The Kindle to Print Challenge

This is episode 39 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 back to another episode of Author Audience where I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's 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 the Kindle to Print Challenge. Now, this came about because my members in Author Audience Academy often will publish kind of Kindle books first, because that's what I recommend. It tends to be an easier process, it's more inexpensive, it's just easier to learn. But then there's this interest or this need or this desire to then print an actual print book. And so I decided that this month our Take Action workshop is going to be just this, the Kindle to Print Challenge. I'd love for you to join us@all authoraudienceacademy.com you'll be able to get access to this training at any time that you join, but I believe you have a God given message to share with the world. The question is, are you ready to shine?

So 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. This is going to be all about books because we're going to be talking about taking a Kindle book that you already have and transforming it into a print book. So then you're going to have another version, another product, another way to reach your target audience with your message. And print books just open up so much for you. So I know this is going to bring you one step closer to getting your message to more people. So be prepared to shine.

So I'm going to take you through the steps of what I do. I've done this many, many times where I've first published a book as a Kindle book. And then I decide, you know, this book is selling well, it would be a great book to have in print and then I will later publish it in print. And so the very first thing I want you to think about is gathering what you already have. So I'm assuming you already have a book published on Kindle. If not, listen to the first five episodes of this podcast. It contains my training procrastination to publication and will take you through the steps of publishing that Kindle book. So once you have that book published, I want you to gather what you already have have. And I love to organize my book folders in Dropbox in a way that helps me find things quickly and easily. So what I normally do is I normally create a folder for that book, and then I have a folder for the book interior file and a folder for the book cover, and then I will have different folders for print and Kindle. And so that's the way I organize it. You can organize it in the way that works best for you, But I recommend having a filing system because that way it's going to be much easier for you to keep track of everything as you have more different formats. Maybe you decide to do an audiobook next. So then you could have another folder inside that book folder for audiobook. So make sure you gather everything you have and organize the folder, if at all possible, in a way that makes sense for you. So you want to gather your book file, your original book file from Kindle, your book cover. And I also recommend that you have a document, either a text document, word document, something like that, where you have your book description, the categories you used in Kindle, and your keywords, because you're going to be able to reuse the same description and you may be able to even choose similar categories, but that will help you and use similar keywords. So those are things that you've already done, you've already researched, you've already done it. And so, you know, I recommend just gathering those things and having them available. Now, what will you need to then transform your Kindle book into a print book? Well, well, first of all, you'll need to have the interior formatted for print. I recommend that you use a template. I use book design templates, and you can find them at shellyhits.com booktemplates I love their templates because they just make everything look more professional. And yet it's a very affordable way to get your book into print. You will also need a book cover for print. That includes the back cover with a spine. And you'll also need an ISBN. And so those are some of the things that you will need. So step one is I recommend you get your ISBN if you're using CreateSpace, you'll just be setting up a book in CreateSpace. And I walk you through, step by step, how to do this in authoraudienceacademy.com in our Kindle to Print challenge. But basically, you'll start a new book project and you'll have an opportunity then to decide what type of ISBN you want. I do not recommend that you use the CreateSpace Free ISBN. I recommend, at the very minimum, purchasing the $10 ISBN and using your own publishing company name. Now, I've covered this in other episodes in the past, so I'm not going to go into detail about this, but one of the things you want to consider is possibly getting a universal ISBN. You can do so much more with the universal ISBN. It will give you a lot more opportunities with bookstores, with other publishing opportunities. If you use the $10 CreateSpace ISBN, then you are limited to only using that on CreateSpace. So you want to make sure that you know what your options are with the ISBN and make that decision. Step one, Step two is to then get the interior formatted for print. You need to decide on the size. Now, 6 inches by 9 inches is a very common size that you can use. Also 8 and a half by 5 and a half inches. And so you just need to decide what size size do I want? You don't have to use a traditional size. You can do all different sizes. You can have a designer do something custom for you. But if you're using a template like you'll find@shellyhits.com booktemplates, you can go through their different templates. You can see what kind of style you like for the interior and then make sure you choose the size you want. That's going to be very important for also getting your book cover designed. And you can also hire someone to do this for you. You can find people very inexpensively in multiple places, but we give a lot of different recommendations for this in authoraudienceacademy.com where share the exact people we use and you'll get a lot of other information there. Step three is now to format your cover for print. This is where you'll need to know what size your interior is. So if you chose six by nine or eight and a half by five and a half, then that will also translate to the size of your cover. CreateSpace has a book cover.

Calculator so you can actually put in the number of pages you have, and it will actually give you a little template that you can download and be able to use that or send that to your designer that they can use. However, you need to know the number of pages in order to really get the book cover designed correctly with the spine. If you don't know the number of pages, then you're not going to be able to tell the book cover designer what size to make the spine. And that's a very important part of your print book. So you really do need to make sure you have the book formatted, the interior first, so you know how many pages it's going to be. And then you'll give the number of pages and the size based on your interior template or your interior design. You'll give all of that information as well as your back cover copy to your designer. Now you do want to make sure you have print quality pictures. So this is where it can get a little tricky. If you've had a Kindle book cover created and you had it created in a size that was good for Kindle, you know, ebooks, you may not have purchased a big enough picture. Like you need to have a print quality picture. So, so it needs to be what they call 300 DPI. Now, I know this is a lot of details and information, but basically whatever designer you work with, they can let you know if what you currently have will work. Now, if it will, I'd recommend kind of sticking with the same kind of design. And I always recommend when you're working with a designer to get the original Photoshop or InDesign files for your book cover. So hopefully you have that from your Kindle book cover because then your designer can then take that and expand it into a print version of your book cover. If for some reason your Kindle cover and your images are not print quality, you know, it may just be a good opportunity to update your book cover throughout. So, so you could have a new cover design for the print book and then use the front cover and have it cropped down to the size that's needed for Kindle and you can update your Kindle cover at the same time. So no worries, it's all going to work out and you may actually end up with a better book cover in the end. But you will. I really recommend that you keep the Kindle cover and the print cover the same so that if somebody's looking at your book on Amazon and they switch over from a print, the print version to the Kindle version, it's not a disconnect. It's like, oh, yeah, this is the same book but just a different format. So I do recommend you keep it the same. And then finally, step four is you'll publish your files on CreateSpace. Now you can also use IngramSpark, you can also use Vervante. There are many other companies that you can use. I personally use and recommend Create Space. And it's a very, very easy, reliable quality system to Use. Now, there are a couple times that you will want to consider IngramSpark. If your main goal is to get into bookstores, IngramSpark is the way to go because many of the bookstore owners, their biggest competitor is Amazon. And if they see that You've published through CreateSpace, which is an Amazon company, they won't even consider your book. How do I know that? Because I tried with Barnes and Noble and they saw I had a CreateSpace published book. It wasn't even an option. They wouldn't even consider my book. Now, if you are also an author overseas, if you're in, let's say, the UK or in Europe somewhere, you. You may also want to consider IngramSpark because.

You tend to be able to make more on the royalties for those sales overseas. Now, if you're a US author, I highly recommend going with CreateSpace. It's easy, simple, there's not any upfront costs, and they work very smoothly with Amazon and have really low costs for purchasing copies of your book on your dashboard and in your back office. So basically, you'll just upload your PDF file of the interior. Once it is formatted and finished, you'll export it and save it as a PDF and then you'll upload a PDF of your book cover that should have been given to you from your book cover designer. You'll add your description, your keywords, your categories, all of that, and you will click publish. I do highly recommend that you get a print proof. So they do offer on CreateSpace where you can just proof your book online. They give you a PDF and then also an online way to proof it. But I just really recommend taking a little bit of extra time and investing a little bit in the proof copy. You can use the proof copy as a giveaway as something that you use later.

For a reviewer. You can give it to a reviewer, but it's just. And there's just something amazing about holding that print book in your hands. So, so amazing. So I'm gonna take you step by step through every single part of this process. I'm gonna be coaching you, answering all your questions, and we are going to take you through this Kindle to Print challenge. Are you in? Are you ready to do this? If so, I recommend that you join us@authoraudienceacademy.com and if you join as a result of this podcast episode, just email me@shelleyellehits.com and I have a special bonus for you. I will actually send you a coupon to one of these book design templates that you can use to format your book. $57 value. I will give that to you as a bonus for joining authoraudienceacademy.com as a result of this podcast. So just email me, let me know you heard this on the podcast and I'd love to send you that extra bonus.

So what I want to do is just kind of recap. So first you'll need to gather everything you already have from your Kindle book and step one is is to get your ISBN. Step two is to format your interior for print. Step three is to format the COVID for print. Step three and step four is to publish on CreateSpace. Or you can also use companies like IngramSpark or Vervante. I also encourage you to get all the show notes and the resources from Today's episode@authoraudience.com.

That way you have all this information and you can be able to have it as a resource for now or for later. Lights, Camera, Action. Are you ready for this week's take action tip? If you are ready to get your book in to print, I encourage you to go right now and gather everything you have. Create a filing system that makes sense and gather all your files so that you can take that next step. And I encourage you to join us@authoraudienceacademy.com for our Kindle to Print challenge. I am so excited to work with you and to help you give birth to a print book that you can hold in your hands and that you can do so much with. There's so many opportunities that having a print book opens up for you.

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 all we do. In the end, it's not about us, it's all about Him. Now sometimes when I talk about all these details and the different sizes steps for publishing, sometimes it may want to overwhelm you.

But I want to tell you it is.

A system, there is a process and I would love to work with you step by step, give you all the resources, give you all the things you need, show you step by step how to do this. One of the things that I believe God really impressed upon my heart the very first time I published a print book this was in 2008 is the verse from Revelation 12:11. It says and they overcame him, Satan, our enemy, by the blood of the Lamb, which is Jesus, and by the word of their testimony. This is powerful. We overcome our enemy by the word of our testimony. And many times Many of you are sharing your testimonies in your books. You're sharing your stories. You're sharing what God has done in your life. You're sharing something in a way that is able to have an eternal impact. And this is powerful because it helps us and God can use it to overcome the enemy. Obviously, it's through the blood of Jesus. It's through his sacrifice and what he's done for us. But we have such an amazing opportunity to also share our testimony, not only in Kindle format, but in print. Print books can get passed around. They're so many ways that God can use a print book. So if you don't have your book in print yet, I highly recommend it because God can use it in ways that you don't even know is yet possible.

It's my hope and my goal that these episodes are bringing you one step closer to being able to shine and reach more people with your message. I I am so excited to hear the print books that are birthed out of this Kindle to Print challenge. Let me know if you take action on this episode and I'd love to be able to see.

What you've done in the print books you published, but also be able to cheer you on.

I encourage you to download a free copy of my book, self publishing books 101. It goes into detail and has tons and tons of resources about publishing not only print books, but Kindle books and audiobooks. And you can get that book for free@authoraudience.com self publishing.

And if you have enjoyed this episode, would you take just 30 seconds to rate and review the podcast on itunes? This is kind of like a way you can leave me a tip if you have enjoyed the training and you know, it's a way that we can just be able to reach more people and help others be able to get their message to more people. So it means the world to me. Thank you so much if you've already posted a rating and review. But if you haven't, just take 30 seconds and leave that rating and review in my my virtual tip jar and I will 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 Shelley'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.