away from hiring a professional editor either.
2. Design a well thought out and professional book cover. It’s important to do this since your book will be in the proximity of books from traditional publishers, and it needs to belong.
3. Next, sign in to the Digital Text Platform where, if you already have an existing Amazon account, can use the same log in information. You will need to create a new account if you do not, however.
4. To publish your book, click the “Add a New Item” button on the top of the left hand side. This leads to a dashboard enabling you to manage all aspects of your manuscript, from entering product details, confirming content rights, uploading & previewing books and suggesting a retail price.
5. While entering product details, you can add your book’s title, language, category and author name. Further information like the ISBN number, description, publication date, publisher, edition number, product image/cover page, series title and volume and search keywords. This last will help readers to find your book on searching these keywords.
6. During confirming content rights, as the author of the book it’s better to own all copyrights. Select “Worldwide Rights – All Territories,” and then confirm you have all the right rights.
7. Ensure you convert your eBook to the proper format. Kindle supported formats include .doc, .mobi, .prc and .html. We would advise converting to the HTML format which keeps the MS Word formatting in tact as well as looking good. You can always use external conversion software, but those are paid services.
8. Before pricing your book, check out other books in the same category to get an understanding of how items are priced. Keep in mind that Kindle customers expect a discount; the lowest allowed price on Amazon is $0.99.
9. Once you’ve finalized everything, clicking the “Publish” button will publish the book. Amazon takes between 24 and 72 hours to process the book and upload to their store.
10. This step is all about self promotion and marketing and this all comes down to how aggressive you are. Try starting out by creating a website for you or your material, taking part in discussions on forums frequented by your targeted readers (Amazon and Kindle forums are great places to start). Putting up free excerpts and sample chapters are also great ways to boost readership and increase sales.

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