How to Publish an E-Book on Amazon KDP, Step by Step

Uploading a book to Kindle Direct Publishing takes about twenty minutes. Getting it right takes considerably longer, and almost all of that work happens before you open the upload form. This is the sequence, in the order you should actually do it.

Before you upload: what the platform needs from you

• An Amazon account, with a KDP account created on top of it
• Bank details for royalty payment, in a supported country and currency
• A completed tax interview
• A finished, proofread manuscript in an accepted format
• A finished cover image
• Your metadata decided in advance: title, subtitle, description, categories, keywords

The tax interview is the step most non-US authors get wrong, and it is expensive. Royalties from US sales are subject to withholding tax, and without a completed interview the default rate applied is the maximum. Authors resident in a country with a tax treaty with the United States can usually claim a reduced rate, but only by completing the interview and supplying a valid tax identification number. Do this before publication, not after your first royalty statement arrives short.

Formatting the manuscript

You are choosing between two layouts. Reflowable is the normal choice: the text rewraps to the reader's screen and font size, which is how e-books are meant to behave. Fixed layout preserves an exact page design and only suits children's picture books, cookbooks and heavily illustrated titles. If your book is mostly words, use reflowable.

• Use real paragraph and heading styles rather than manually bolding and resizing text — the styles are what generate the navigation
• Start each chapter with a page break, never with a run of empty paragraphs
• Set first-line indents through the paragraph style, never with tabs or spaces
• Include a linked table of contents generated from your heading styles
• Keep images at a sensible resolution but compress them — file size affects your royalty, as explained below
• Put front matter in the conventional order: title page, copyright page, dedication, table of contents, then the body
• Remove headers, footers and page numbers, which mean nothing in a reflowable book

A clean Word document exported properly is perfectly acceptable. The most common cause of a rejected or ugly conversion is manual formatting that looked fine in the word processor and falls apart when the text reflows.

The cover

A Kindle cover is a single front image at a 1.6 to 1 ratio, with 2,560 by 1,600 pixels as the recommended size, saved as RGB JPEG or TIFF. It must read at thumbnail size, because that is where it is judged. Promotional text, pricing and website addresses on the cover are not permitted.

If you are also producing a paperback, that is a different file entirely: a full wrap covering back, spine and front, where the spine width is calculated from your final page count and the paper type you select. Do not attempt to reuse the e-book cover for print.

Metadata is where discoverability is actually decided

The title and subtitle you enter must match the cover exactly. The description field accepts around four thousand characters and supports limited HTML, so the first two lines matter most — they are what shows before the reader has to press "read more". Lead with what the book does for the reader, not with your biography.

You get two categories at the point of upload and can request additional ones afterwards. Choose specific subcategories over broad ones; a book that is credible in a narrow category is more visible than one that is invisible in a huge one. You also get seven keyword slots, and these are the most misunderstood field in the whole form.

• Use phrases a reader would actually type, not single words
• Do not repeat words already present in your title or subtitle — they are already indexed
• Do not use other authors' names, book titles or trademarks
• Do not use subjective or promotional terms such as bestselling, free or new
• Think in reader language: the problem, the situation, the outcome, not your internal terminology

Pricing and royalty, concretely

There are two royalty options and the choice is constrained by price. The seventy percent rate is available only when the list price falls inside a defined band — currently 2.99 to 9.99 US dollars, with equivalents in other currencies — and it carries a delivery charge based on the file size of your book. The thirty-five percent rate applies at any price and has no delivery charge.

The delivery charge is why file size matters. On a text-only book it is negligible. On an image-heavy book it can consume a meaningful share of each sale, and it is entirely within your control at the formatting stage. Compress your images.

There is also the exclusivity question. Enrolling in KDP Select commits the digital edition to Amazon alone for ninety-day renewable terms, in exchange for inclusion in Kindle Unlimited page reads and access to certain promotional tools. It suits fiction and serial readers, where the subscription audience is large. It usually does not suit a book that exists to support a business, because you lose the ability to sell or give away the file yourself.

Publishing and the first week

• Preview the book in the online previewer and then on a real device — they do not always agree
• Check the sample: the free preview readers see is generated from the start of your file, so a long front matter section wastes it
• Expect the review to take up to seventy-two hours; new accounts sometimes take longer
• Once live, verify the price, categories and description on the actual product page
• Link the paperback and Kindle editions so they appear as one listing
• Set up your author profile so your name links to everything you publish

What happens after that

Publishing is a distribution decision, not a marketing plan. The listing is a conversion page: cover, title, first lines of the description and reviews do the persuading, and the platform will only show it to people who are already looking. Everything that brings those people is separate work — an audience, a mailing list, a reason for anyone to look at all.

Nobody can promise a sales figure or a category ranking, and anyone who does is selling something other than publishing. What you can control is that the book is well made, correctly categorised, honestly described and easy to buy. That is the part worth doing carefully.