The Ultimate Amazon KDP Checklist: Publish Without Regrets

Publishing your book on Amazon KDP is fast, but once your book is live, you're fixing problems in public if you haven't done it right before you hit publish. So if you want a KDP Publishing checklist to help you make the most of your book launch on kdp, this video is for you. Hi, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and your host here at Book Launchers tv. Book Launchers is your first choice for all things related to writing, publishing and promoting a nonfiction book today. Got a prep checklist for you to avoid regret and set yourself up for KDP success. Step one get those book files ready. You can write like a pro and still lose readers if you don't have a professional editor. I have three, sometimes four on every book I publish because each editor does a different job to make my books the best they can be. Regardless, I'm not talking about Grammarly or chatty chatgpt they are not enough. You need humans you to need. You need polish. Then you need to make sure your interior file is ready to rock. Make sure it doesn't look like it was formatted by a raccoon using a Word document. My mom was texting me recently because she'd bought a book on Amazon and was disgusted at the interior. She kept sending me all these pictures and said that this is why every author needs book launchers. She quickly wrote a one star review for this book and sent it back asking for a full refund. I took one look and said, well, yep, this book was written by AI and formatted with one of the tools that takes a doc and formats it automatically. It might have been the free KDP tool or something else, but human hands did not get involved or if they did, they were not skilled. Here's the takeaway. Amazon has minimum formatting standards. Meeting them isn't enough if you want five star credibility. So what I'm saying is just because Amazon accepts your file doesn't mean a reader is going to enjoy it. Here's what to check before you upload Consistent font sizes, headers subheaders Body copy should be clean and readable with the same line spaces between each. Margins and gutters must be set up based on trim size and page count. You can use KDP's print setup guide to calculate this properly. Avoid excessive hyphenation, weird line breaks and orphaned headers. Page numbers, chapter openers, front and back matter all need to be properly set up and do include a copyright page. I like Dibbly Create as a tool that will do simple formatting for you. Of course. I have an affiliate because I like them. Book launchers.com dibbly I'll put the link in the description below, but you can also use tools like Vellum or Atticus. Vellum is only for Mac by the way. Or again, my preferred method is hire a pro who knows how to design for print and Kindle. I can't tell you how many times people have worked with graphic designers who are have made beautiful covers and interiors that are not set up properly for ebooks. And it doesn't even look quite right in print. You need professionals or professional tools at the least. Then your cover needs to be properly designed, for sale and for upload. And yeah, a reader can tell if it's not. I love our covers. Can we just take a minute to appreciate how fabulous they are? Yeah, these are just a few of my more recent favorites. Okay, I'm done showing off. Your files are ready. Step two is to make sure you've got all your metadata ready to go and paste into the KDP dashboard when it asks for it. Now, as much as AI and large language models are changing how books get discovered, you need great metadata to help your book get discovered on Amazon. If you want to be found. This step is not optional. So things to have well, you're going to have to do your research. So you have seven relevant keyword phrases. Not too broad, not too niche. You can start with Author Launch Kit, our tool Author Launchkit AI to get your hands on this thing and you can use that to start with a list of keywords that you might want to use and keyword phrases. If you want to go deeper on search, volume and conversion of those keywords, Publisher Rocket is the tool to use for that. Ultimately, don't repeat words that are in your title or subtitle and find the phrases that are going to help your book be found by the readers that you want to to find it. Now if you are going to use Author Launch Kit, it's super simple. Once you have completed the form at the beginning, Author Launch Kit does so much of the thinking for you. You're just going to have to click right here. Boom. And you're going to get your list. If you want to get more phrases instead of two or three word phrases, you can just edit the box at the bottom and voila. New phrase keywords. Then what I do is I can check traffic on them using Publisher Rocket or I can test them out in my KDP account and see how they perform and next metadata that's important is your categories. Ideally, look for ones that have three to five new releases per day for better ranking potential. Again, Author LaunchKit will give you a list, but Publisher Rocket is really the best tool because it has deep, deep data from Amazon to assist you with this. All right, now we need to write a description that is not summarizing your book, but converting the person visiting the page. To be a buyer, to be a reader, we want to hook the reader and in that first line and then use a short paragraph with bullet points to get their attention and then end with a clear reason to buy. Now give them that call to action. Now, Author Launch Kit will do this for you. It drafts a short and a long version of your book description. The short one can be revised for the back of your book and the long one can be used for your sales page. And it is a fabulous copywriter if you have entered good data into the form to begin with. So Author Launch Kit is an ultimate tool for this. It includes keyword, research, metadata, planner, category research, and of course it's going to write your book description and your author bio for you. Now, if you've never uploaded a book to kdp, here's a quick look at what your dashboard looks like. All right, you see this big button, this big yellow button? You'll click there, click Create, and then choose if you're starting with an ebook, hardcover, paperback, and then get to work entering that information in. It's pretty straightforward if you've done this prep checklist, but to give you a sense of what you need to have ready, of course you need to know your name, your title, subtitle, and then of course, if you are giving credit to contributors, which some people might if they're an editor or ghostwriter, to be completely transparent, it's not something I would do unless I was required by a contract. And usually the contract would be a lower priced contract in exchange for contributor recognition and credit. Believe me, two years from now you may no longer want to be tied to that person. So generally speaking, I wouldn't do it. Unless you have to. Of course, you have to have your description and your keywords. And if you aren't sure about anything, what it is, there's blue hyperlinks along the way so you can get some support and answers. The newest thing on the KDP dashboard as I film this at the end of July, is this checklist of accessibility features. It's basically asking if the images are accessible. What does that mean? Well, images are visual information. So to benefit customers who cannot see the images in your content, including alternative text, the alt text for meaningful images in your content screen, readers will describe them. To a blind reader, a meaningful image is exactly what it sounds like. It's something that conveys meaning to the reader. Basically, you have to consider whether the content of your book would make sense if the reader couldn't see the image that you have on that page. An alternative text is a short description of the media that is focused on that page. So if visual elements don't have a text, alternative customers with low or no vision or will not have access to this information. While images can have text alternatives that assistive technology users consume. Where possible, we recommend authors use real text rather than an image of text. Anyway, it defaults to you don't know. But knowing this is something that is coming up and will be requested, you may make different design choices. Now it's something we've started to look at within our processes at Book Launchers, and we're starting to make adjustments to what we do and what we recommend to our authors so that our authors can increase the accessibility of the books that are getting published right now. All right, once you set this up, you got to know your pricing, so check out books that are like yours to see what it'll be priced at in each format. I've got a different video on this channel that goes deeper into pricing considerations and setup, so I'll link to that one in the description below, including one on how to price for international markets. Now you want to set your launch date and confirm you have the rights to publish and go through a few other questions and it will take you step by step through those. Now you're ready for step three for print. Order your print proof and then you can hit Publish for your launch date. Now you're ready to claim your Author Central page which if you're new to this, add a high quality author photo, a detailed biography and links to your website and social media. If you have books already, sync all your books for cross promotion and update your bio to reflect these new books. Any awards or recent experience that you have since your last book came out. So now you have your book on Amazon. Well, that felt like work, but the real work begins. It's time to start gathering your reviews. Shoot for 25 plus in the first month. Use services like get authentic book reviews, get books reviewed Book Sirens, Book Sprouts, Run Goodreads giveaways, Ask everybody you know to review your book, then track your rank and tweak metadata every 30 to 60 days. Pick pitch yourself for podcasts guest blogs, niche media outlets, Start running Amazon ads. Promote your book on platforms like ebook fairs if you're interested in that. Then of course activate your other marketing plans. And if you're wondering what else you should do, chat with Julie the Bookbot, which is inside of your Author Launch Kit. Let's say, for example, now you're wondering, should I have enrolled in Kindle's KDP select to run a Kindle Countdown deal? You can ask Julie the book bought that. Or maybe you're looking for other book promotion strategies or you want to run some ideas or pitch letters. Buy the bot. She's there for you. Now, besides getting Author Launch Kit, which I think should be step one, here's your steps. Number one Professional editing, then interior formatting and of course a great cover keyword research which is optimized metadata and a book description ready to sell your book, get your print, proof, publish and of course make sure you've claimed your book pages on Amazon Author central and then you're over to reviews and promotion. Now you're a KDP pro. Go check your book on Amazon and then share your book title below so we can find it on Amazon and see what you did. By the way, commenting the day a video is released gets you entered to win some noboringbookswag. Sometimes we give away shirts, mugs, journals and books. I can't wait to see you on the next video.