How to publish an ebook: every step, every store, and the honest math

Almost everything that ranks for “how to publish an ebook” is really a walkthrough of one website: Amazon's KDP dashboard. That's understandable — Amazon is where most ebooks sell — but it skips the decisions that actually determine whether your ebook earns anything: what shape the file needs to be in, whether to give Amazon an exclusive, what the other stores pay, and where your production money should go. We've published more than 1,200 authors since 2017, and this is the whole picture we give them — the buttons and the choices behind the buttons.

What “publishing an ebook” actually involves

Strip away the platform tours and there are five jobs between a finished manuscript and an ebook someone buys. Every path through publishing — do-it-yourself, assisted, or somewhere in between — is just a decision about who does each one:

1. Editing. At minimum a professional copy edit. Ebook readers leave reviews too, and typos in a $4.99 ebook read exactly as badly as typos in a $24.99 hardcover.
2. Cover design. An ebook cover lives or dies as a thumbnail — roughly postage-stamp size in search results. It needs to be legible and genre-correct at that size, which is a different design problem than a print jacket.
3. Formatting. The standard ebook file is an EPUB — reflowable text that adapts to any screen size. Amazon stopped accepting the old MOBI format for new ebook uploads back in 2022, so EPUB now works everywhere: Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, Nook.
4. Metadata and upload. Title, subtitle, description, categories, and search keywords. This is unglamorous and it moves books — metadata is how readers who've never heard of you find the book.
5. Pricing. Every store pays different royalties at different price points. Price inside the good bands (more below) and the same book can earn several times more per copy.

Step by step: manuscript to live ebook

1. Finish and edit the manuscript

Nothing downstream fixes an unedited book. Hire at least a copy edit; get a developmental edit first if the structure feels shaky. If you'd rather hand this off, our editing services handle both levels.

2. Design the cover for a screen, not a shelf

Look at the top 20 ebooks in your genre and shrink them to thumbnail size — that's your competition, at the size readers will actually see you. Big type, one clear image, genre-standard colors. A professional cover is the single highest-leverage dollar in ebook publishing, because it's the only part of the book shoppers see before deciding whether to click.

3. Format the EPUB

You have free and paid routes, and the free ones are genuinely good now. Free: Kindle Create (Amazon's own tool), Reedsy Studio, and the open-source Calibre will all turn a clean Word document into a valid EPUB. Paid: tools like Vellum (Mac) and Atticus — roughly $150–$250 one-time — give you more design control and painless updates. Whatever you use, preview the file on more than one screen size before uploading; the classic ebook embarrassments (broken chapter breaks, giant images, invisible tables) are all catchable in preview.

4. Upload with real metadata

On each store you'll enter the book's details, upload the EPUB and cover, and choose categories and keywords. Write the description like ad copy, not a synopsis — its job is to make a stranger click Buy. On Amazon, a new ebook is typically reviewed and live within 72 hours on Amazon.com, per KDP's published timelines. Our Amazon walkthrough covers that store's screens click by click.

5. Price inside the royalty bands

This is where an hour of reading pays for itself, so it gets its own section.

The real decision: Amazon-only or wide?

Before pricing, you face the one strategic fork every ebook author hits. Amazon offers an optional program called KDP Select: enroll and your ebook becomes exclusive to Amazon for 90 days at a time — you can't sell it anywhere else, even on your own site. In exchange, the book joins Kindle Unlimited, Amazon's subscription library, where you're paid from a shared fund by pages read, and you get a few promo tools (free days, countdown deals).

“Going wide” is the opposite bet: skip Select, keep your rights to sell everywhere, and publish to Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble Press, and Google Play alongside Amazon — either store by store, or through an aggregator like Draft2Digital that pushes one upload to many stores and keeps roughly 10% of list price for the service, per its published model.

What each store pays

Per the stores' own published terms as we write this — always confirm on the store's rate page when you upload, because these do change:

Put real numbers on it: a $4.99 ebook on KDP's 70% plan pays you about $3.45 a copy after the delivery fee. The same book priced at $12.99 drops to the 35% tier and pays about $4.55 — barely more per copy, at a price that sells far fewer. That asymmetry is why the $2.99–$9.99 shelf is where nearly every self-published ebook lives. For the deeper math across formats, see our book royalties explainer.

What publishing an ebook costs

Uploading is free on every store listed above. Nobody honest charges you to press the publish button, and any “publisher” quoting a fee just for uploading an EPUB is selling you a $0 service. What costs money is making the book good: professional editing and cover design typically run several hundred to a few thousand dollars on the freelance market depending on length and genre — our cost breakdown walks the line items. Formatting adds $0 (free tools) to a few hundred (hired out). If you'd rather pay once and have a team do all of it — edit, cover, EPUB, metadata, and the print edition too — that's exactly what our packages from $699 are, with 100% of rights and royalties staying yours.

Do you need an ISBN for an ebook?

Mostly, no — and this surprises people. Amazon doesn't require an ISBN for ebooks at all; it assigns its own ASIN identifier. Most other stores and aggregators will supply a free identifier or ISBN if you want one, with the usual catch that a free ISBN lists its provider — not you — as the publisher of record. If you want to be the publisher of record across every store, US ISBNs come from Bowker at $125 for one or $295 for ten — and note that each format (ebook, paperback, hardcover) needs its own. Print is where an ISBN becomes genuinely necessary. The full pros, cons, and prices are in our ISBN cost guide.

Don't publish only an ebook (usually)

One honest nudge before the mistakes list: unless your book is genuinely digital-native, publish a print edition alongside the ebook. Print-on-demand costs nothing up front on KDP, some readers simply won't buy digital — grandparents buying a children's book, church groups buying a devotional — and a $15.99 paperback sitting next to your $4.99 ebook makes the ebook look like a bargain instead of a gamble. Every package we sell produces both editions for this reason, and authors from Arizona to North Carolina consistently tell us the print copies — the ones they can hand to family — were the point all along.

Five ebook mistakes we see constantly

1. Uploading a Word file and hoping. Stores will convert it, badly. Make a real EPUB and preview it on multiple screen sizes.
2. A cover that dies at thumbnail size. If you can't read the title at postage-stamp size, neither can shoppers.
3. Pricing outside the royalty band. A $1.99 or $14.99 ebook on Amazon earns the 35% rate — usually the worst of both worlds.
4. Enrolling in Select without noticing the exclusivity. That checkbox means no Apple, no Kobo, no selling from your own website for 90 days. Decide it; don't default into it.
5. Publishing into silence. An ebook with no launch plan sells to nobody, free upload or not. Our book marketing guide covers what actually works for a first book.

Questions authors ask us

Sources & further reading: royalty rates and timelines are from each store's published terms — Amazon KDP (70%/35% tiers, ~$2.99–$9.99 band, delivery fees, 72-hour review), Apple Books, Kobo Writing Life, Barnes & Noble Press, Google Play Books, and Draft2Digital's published pricing model; confirm current rates at upload, as stores revise them. ISBN prices are Bowker's published US prices. Cost and timeline ranges reflect USA Publishing House's work with 1,200+ authors since 2017.