Distribute and sell your Kindle ebook

- [Instructor] You're allowed to create a MOBI file and sell it anywhere, really. You can sell it on your own website, you can put it on Etsy, you can put it any place you can sell downloadable files. Here we're looking at this cool website, StandardEbooks.org. It has a mission of making beautiful ebooks from public domain text. And I wanted to show you that here, if you go to their ebook section and you click one of these guys, look at how you can download it in these formats, which I thought was very interesting.

Notice there's no MOBI file here. And that's because AZW is actually, I think I mentioned this previously, the more technically-correct file format for Kindle ebooks. It's what they use internally. And professional ebook designers will choose the AZW format, which you can export out of Kindle Previewer. Remember that? You had your choice of MOBI or AZW. They'll export AZW and they'll put that on a Kindle device because you get a more accurate read of what Amazon's going to give you than a MOBI file.

A MOBI file will get close, and it's perfectly fine for reading in the Kindle apps. But on an actual device, you want to use AZW. So they're not selling it here, you can simply download it if I click right here, it would say AZW. What I think this site needs is instructions, for most normal people have no idea what to do with that AZW file when it's on their hard drive. How do you actually get it onto a Kindle? You have to email it to your Kindle address. You have to plug in the Kindle and put it into the documents. I mean, there's all sorts of instructions.

And same thing for ePUB3 or regular ePUB. And Kobo devices, they actually do have an ePUB extension. But they have a little bit in front of that extension in order for the Kobo device to use the more modern HTML5 and CSS3. All of this you really don't need to know for the purpose of this video, but I'm just sort of trying to expand your brain here and show you that you can do whatever you'd like with your Amazon books. But I would guess that 99.5% of the population actually wants to upload them to the Kindle Bookstore and have them sold there.

And it's really simple to do. I'm going to step you through a few of the initial steps of uploading your book to the Kindle Store. You need an account, which you can create. And I'll cover that in a later chapter. But I've already created a Kindle account for KDP, and I'm logged in. And here is my dashboard for all the books that I've uploaded, which is not that many. Actually, I have another email address and account that I use for my ebook publishing on Kindle. But it's very easy to do, they step you through it. I want to make a new ebook, so I choose Create a New Kindle Ebook.

And then it brings me to three different panels, and we have to start this one. What language and the book title? I'll call it First Book. And I don't have any series. All these are optional, so I can skip by it. I'll call, my first name is Anne Concepcion. And there's no contributors. And this is a wonderful book. I'm not actually going to publish this. This is kind of what I want to show you. I own all the publishing rights, so I'm not really that worried about the contents of what I'm putting here.

And I need to choose a category, so we'll say it is an Action and General. Okay, and the age range, that's optional. Pre-order. Let's leave it at I'm ready to release my book now, and then choose Save and Continue. Now you don't have to worry that it's suddenly going to appear on the Kindle Store because there's more steps to do. Now it's where it's asking you, have you read the Content Guidelines to make sure that the content is appropriate? And view the supported file types.

If I click there, view the supported file types, learn more about supported file types on KDP, these are all the file types that you can upload to KDP for them to convert to AZW or MOBI on their own. So you can upload a Word file and they'll convert it on their own, which I think is interesting, though they tell you to clean up the Word file and save it as a filtered HTML file. You could also create your own MOBI, which I showed in a previous video, and upload that. Or you could just upload an ePUB and have them do the conversion.

And then you also can upload an RTF file, a text file, or a PDF or a KPF. That's one of the formats from one of their own Kindle apps, like Kids' Book Creator and the Create app. They make KPF files that you upload. Let's come back up here. And you can choose if you want digital rights management or not, and what you want to use for the cover. They have their own Cover Creator, which I think is interesting. So you can come over here and say, I want to choose the design. And I'll choose it from your image gallery, and I'll take something with architecture, a building.

That looks good, I want to use that image. And then it shows it on different cover designs. And I'll say it's that one right there. And that's good, I want to preview that. Perfect, Save and Submit. Or of course I could've done my own JPEG or file and uploaded it that way. Oh, I forgot to choose digital rights management. I don't need them to protect this ebook. Cover uploaded. And now, why can't I download my book? Because I haven't uploaded the content yet.

I missed this button, Upload Ebook Manuscript. And I have already created a file here in the Exercise Files. You can just grab anything. I made a single page called My First Book and exported it to ePUB from InDesign. And what's interesting is then I'm uploading an ePUB, and so Amazon is going to convert it for me. And I'll be able to download and see what it looks like in the Online Previewer, or I could download it once it's done.

And I think that's really useful that not a lot of people know, is that you don't have to have the thing completely final ready to go before you upload it to the Kindle Store. You can upload your manuscript or you can upload your ePUB, and let them do the conversion and see what it looks like. So I really appreciate how simple Amazon makes it for authors and small publishers to jump in and publish their ebooks on the Kindle Bookstore.