Book Cover Design, Amazon for Authors, and eBook Formatting for Kindle

This is Episode four of Author Audience.

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message, create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Welcome to Author Audience where I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's to time. Time to let your light shine. Today I'm rolling out the red carpet and inviting you to join me as I share all about book cover design, optimizing Amazon for Authors, and about ebook formatting in this episode. My name is Shelly Hitz. I'm the owner of Author Audience Academy where my members are successfully publishing new books almost every day and some have even become number one Amazon best selling authors in their categories within days of publishing their books simply by following my proven system. I believe you also have a God given message to share with the world and I'm passionate about helping you share that message through books, online marketing and more. The question is, are you ready to shine? It's time for this week's Center Stage Spotlight Training. This is where I share training and strategies to help you grow your business or ministry through writing and publishing books, marketing online and creating products and services to sell on the back end. Now I'm not just about books, but so much more. I'm here to help you connect with your audience in the best way possible. Today's podcast episode is number four titled Book Cover Design, Amazon for Authors and Ebook Formatting for Kindle. This is part four of my Procrastination to Publication series. So this so if you've missed any of the previous episodes, make sure you go and get them. And every episode is on my blog with the full transcript, links and resources for you. I'm so excited for you to cross that finish line and be able to publish your book. And I know this episode is huge in helping you get one step closer to connecting with your audience, getting your message to more people through Kindle Publishing. So be prepared to shine.

The fourth step is book cover design and there are several options that I want to share with you to have you consider. The first option is do it yourself. I really don't recommend this for many of you unless you have a background in design and unless you really know how to use the graphic design software, I really don't recommend a do it yourself option. Now if that's the only thing that you can do to get your book done, then by all means do it. But for most people, investing even a small amount will be worth it. So you can start With a template. We offer templates at Covermania that you can check out. Also, canva.com offers free templates you can start with. You can use one of their ebook templates and start with a template and then add your picture and text from there. You can also hire a designer. And what I recommend doing is find covers that you like on Amazon and then click the look inside feature and look at the credits and see if they've written a credit to who was their designer. And a lot of times they will, they'll put an email address or a website so you'll see who the designer was for that cover. If you liked that cover, there's a very good chance that you would like that designer's work. So you can check out that designer and and go from there. Another website you can check out is fiverr.com @fiverr, you can search for ebook cover designers and you know, many of them will design a cover for you for as low as $5. However, this can be hit or miss. So you may want to hire several and then choose the one that you like the best. With Fiverr, what I found is you have to be very specific with what you want, otherwise you may not get, you know, something really good. But probably my biggest recommendation, if you have the funds, is to use 99designs. At 99designs, what you'll do is you'll say what your project is and then a bunch of designers will give you ideas. That way you have a bunch of different ideas, especially if you have no idea what you want to do for your book cover. And then you can choose the one that you like the best. It's fairly inexpensive, a couple hundred dollars, and it really allow you to have a professional product with not, you know, a huge investment for your book covers. One of the biggest things I want to remind you is that you need to use images on your book covers that you can legally use. What I mean by that is either they are your own images that you have yourself taken that you hire a photographer and you have an understanding and agreement. Maybe you have a contract between them and you that you can use those commercially or you buy stock photos. A stock photo will typically allow you to sell so many books for, you know, their standard license with that cover image on it. So you really just can't be searching on Google and finding an image and putting it on your book. You need to have one that you can legally use. For stock photos, I recommend Fotolia or Dollar Photo Club. If you just need a couple pictures here and there. Use Fotolia. It's pay as you go. However, if you use a lot of images in your social media, on your blog and your books, I recommend the Dollar Photo Club. It's $10 a month and you get 10 downloads for print quality images. That is really a good deal. If you've bought print quality images on Fotolia on a pay as you go site, you'll know that that is a really, really good deal. Sometimes I'd be paying up to $15 for a print quality image, whereas now I can Download it for $1. At Dollar Photo Club you have to pay a $10 per month fee, but to me it's been much worth it and I use those photos all the time. Your book cover should also look good as a thumbnail on Amazon. Oftentimes they will promote your book in different ways and they'll show the thumbnail version of your book. So you should be able to see your title, should be able to read it decently at the small.

Overall cover should just look good at the thumbnail version. I really recommend too that you get some feedback so you know if you can find a Facebook group where there are people, other business owners or authors or post it on your social media. Say these are my three options. What do you think? You can get some feedback. Send it to family and friends. I usually get feedback from a few people and my husband is one of them, my business partner is another one, and I have another couple colleagues that I'll go to. There's several times I have shown the COVID that I just thought was so good to somebody and they were like no, I don't think that's it. And I was like really? And I didn't necessarily want to change it. But then in the end I was so glad that I did because the COVID was so much better in the end. So it is important to get feedback from people who really know graphic design or from your target audience. Then for Color Schemes, a fun site I like to go to to get ideas for color schemes. You can use these for even your blog or your social media graphics. It's just design-seeds.com and you can then choose a color scheme you like and give that to your designer as well. So those are some options for your book cover and definitely keep taking those steps one step at a time and you are now over halfway through the process. You're getting so close to the finish line. Now the next step Step to prepare for publication. These are the steps that you'll need to do in order to publish Your book on Amazon, you want to look up keywords for your book. So you get seven keywords for Kindle and five for print. And there's so much I could go into and I could talk to you about keywords, but I basically want to just encourage you to do some keyword research. You can use Google.

Keyword Planner, or I do recommend a software, Kindle Samurai. It makes the process of researching Kindles, researching keywords so much easier. And so I definitely do recommend considering that. So once you've chosen your keywords, the next thing to do is to choose your categories. You get two categories for Kindle and two categories for print. What I recommend doing is simply going through the Kindle store and looking at books similar to yours and seeing what categories they're in. And I usually recommend choosing one category that is bigger, so there's more competition in it, but there's more people that are looking in that category and then one category that is smaller. So that would mean there would be less books available in that category, but it would be easier to rank for that category. If you want detailed description on how to find the keywords and the categories, I recommend checking out the resources that I have for you. I've written a book, Marketing youg Book on Amazon, which you can get, or I have a full video course, Amazon for Authors. You can also then start writing out your book description. You want to draw your readers in. You want to maybe ask them some questions or put your most powerful information and benefits in that description. If you'd like help writing your book description, I recommend the training Amazon Advantage. And then you prepare your front and back matter. Now your front and back matter. Once you have this written, you can use this over and over again. And so you want to decide how you want your front matter and back matter to look. And one thing that I did is I just looked through other books that I had on my bookshelf or on Kindle using the Look Inside feature. And I just noticed what was the order they had in their books. And so you can do that. And then what you do is you create a template for the other books in your series. One thing I highly recommend including in your front matter and your back matter is a call to action to have them sign up for a free gift to your email list. Now, I would recommend this free gift be as closely related to the topic of your book as possible. And so if you can create a different free gift for each book, that would be great. For instance, for this book that I've written procrastination to publication. The free gift is this video and mind map. It's very, very closely related to the book and actually I'm this video and mind map to write the book. I'm speaking the book and I will have it transcribed. So I'm using my own system and techniques that I recommended to you to actually write this book. And so in the front and back matter, make sure to include a call to action for your email list as well as at the back I like to include a little blurb asking for reviews. And like I mentioned before, we have several resources for you if you want to go deeper into this. I recommend my ebook Marketing youg Book on Amazon as well as the video training Amazon for Authors. So those are resources there for you. So now we're on step six. We have the final corrections and edits. If you've used a professional editor, you'll want to accept or reject the edits from the editor. Go through your document and accept or reject those and then I usually recommend doing just one final read through. By this time you'll be getting pretty tired of your manuscript, but you're almost done. This step also includes the formatting. I have my own Kindle template that I use and I've used this for all of my books. It just works really well for me and what I tend to do is if I'm writing a book and typing it out, then I type it directly into the Kindle template. However, if I'm having it transcribed then I make sure that when I copy and paste it into the template, I copy and paste it as well plain text and strip out any formatting so it doesn't mess up my formatting. Kindle will be able to read hidden formatting or you know, it may, you know, mess it up if if you have something weird happen and so you do want to make sure that you know you're using template in the way it was intended. I also recommend Book Design templates. They have both ebook and print templates that you can use and then you can hire someone. You can hire someone for as inexpensively as $49.

Lights camera action. Are you ready for this week's Take Action tip? I covered so much in this episode.

But what I want you to focus.

On for the Take Action tip is to make sure you spend time researching the best keywords. Set a timer for 30 minutes and.

Do some research to make sure you.

Are getting more visibility on Amazon. Download the free PDF report no opt.

In required to find out more about how to do this manually on Amazon.

Or how to use the software I like to use. You can download this PDF@authoraudience.com Amazon keywords.

Also make sure to get all the.

Show notes and resources from Today's episode@authoraudience.com 4 that's the number 4 authoraudience.com 4 Before we end, I want to give you a backstage pass in this week's Godly Gains segment, which is all about keeping Christ at the center of what we are doing as authors and entrepreneurs. In the end, it's not about us.

It'S all about Him.

But it's so easy to get wrapped up in the publishing of our books, the ranking of our books, how many books we're selling, how we're getting promoted online, and a verse that God was really using to speak into my own heart today comes from 1st Peter 5:5:6 and I wanted to share it with you today. It says God opposes the proud but.

Gives grace to the humble.

So humble yourselves under the mighty power of God and at the right time.

He will lift you up in honor.

You know, it's all about God's timing and it says at the right time he will lift you up. However, we have to be humbled underneath him and not allowing our pride to take over. When we're humbled under him, when we are trusting in his timing and we are trusting that he is leading and guiding us, he will lift us up at the right time and he will give us the openings and the connections and the things that we need.

When we're following him, it may not.

Always look like what we expect. And so I just encourage you to lay aside your expectations and humble yourself under his mighty hand and trusting in his perfect timing today. It's my hope and my goal that these episodes are bringing you one step closer to publishing your Kindle book and being able to reach more people with your message. So excited to see you cross that finish line. It's time to make it happen. I encourage you to keep taking the next step and never, never, never give up. I'd love for you to join me on my next live webinar.

We have a ton of fun and.

There'S always actionable content that you can apply right away. Sign up@authoraudience.com webinar and don't miss next week's episode where we'll be wrapping up the Procrastination to Publication series. This particular episode next week will be all about publishing your book on Kindle, that final step to crossing the finish line. So I'll see you next time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelly's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.