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How to publish a book on Amazon, start to finish — account setup, formatting rules, cover specs, pricing, royalties, and going live. Uploading is free, and this guide is written so you can do the whole thing yourself. We help authors through these exact steps every day, so we've also marked the five spots where people get stuck.
Zero dollars. Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) charges nothing to publish an eBook, a paperback, or a hardcover. Amazon makes its money on each sale — a cut of the price plus the printing cost — so there's no upload fee, no setup fee, no annual fee.
We're a publishing services company, so let's get the awkward part out of the way: we charge $699 and up to do this work for authors, and we're telling you the platform itself is free. Both things are true. What costs money — whether in dollars or in your evenings — is everything around the upload: editing, cover design, formatting. This guide covers the upload side completely. What the surrounding work costs is covered in our book publishing costs guide. And to be clear, we're an independent company — Amazon doesn't endorse us or anyone else in this business.
Go to kdp.amazon.com and sign in with a regular Amazon account — the same one you shop with works fine. Then KDP asks for three things before you can be paid:
Time required: about 20 minutes. This step trips up more of our older authors than any other, not because it's hard, but because it feels risky to type bank details into a website. It's Amazon's own secure system, the same machinery as their shopping site. If you have an adult child nearby, this is the step to borrow them for.
Your book needs two different files, because screens and paper follow different rules.
KDP accepts a Word document (.docx) or an EPUB. For most books, a clean Word file honestly does the job: use a normal font, use Word's built-in Heading styles for chapter titles, insert page breaks between chapters, and never use the Tab key or spacebar to indent paragraphs — use paragraph settings. eBooks "reflow" to fit each reader's screen, so don't fight for exact page layouts; they don't exist on a Kindle.
Amazon's free Kindle Previewer app shows how your file will look on different devices. Run it before you publish. The classic surprise is an image floating somewhere strange or a chapter heading stranded at the bottom of a screen.
Print books need a PDF laid out at your exact trim size — the physical dimensions of the page. A few rules that reject files daily:
Tools that help: Word can do a serviceable print layout if you set custom page size and mirrored margins. Purpose-built tools like Atticus (about $147) or Vellum (about $250, Mac only) do it better, or a freelance formatter charges $200–$600. In our packages, formatting for print and digital is included and done to spec, which is a big part of what people are paying for.
Two covers, again — one for the eBook, one wrapped around the print book.
KDP includes a free Cover Creator with templates. It works, and it looks like it works — template covers are recognizable at a glance, and shoppers scroll past them. Our position, having watched covers make or break the same manuscript: a custom cover is the single best money a self-publisher can spend. If you hire it out, see our book cover design service or budget $300–$800 for a good freelancer.
Our Amazon publishing service does every step on this page for you — editing, cover, formatting, upload — from $699, one payment. You keep 100% of rights and royalties, and nothing publishes without your written approval.
Get your free consultationThis is the bookstore-shelf step: you tell Amazon what the book is and who should find it. It's also the step DIY authors rush, because after months of writing, filling in forms feels like nothing. It isn't nothing. This screen decides whether anyone ever sees the book.
Amazon's royalty rules sound complicated. They're two rules and a subtraction.
Price between $2.99 and $9.99 and you earn the 70% royalty (minus a small delivery fee of a few cents). Price outside that band and you drop to 35%. This is why so many eBooks cost $4.99 and $6.99: the band is where the money is. A $4.99 eBook pays you roughly $3.40 a copy.
You earn 60% of the list price, minus the printing cost. Printing a standard black-and-white paperback costs about $2.15 plus a penny or so per page. Worked example, the one we sketch on calls every week:
Net effect: Amazon keeps its standard 30–40% retail cut plus printing, and the rest lands in your bank account, paid out roughly 60 days after the month of sale. On a $20 paperback, authors typically keep $7–$12 a copy. That math is identical whether you upload the book yourself or we do it for you — we take zero royalty, ever. Color printing is the exception to cheerful math: it multiplies printing cost several times over, which is why children's book pricing takes real care.
One opinion from experience: don't price a first paperback above $19.99 out of pride, and don't price it at $8.99 out of modesty. $12.99–$16.99 is where most first paperbacks belong — low enough to try a stranger's book, high enough to pay you properly.
Before you hit publish, order a physical proof copy. It costs only the printing charge plus shipping and arrives with a "Not for Resale" band. Then read it on paper, cover to cover, pencil in hand.
We've reviewed proofs with hundreds of authors, and the first proof always has something wrong with it. Always. A header on a blank page. A photo darker than the screen showed. Chapter 7 starting on a left-hand page when the rest start on the right. None of it is visible in the online previewer; all of it is visible to your readers. The proof step is where a self-published book becomes indistinguishable from a bookstore book — skip it and readers can tell.
When you approve and publish, the eBook typically goes live within a day and print within about 72 hours. There's no launch ceremony. One quiet morning your book is simply for sale on the world's biggest bookstore — and that moment, our authors tell us, is worth every hour it took.
Here's the piece that changed everything, and the piece most first-time authors don't realize: there is no stack of your books in a warehouse. When someone orders your paperback, Amazon prints that single copy — usually within hours — and ships it. Order three, they print three.
That means no upfront print run, no garage full of unsold boxes, no minimum orders. The old vanity-press model — "pay us $8,000 and we'll print you 1,000 copies" — is dead, and any company still selling it should be walked away from at speed. The only reason to print copies in advance today is because you want them: for signings, church tables, and gifts, you can buy author copies of your own book at printing cost, about $5–$6 for a typical paperback.
During setup, KDP will offer to enroll your eBook in KDP Select. Understand the trade before ticking the box.
About a third of our clients arrive mid-attempt — account open, files half-ready, patience gone. It's nearly always one of the same five walls:
If you've read this far and thought "I can do that" — you probably can, and you should. KDP is genuinely fine for a tech-comfortable author with time, and this page plus Amazon's own help docs will get you there. Plenty of readers of this guide will never call us; it was written to be complete for exactly those people.
Get help if the tech is the wall between you and a printed book, if you've hit one of the five stuck points and lost a month to it, or if you simply value your evenings at more than the cost of the service. Where we fit: from $699, one payment, we do the editing, the cover, the formatting, and every screen described above — and the account, rights, and royalties stay 100% yours, with nothing published until you approve the proof in writing. Start with the bigger picture in our complete guide to publishing a book if you're still weighing paths, or call (229) 518-4453 — a real person, 1pm–11pm ET, seven days.
“I got as far as the cover template and quit for six months. They untangled my half-finished KDP account, fixed the files, and my book was live in two months — under my name, my account, my royalties.”
From the phone at (229) 518-4453, 1pm–11pm ET, seven days a week.
Yes. KDP charges nothing to publish an eBook, paperback, or hardcover — Amazon earns a cut of each sale instead. The costs of self-publishing are all in the surrounding work: editing, cover design, and formatting, whether you do them, hire freelancers, or use a package like ours.
For eBooks priced $2.99–$9.99, Amazon keeps 30% and you keep 70% (less a small delivery fee). For print, you earn 60% of list price minus the printing cost — typically $7–$12 to you on a $20 paperback. Payouts arrive roughly every 60–90 days, straight to your bank.
Not for eBooks, and Amazon gives print books a free ISBN listing the publisher as "Independently published." An ISBN in your own name — about $300 bought direct, $200 through us — makes you the publisher of record and works on every store, not just Amazon.
Once you press publish, eBooks usually go live within a day and print books within about 72 hours. The real timeline is everything before that button: done properly, with editing and a physical proof, plan on two to six months DIY — or about 60 days with us doing the work.
Only if eBook exclusivity is worth it for your book. Select adds you to Kindle Unlimited (paid per page read) but bars your eBook from every other store for 90 days at a time. Good for binge-read genre fiction; a poor trade for memoirs and community books. Print is never affected.
Yes — that's our Amazon book publishing service, from $699 in one payment: editing, custom cover, print and eBook formatting, and the full setup above. You keep 100% of rights and royalties, and nothing goes live without your written approval of the proof.
See how KDP compares to every other route in our guide to how to publish a book, get the full money picture in the publishing costs breakdown, or check what a professional cover involves on our cover design page.