HELLO!

My name is RJ Zarkani, I recently self published my book on Amazon with zero money down!

Stranger Paths, The Magic in The Madness

Poetry Collection

Hope this post helps you bring your book to life!

If you are wondering “Can I do this?”

Yes you can!

Here’s a list of what you need to get started

• Book Title, and subtitle (if you wish)
• Compelling content (longest part!)
• Book cover design (Get creative)
• Advertising ideas (can use social media, google, Amazon, Kindle…)
• Decide on book size and dimensions
• Get started on publishing !

You can always hire someone on Fiver or other websites like Fiver to help with editing & book cover design

What I did:

• I compiled my poems and divided them to different chapters using Microsoft Word
• I edited my own content and got my boyfriend to double check it
• I used one of my own photographs as a book cover
• I used Photoshop to edit the cover, using KDP’s book cover template

Now you are ready to PUBLISH!

• Go to www.kdp.com and set up an account

  • (This is not an ad for KDP, not getting paid for this)

• Watch the video, it’s so helpful!
• Sign in
  • You will see this
    • (without my info, hopefully)

You can choose to create a Kindle eBook, Paperback, or BOTH! I did both as you can see above

Clicking on on the “+” to the eBook or Paperback you will see a form that you need to fill out

Description is so important! Having a great book with no or little description is tragic. Readers will never know why they should invest in your book, out of the million books on Amazon. Give them a taste of what they’ll be buying, entice without giving it all away! I suggest looking up other books on Amazon and seeing their description. Mine is seen below:

Keywords!

When choosing keywords, make sure to be specific and to not reuse words that are already in your book title, description, or category (these are already used by Amazon to direct readers to your book). Keywords will help readers find you when they search Amazon. The category selection will help readers find you as well!

Keywords tips: go on Amazon and write what you would lookup to find your book, let’s type “books” and see what pops up, you can get an idea of what is frequently searched on Amazon

Example:

My book is a poetry collection so I also searched “poetry”

You can also search the category of your book and see what pops up

Use this tip as a general starting point. You can edit your keywords later!

Click save as draft if you need to come back to finish it later!

That’s all for today’s post, stay tuned for the next post!

Best of luck on your new adventure!

Time to make your dreams a reality 🙂