Self-publishing guide
Amazon KDP costs nothing upfront, pays royalties monthly, and puts your book in the world’s largest bookstore. This walkthrough takes you from finished manuscript to live product page — every screen, every decision, in order.
In one sentence
Self-publishing on Amazon is a sequence of small, learnable decisions: finish the manuscript, set up KDP, choose metadata that helps readers find you, price inside the 70% royalty window, publish, and then read your sales data calmly instead of superstitiously.
Quick read
Self-publishing on Amazon is a sequence of small, learnable decisions: finish the manuscript, set up KDP, choose metadata that helps readers find you, price inside the 70% royalty window, publish, and then read your sales data calmly instead of superstitiously.
Key takeaways
If You Are on the Fence
Most people researching this page are not missing information. They are looking for permission. So here is the honest case: Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing costs nothing to use, keeps you in control of your rights and your price, pays royalties every month, and puts your book on the same store where most books in the English-speaking world are bought. The downside is equally honest: nobody curates you in, and nobody buys a book they cannot find or that was never finished.
That means the real barriers are the manuscript and the follow-through, not the platform. Every step below is learnable in an afternoon. None of it requires an agent, a publisher, or an upfront check. If your book is written — or if you finally want a system that gets it written — the machinery on the other side is ready when you are.
Step 1
Before KDP ever matters, the book has to be done and it has to be the right size for its category. Readers have strong expectations about length, and a book that is dramatically short or long for its shelf gets punished in reviews.
Use these ranges as the working targets most editors and indie veterans quote. They are norms, not laws — but if you are far outside them, know why.
Step 2
Go to kdp.amazon.com and sign in with an Amazon account — your normal one works. KDP will walk you through three setup blocks before you can publish: author/business information, payment details (the bank account where royalties land), and the tax interview. The tax interview sounds intimidating and takes about five minutes; US authors enter a SSN or EIN, and international authors complete the same flow to apply their country’s tax treaty rate.
Do this before launch week, not during it. An incomplete tax interview is the classic reason a first book’s royalties sit frozen while the author panics.
Step 3
When you click “Create” on a new title, the first screen is metadata — and this screen matters more than most authors believe. Your book title and subtitle must match the cover exactly. Your description is sales copy, not a synopsis: lead with the hook, use short paragraphs, and end with a reason to click. Your seven keyword slots and two category choices are how Amazon’s search engine decides which queries you appear for.
Treat the seven keywords like search real estate. Phrases beat single words, reader language beats writer language, and you should never waste slots repeating words already in your title or categories — those are indexed automatically.
Step 4
KDP accepts EPUB or DOCX for ebooks, and a sized PDF for paperback interiors. EPUB is the safer ebook upload: what you preview is much closer to what readers see. For paperback, your interior PDF must match your trim size (6"×9" is the default choice for most genres), and your cover must be a single wraparound PDF built to KDP’s cover calculator dimensions — spine width depends on your exact page count.
After upload, use the online previewer and actually read the first three chapters in it. Bad indents, missing page breaks, and broken front matter are the most common reasons a book looks amateur in the Look Inside sample — which is the only part most browsers will ever read.
Step 5
Since 2023, KDP asks every publisher whether the book contains AI-generated content — text, images, or translations — and the 2026 flow makes the distinction between AI-generated and AI-assisted explicit. Assisted means you created the content and used AI to edit, refine, or brainstorm; generated means AI produced content you then published, even with heavy editing. You must answer accurately, and the answer does not appear on your product page.
This is a compliance checkbox, not a judgment of your book. Answer it truthfully, keep your own records of your process, and put your energy into the parts readers actually see.
Step 6
Kindle ebooks have two royalty plans. The 70% plan applies to list prices from $2.99 to $9.99 (minus a small delivery fee based on file size). Outside that window you drop to 35%. This is why the indie ebook market clusters between $2.99 and $5.99 — the math punishes $1.99 and $12.99 alike. A $4.99 ebook on the 70% plan earns you roughly $3.49 per sale.
Paperbacks pay a 60% royalty on list price minus printing cost. A 300-page black-and-white 6"×9" paperback costs about $4.85 to print, so a $14.99 list price returns roughly $4.14 per copy. Run your own numbers before you commit — small price moves change the royalty more than authors expect.
Step 7
When you click publish, the book enters KDP’s review queue. Most titles go live within 24–72 hours; you will get an email when the product page is up. Note that KDP limits publishers to three new titles per day — irrelevant for most authors, but a real constraint for rapid-release strategies.
The first week is when Amazon’s systems are most curious about your book. Feed them deliberately: share the link where your readers already are, ask early readers for honest reviews (Amazon needs verified purchases to weight them), and consider a launch-week price you raise afterward. What you do in week one does not make or break the book forever — but it is the cheapest attention you will ever get.
Read the Dashboard
Amazon Best Sellers Rank (BSR) is the number on your product page that authors obsess over — usually wrongly. BSR measures recent sales velocity relative to every other book in the store, recalculated hourly with heavier weight on the last 24–48 hours. Lower is better: BSR #1 is the store’s current fastest seller. It is not a measure of lifetime sales, quality, or trajectory.
The rough rules of thumb the indie community uses: an overall Kindle BSR around 100,000 is roughly a sale a day; around 10,000 is several sales a day; under 1,000 is serious volume. Category rank (the “#3 in Cozy Mystery” line) is far more winnable and more useful for marketing than overall rank. Watch your seven-day trend, not the hourly wobble.
The Money
Here is sober math for a $4.99 ebook earning $3.49 per sale: one sale a day is about $105 a month; five a day is about $524; twenty a day — a genuinely selling book — is about $2,094 a month from one title. Add a paperback at $4 net and Kindle Unlimited page reads and a single healthy title can clear $1,000–$3,000 a month. Most first books do not do this. Portfolios do: the working model in indie publishing is several books in one genre, each feeding the next.
That is the honest fence-sitter answer. One book is a lottery ticket; a finishing system is a business. The authors who win treat book one as the system test — they learn the machine, then run it again with book two already outlined.
KDP royalty calculator
Estimate paperback or eBook royalty per sale, cost assumptions, and simple revenue scenarios using transparent formulas.
Open toolAmazon KDP keyword generator
Generate keyword phrase directions that sound like reader intent instead of vague publishing jargon.
Open toolbook title generator
Get bestseller-style title directions for your genre, then claim the one you love and keep building the book inside BookWriter.
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