How to Self Publish an eBook for Free

1.  Create an account. Start at Kindle Direct Publishing. You can sign in with your regular Amazon account (the same one that you use when shopping with them) or you can create a new account if you don't have one or want to keep them separate for some reason. I created a new account so that my uncle and I could both keep track of the sales without having to share one of our Amazon accounts, but I don't recommend creating a whole new account if you already have one and are only publishing your own work.
2. Start a new title. Once you log into your account you are going to click on the plus sign that says create a new title. I was confused how to do this at first, somehow I kept overlooking this section of the page. It just blends in for some reason. It should look like this:
   
3. Fill out your book's information. At the top of the page you get a message about signing up for KDP Select (more on that later), but just scroll down and now you can fill out all the information you have about your book. It looks like a lot, but just take it one piece at a time, and it is really all quite simple.
4. Create a cover. If you have a cover designed, there is a button to upload it. If you don't have a cover yet, there is actually a cover creator that will help you. It even has some stock photos available for you to use - for free.
5. Upload your file. They actually recommend a Word Document as the preferred format. Which I think is probably what most people will have their novels written in. Or at least the easiest available format for pretty much everything. Also acceptable is a PDF, Rich Text Format, Plain Text, MOBI, ePub and HTML. It's going to take a few minutes to upload, and then the file is converted into I think a PDF (but when I tried submitting my file as a PDF I think they converted it to a Word document and then back to a PDF, or something strange, so I just decided to sick with submitting a Word document). A box will pop up to let you know that it's doing something, but just be patient.
6. Decide on your pricing. The next screen wants you to set up your pricing information. Most of this can be ignored, just choose your royalty option (it has to be between $2.99 and $9.99 for the 70% option) and type in the price you want to sell your ebook for. The rest can be pretty much ignored, so scroll down to the bottom and click the box that says you agree to the terms and click save and publish.
7. Now we wait. There is a box that pops up to tell you that your submission will need to be reviewed before it will officially be published. I think it says that it can take up to a day to be approved, but I've found that it was usually done within a few hours. If you do this at night before you go to bed, in the morning when you wake up it should be live.

1. Make sure your document is a .doc and is save as a Word 97-2003 Document. For some reason they like that better. To do that, go to file and hit "Save as" and then underneath the file name there is a drop down menu that asks for the file type.
2. Table of Contents. The real annoying thing is that they don't accept an auto-generated Table of Contents. You have to manually link your Table of Contents in your document. How to do this:
1. Go to the beginning of a chapter and highlight the title. 
2. In Word's top menu go to "Insert" and click "Bookmark."
3. Type a name in the box that pops up and click add. (I used c1, c2... so I knew it was one that I had created and not auto generated.)
4. Do this for all chapters.
5. Go back to your table of contents, if you already have one I recommend just deleting it and typing in the chapter titles manually.
6. Highlight the chapter title and go back to the top menu and click "Insert" and "Hyperlink."
7. From the pop up select "Place in this Document." You may have to scroll down to where it says "Bookmark." If that section is not expanded, click the plus sign next to it and then select the bookmark you created that corresponds to the text you have highlighted in your table of contents. Hit "Ok."
8. Do this for all chapters.
3. Tips for Images. If you have lots of images in your book, good luck with that. I only had one, and for the first few submissions, I just got rid of it because it seemed like there was nothing I could do to get them to accept it.
• For whatever reason, I kept getting an error message saying that the image was the wrong file type. So if you only have a few images, try deleting them and going to the top file menu "Insert" and "Picture" then navigating to the proper picture from widows explorer.
• Make sure the image is formatted to be "inline with text." To do this, right click on the image select "Format Picture" then the tab for "Layout" and under "Wrapping style" make sure that "In line with text" is highlighted.

1. Author Website

1. Formatting and ebook conversion. I've seen a few breakdowns of where and how much people spend money self publishing and somewhere in that list is formatting and ebook conversion. In my mind I'm saying, I don't know what this is. This is something that is done for you when you upload your file. So what are you paying for? What are you converting to? All the sites that I've seen ask for Word documents. And I thought that both Amazon and Smashwords had some pretty good material to help walk you through any spots that you might be having trouble.
2. Publishing packages. When I first started looking into self publishing I looked at sites like BookBaby that sound like they have a lot of great features. But then you look deeper and it's a $300 charge for them to publish your book. Why? What are you paying them for? You can absolutely do all the things that they say they are going to do for free, and it really takes very little effort. All they are going to do is upload your book to Amazon and to some of the places that Smashwords will do for you. So any of these companies that say that charge you a fee for their services, just move on because what they are doing can absolutely be done for free.