Self Publishing On Kindle

There's never been a more exciting time to publish your own books, especially with so many self publishing options available to you.

To begin, you will want to set up 2 accounts with Amazon:

1: https://kdp.amazon.com
This is where you create your Kindle publisher account, and it's where you will later log in to submit your ebooks for publication.

2: https://authorcentral.amazon.com
You can only create an Author account once you have at least one book available within the Amazon marketplace.  Author Central will give you the opportunity to create an author profile, bio, as well as add the RSS feed from your blogs and twitter account.

Creating a Kindle version of your book is relatively easy. All you need to do is make sure that it's properly formatted inside of your doc editor and then save out as .HTML

One thing to keep in mind is that when you export your book in HTML format, the files will be saved on your desktop in two different ways.  You will see a folder that contains any images that you've included in your book as well as the HTML file itself. You need to zip up both of these into one file before uploading to Kindle. 

When you submit your first book into Kindle, it can take up to 48 hours to be approved. You will see your book go through various stages, including:

In Review: This means that your book is being reviewed by Amazon to ensure that it's compliant with their guidelines.

Publishing:  The tab inside of your Author account will be greyed out during publishing, which means that you will be unable to make any changes, either to the content, title or price until it has been completely published.  One thing to keep in mind however is that your book will actually become available on Amazon before you actually see the update within your Author account.  So, keep checking the Amazon marketplace for your book while you are waiting for your account to update.

Blocked: If Amazon finds that your book is unacceptable for publication, it will be "Blocked". If you have a book that ends up Blocked by Amazon, you will not be able to re-submit it for publication, even if you make changes. Instead, edit the book as necessary and then re-submit it as a new book.  Most times it will be accepted on the second attempt (Just depends on the reviewer!).