I compiled this list as a resource for authors looking for places to advertise their free ebooks online.

Related lists:

Click here to see a list of sites where you can promote free books at no cost. 
Click here to see a list of sites where you can promote discounted books at no cost.

Click here to see a list of sites where you can promote discounted books for a fee.


In some cases, as you can see, I’ve made notes about certain useful-to-know details. If you have additional information about any of these sites, feel free to share it in the comments. It would also be great to hear if you have tried any of them, and how they have worked for you.

Please let me know if you find any broken links or outdated info, or if you know of any paid promo sites for free books that I have not listed. I will try to maintain this list and keep it as thorough and accurate as possible!

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I compiled this list as a resource for authors looking for places to advertise their free ebooks online at no cost.

Related lists:

Click here to see a list of sites where you can promote free books for a fee.
Click here to see a list of sites where you can promote discounted books at no cost.

Click here to see a list of sites where you can promote discounted books for a fee.


In some cases, as you can see, I’ve made notes about certain useful-to-know details. If you have additional information about any of these sites, feel free to share it in the comments. It would also be great to hear if you have tried any of them, and how they have worked for you.

Please let me know if you find any broken links or outdated info, or if you know of any paid promo sites for free books that I have not listed. I will try to maintain this list and keep it as thorough and accurate as possible!

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*Want to save some time? Let me submit your free book to ALL of the highlighted sites for you. This service will only cost you about as much as a cup of coffee! Click here to sign up or find out how it works.

Every once in a while, something comes along that changes things for the better.

And in the world of writers, this is especially welcoming, because we all know just how much sweat, courage and persistence it takes to write a book and then release it into the world. Today I’m pointing you toward a new website which I hope will help writers brainstorm stronger characters, craft deeper, more compelling plots, and teach us how to be more effective with our description so we draw readers in. One Stop For Writers is a collaboration between Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman, authors of The Emotion Thesaurus, and Lee Powell, creator of Scrivener for Windows. This powerhouse online library is filled with one-of-a-kind descriptive thesaurus collections, tools, tutorials and much more, all geared to provide the resources you need to strengthen your prose and write more efficiently.

Want to check One Stop For Writers out?

Hop on over to Writers Helping Writers for their Launch Week festivities (October 7-14th)! If you know Angela, Lee and Becca already, you probably can guess there will be some great prizes, and probably a bit of paying-it-forward too.

I first heard about Books Butterfly a couple months ago on Readers in the Know (an excellent site for authors; it has a handy chart showing dozens of different book promotion sites and what they offer).  I was looking for new places to promote my books, and I hadn’t heard of Books Butterfly before.  I searched online and found very little about it apart from their own website and one conversation on Kboards.  But the little I heard was good, so I decided to give it a try.

 Books Butterfly offers several different packages for authors.  They are unique in that they guarantee a certain number of downloads, depending on which package you buy.  I decided to try the “pure gold” package, shown at right.  It cost $50, and naturally I was worried that it wouldn’t end up being worth it.  After all, that’s a lot of money to pay just to get a thousand people to download a free copy of my book!  Books Butterfly promises that if you don’t end up getting that many downloads, they will refund a percentage of your money based on the percentage of the promised downloads you didn’t get.  So from that perspective, I was confident I would get what I was paying for.  But what I was really wondering was whether all those free downloads and the increased exposure would lead to enough actual sales to make it worth the expense.

 Anyway, I decided to go for it.  I filled out the form on their site and received an email response less than an hour later.  I’ve been quite pleased with Books Butterfly’s customer service and correspondence, so I’m going to include some of the text from our emails back and forth for you to see.  The guy who I corresponded with was Abhishek Singh.

 Hi Annie

thanks for writing in.

A) Your book meets our acceptance criteria. We’ll be glad to run it. It looks lovely and the reviews are among the strongest I’ve seen in Fantasy.

B) We’ve sent you an invoice. It’s Pure Gold Slot. $50 for 1000+ Free Book Downloads. Downloads will be on Date of Promotion and Next Day.

We estimate free book downloads range to be: 800 to 1,500.

C) Please see terms below.

D) Slot will not be run until invoice is paid. 

E) For Free Books, please let us know if the book is permanent free or was permanent free in the past.

F) There is a prorated refund. Refund is required in less than 5% of free book promotion slots. Please see terms below. 

G) Refund does not apply if you are running promotions with other sites. We can only guarantee our own performance – we cannot and do not guarantee results for you if you are running with multiple sites.

We still guarantee 1000+ downloads. However, we cannot and do not guarantee performance of other sites.

******* Terms & Clarifications

Please read the following to get a clear understanding of what happens when we run your book.

*Terms & Details

1) We’ll run your book 2 days in a row.

Dates would be: May 22nd, 23rd.
You’ll get additional sales on 3 days.

Dates of Promotion: 22nd, 23rd.
Date after Promotion: 24th.

IN this case Sales will be 40-50% on Day 1, 40-50% on Day 2, 10% on Day 3.

3) There is a prorated refund for all fixed price slots.

Example: If you buy a Platinum 100 Slot ($100 for 100+ Sales) and get only 75 sales, we’ll refund $25.

Example: If you buy a Pure Platinum Slot ($100 for 2,000+ Downloads) and get only 1,500 free book downloads, we’ll refund $25.

4) Refund does not apply if you misrepresent your book’s sales history. In addition, there is no refund if you don’t disclose a free book is a permanent free book before slot is run. In addition, there is no refund if you don’t disclose that a paid book has been free, or at a cheaper price, in the last 12 months before date of promotion.

5) Refund does not apply if you are running with multiple promotion sites. We can only guarantee our own performance, not that of other sites.

6) We do not track sales or downloads. Free book downloads can’t be tracked. For sales we don’t use Amazon Associate tag so there is no way to track sales. You’ll have to check your KDP Stats. You can also ask us for expected range of downloads and purchase a book promotion slot based on that.

7) Please also read the Terms of Service included in the Invoice and on the Website. Using our service for book promotions constitutes acceptance of terms.

8) For purposes of the Prorated Refund, average sales during the last stretch when you were running no promotions is counted as the baseline. You can choose a 7 day stretch or a month stretch. However, it cannot be a stretch during which you ran a big promotion like Bookbub or ENT. It must be a normal stretch with no promotions. It is your responsibility to let us know if your book gets big sales spikes of 50-100 sales periodically because your mother’s cousin tweeted it or your dog instagramm’ed it.

9) Thanks for getting so far. 98% of authors are great. Unfortunately, there are a small 2% who try to game the system, and try to get refunds illegally. Hence the terms listed above. If you’re in the good 98% of authors, we’ll do whatever it takes to make you have a great promotion with results backed up with a prorated refund.

 As you can see, some of what they said was redundant (that was the case on their website as well), but it all made sense.  I received the invoice separately and paid it, then replied and said that I understood and agreed to their terms.  After a couple more emails back and forth clarifying some of the details, I thought of something else and sent Abhishek this note:

I thought of two more details that might be useful to know for this promotion.  My book, Prince of Malorn, is listed as Book III in the series, but the books can be read in any order, and each one can stand on its own.  If there’s a way you can mention that in the promotion, it might encourage more people to buy it.  Also, another book in the series (Annals of Alasia: The Collected Interviews) is permafree.  It has been for a few months now, so I know it’s not eligible for one of your regular promotions.  But another author mentioned on Kboards that you once listed their permafree novel along with a different one in the same series that they had paid to promote, and it led to increased sales of the other one.  I’m not sure if you would want to consider doing something like that in this case, and I understand if not, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.  The link to the permafree one (for Amazon’s stores in any country) is  http://smarturl.it/AlasiaInterviews.

I was quite pleased when Abhishek wrote back and said:

1) It’s still eligible for our regular promotions. Peramfrees are fine. There’s no time restriction. However, let me just run it for you for free. It’s a novella so it might get just 200-500 downloads.


2) Yes, I’ll mention it can be read on its own.

Wow, they would run it for free along with the other one!  If that isn’t great service, what is?!

 Well, I had my promotion this past weekend.  Prince of Malorn was free from Friday to Sunday, with The Collected Interviews of course being permafree.  Here are my results, including the number of downloads I got on other books.  (All are in the same series except The Collar and the Cavvarach.)
# of Downloads:
Prince of Malorn (free)
P of M (paid)
The Collected Interviews (free)
TCI (paid)
In the Enemy’s Service (paid)
Prince of Alasia (paid)
The Collar & the Cavvarach (paid)
Borrows through KU/KOLL from all books
Friday 5/22
377
0
160
1
5
1
1
0
Saturday 5/23
275
0
148
1
1
0
1
2
Sunday 5/24
137
0
47
1
4
2
2
0
5/25-5/28
4
1
39
0
0
1
2
4
total:
793
1
394
3
10
4
6
3

Sadly, my usual numbers (when I’m not doing any kind of special promotion) are usually just one or two sales or borrows a day from all my books put together.  🙁  So this shows you there was definitely a difference!  

 I was surprised and puzzled about a couple of things.  The first was that I actually got some paid sales on my permafree book!  How did that work?  But I realized that it’s actually only free in Amazon’s US, Canada, and Netherlands stores (and possibly the UK – I couldn’t get pricing info there to show up for me).  So, people must have bought it from other countries, which had never happened before with that book.  The second surprising thing was that somehow there were some free downloads of Prince of Malorn even after the 24th, and I know I set it to go back up to the normal price ($3.99) on the 25th.  Probably it had something to do with the fact that I live in Taiwan, and I’m not sure what timezone my KDP report uses, or whether it depends on the timezone customers are in.

 Anyway, as you can see, I did not get a thousand downloads of PofM, but I did get over a thousand on the two free books put together.  Since the Books Butterfly folks were running TCI for me for free, it would have seemed ungrateful not to include that in the total number and instead ask for some of my money back.

 Deciding not to claim any money back, I emailed Abhishek to share my results and thank him.  Here’s his reply:

 Annie, really glad we could get you those downloads.

I was a bit aggressive with your book because the reviews were brilliant. Normally I would only have done Pure Silver ($25 for 500+ downloads). So really glad to see total downloads were 1,142. Thank you for being gracious and including the downloads of the free novella.

And also happy to hear you got sales of the other books in the series and some borrows.

 My only regret is that I did not make much profit from this, but I did get lots of downloads, and hopefully they will eventually result in reviews and more paid sales of my other books, especially the ones in that series.  So far I have been seeing residual effects in terms of slightly-higher-than-usual sales and borrows numbers, so that’s been nice.  And I did make about $30 on the three days of the promotion, with about another $20 since then, so I’m coming out even.

 Will I use Books Butterfly again?  Honestly, I don’t think so.  It was a pretty good experience, but by comparison, the last time I promoted a free book (In the Enemy’s Service) with Ereader News Today, it only cost me $20 and I got 1,849 free downloads and 18 paid ones in the first two days of my promotion.  But I’m not sorry I tried Books Butterfly this time.  It was worth finding out how it would go, and honestly, fantasy never sells as well as certain other genres.  If you’ve written a romance or a mystery, it may do far better with them than my books did.

 Have you tried Books Butterfly?  Feel free to tell us about it in the comments.  I would love to hear how your experience compares!

(Are you writing/have you written a book, but you’re not sure if it’s actually ready to publish yet? You may want to start by reading my blog post “I Wrote a Book! Now What?” – From Rough Draft to Publication and Beyond in 16 Steps. But if you’re sure your book is ready to publish in paperback form, read on.)
Are you interested in self-publishing your own paperback book on Amazon through KDP Print? (KDP Print is Amazon.com’s print-on-demand publishing service. They used to use CreateSpace, but that is closing up now, and authors’ books are being moved to KDP Print.) Here’s how it works:
1.)    Go to https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/ and log in or sign up.
2.)    Click on “Paperback” under “Create a new title” (see the screenshot below). KDP will walk you through the necessary steps and prompt you to enter the required information. Most of it is pretty basic.
3.) When you come to the “Description” section, take your time and come up with a good one! This should be the same as the blurb on the back cover of your book and will be a major factor in customers’ decisions as to whether or not to buy your book. Click here to read my blog post about blurb-writing resources.
4.) In the “Keywords” and “Categories” sections (see the screenshot below), you can select up to 7 keywords and 2 categories that will help customers find your book. Choose carefully! I recommend this article about selecting keywords and this one about categories to help you make the most effective use of these options. (The one about keywords also mentions a program called KDP Rocket that can help find good ones for you. It’s on the pricey side but may be worth it if you plan to publish multiple books and/or don’t have a lot of time to put into researching good keywords. I have it and can attest that it’s a definite timesaver.)
5.) In the “Print Options” section, KDP will select certain options for you by default (see screenshot below), but you can change them if you wish. Your trim size refers to the physical height and width of your book. “Bleed” can be confusing to first-time authors, but it relates to whether pictures or other designs in your manuscript extend past the margins or not. If you are publishing a picture book, coloring book, or anything with lots of interior art, I suggest choosing “bleed”. (I learned that the hard way when creating my adult coloring book calendar). If your book consists only of text, with perhaps small graphics here and there that don’t stretch close to the edge of a page, “no bleed” will probably work well for you. Make sure all your print options are the way you want them before you publish your book! Some options in your KDP Print settings can be changed later if you decide you want to, but you’re stuck with those print options unless you delete your book from Amazon and start all over again.
6.) Before you come to the “Manuscript” section, you’ll want to make sure your manuscript is totally formatted and ready for publication. Yes, you can always upload a new version later if you need to, but do yourself a favor and make sure you haven’t forgotten anything important. Here are some formatting tips for before you upload your manuscript:
·         Take a look at this useful article with some suggestions for front matter, which every book needs at the beginning.
·         Make sure you have page numbers in your book, starting at 1 from the beginning of the first chapter (or prologue), not from the title page, table of contents, etc. Instructions for paginating correctly can be found here.
·         And you’ll need to make sure your manuscript is properly formatted; check out this article for some helpful instructions with lots of screenshots and videos.
·         You’ll want to make sure you avoid these Top Five DIY Book Layout Mistakes.
·         Widows and orphans don’t belong in a print book! Here’s how to dispatch them if you’re using Microsoft Word. (For other programs, sorry, you’re on your own!). Open the document containing your book.  Uncheck the box that says “Widow/Orphan Control” in the “line and page breaks” section of the “paragraph” menu.  You will need to go through your document and check for widows and orphans manually (because the automatic widow/orphan control can cause other formatting problems).  Widows are when a few words at the end of a paragraph appear as a partial line at the top of a page.  Orphans are when a new paragraph begins on the very bottom line of a page.  Both are considered unprofessional; you can try to get rid of them by deleting unnecessary words in a paragraph, rephrasing a sentence to make it a little longer or shorter, etc.  For orphans, you can use the Enter key to move the paragraph onto the next page, thus ending one page a little above where others end.  However, you should then do the same thing to the facing page so the two pages a reader will see at the same time match each other. If all else fails, you can fiddle with the kerning (making the words and letters in a certain line a little closer together or further apart). You can do this by first highlighting the line or paragraph of text you want to change, then clicking on the “Font” menu and choosing “Advanced”.  Under “Character Spacing”, change the spacing to either expanded or condensed by 0.1 pt.  If that isn’t enough, increase the amount a little at a time until the text fits the way you want it.
When everything seems perfect, save your document as a PDF. If you’re using Microsoft Word, you can follow these instructions, and then upload that to the KDP Print site.

7.) Go on to the “Book Cover” section (see screenshot below) and click “Upload a cover you already have”. Don’t have a cover for your book yet? Take a look at this post on my blog about creating covers; it also includes a list of cover artists for hire. You can also make one right there; just click on the yellow “Launch Cover Creator” button to get started.
8.) At the bottom of the page, click “launch previewer” to see an online preview of how the interior of your published book will look. (It often takes a long time to load, especially if your book contains images, so you may want to grab a cup of coffee or something to read while you wait.) KDP will tell you if there are any errors you need to fix; if so, you must fix them and upload a new version of your document before proceeding. Even if it doesn’t tell you anything is wrong, it’s still a good idea to look through every page in the manuscript to make sure everything else looks the way you want it.  Check for accidental blank pages, widows and orphans, inconsistent formatting, missing or incorrect page numbers, etc.  Make any necessary changes in your document and then re-upload it. You’ll have to go through the preview process again every time you do this.
9.) In the “Territories” section, rest assured that you hold distribution rights to your book in all territories (worldwide rights) unless you’ve ever signed a document giving up those rights.
10.) For “Pricing & Royalty”, the list price is what shoppers will pay for your book. Take a look at the “Royalty” amount at the right to see how much you’ll receive from each sale. For example, in the screenshot below, my book Prince of Alasia costs $9.99, and I receive $2.50 from each copy sold on Amazon.com. “Min. $8.73” means that that’s the cheapest I could make the book, based on how much it costs to print a book of that trim size, page count, etc.) If you don’t live in the United States, you may want to change the “Primary Marketplace” to one that matches your country of residence. For example, if you’re in the United Kingdom, you would select Amazon.co.uk. I recommend enabling “Expanded Distribution”, which makes your book available through other bookstores, libraries, etc. (though you get lower royalties from that than from copies sold directly through Amazon). If you click on “6 other marketplaces”, you can manually change the price in other currencies for shoppers who may view your book on Amazon.fr, for example, if they live in France.
11.) You’re nearly done! I suggest clicking on the link at the bottom of the page to order a paperback proof copy of your book to look over before you make it available to the general public on Amazon. When you’re holding a physical book in your hands, it’s much easier to notice little details that may not be quite right. This Guide to Reviewing Your Book Proof gives some reasons why and some suggestions as to what to check for.
12.) If the proof copy looks good (or if it doesn’t, after you’ve resubmitted your files and received a new proof that does), go back to the KDP Print website and click on “Publish Your Paperback Book”. KDP will email you within 72 hours (though usually it’s under a day) to let you know that your book is available on Amazon.
13.) If you wish to publish your book on Kindle (which I highly recommend!), you might find my other blog post, “How to Prepare and Upload Your Manuscript for Sale on Kindle without Hyperventilating”, helpful.
Many thanks to those whose websites, blogs, and good advice I borrowed from to create this list! I hope their input is as helpful to others as it has been to me.
If you discover any broken links, outdated information, etc. in the above list, I’d appreciate your letting me know so I can keep this information as current and useful as possible.  Thanks!
Having gone through the process of turning a Word document into something that will look good on the screen of a Kindle (and a growing number of other devices) several times now, I know how frustrating it can be.  A big part of the problem is that, although there’s a lot of information about the process out there, much of it is outdated, disjointed, contradictory, overly technical, incomplete, or just plain confusing. 

In my quest to publish my young adult novels and my students’ poetry anthologies (click on the cover pictures in the right sidebar to see the books in question), I struggled to forge a path through all the different sets of instructions I found online. In the end, I decided to take what I had learned the hard way and put together a step-by-step list, including what I consider the clearest and most useful advice from others on how to do each step.  I hope this list will be helpful to others out there!

1.)   Save your manuscript as a Microsoft Word document.  (You can use other word processing programs, but I’m not familiar with how the “Kindlizing” process works with them.  Parts of these instructions are specific to Word.)

2.)   Put whatever “front matter” you want at the beginning of your document before chapter 1.  This usually includes a title page, copyright information, dedication, acknowledgments, and the table of contents (which you’ll learn how to make in step 4).  Each of those should be on a separate page.  Check the books on your shelf at home to see the order in which other authors have placed those items. Here are some great suggestions about front matter.

Click here for suggestions on what to put on the copyright page.

3.)   Format your document properly.  Tabs and other features of a normal Word document often cause strange formatting errors with Kindle; these have to be removed.  Jill Williamson has a useful series of short videos that show exactly how to do this:

Part 1: inserting a picture and making your chapter titles look right


Part 2: formatting page breaks


Part 3: formatting paragraphs


Part 4: “cleaning up” the manuscript


Note: Jill recommends saving your document as a webpage, filtered, right at the beginning.  I recommend doing that only after you’ve completely finished formatting your Word document, because I think things are easier to work with in the Word format. You really don’t need to have a webpage, filtered, until it tells you to create one in step 9.

Note #2: If you want to use any special formatting such as pressing  the “enter” key more than once in a row (I know, that doesn’t sound very special, but trust me), then you will need to do a whole different set of formatting in addition to what’s described above.  See instructions at the bottom of this post.*

4.)   If you want to insert images (pictures, graphs, etc.), follow the instructions here.  (Scroll down to the long comment by Man2010 where he has included detailed instructions and screen shots.)  Note that images need to be jpegs, smaller than 500 pixels wide and 700 high.

5.)   Create a table of contents.  Don’t forget to include your copyright information, dedication, etc. as well as the titles of each chapter.  (Even if your chapters don’t have titles, it’s helpful for Kindle readers to be able to skip easily from chapter to chapter, and it makes your ebook look more professional, so you should still make a table of contents with the chapter numbers.)  Put it near the beginning of your document on a page of its own.  There are several ways to make a table of contents, but what I think is the simplest (and, as far as I know, the only method if you have more than 9 chapters), is explained here.  

Another Important Tip:  When you place your bookmark before the title of each chapter, don’t place it immediately in front of the first word.  Place it on a separate line above the chapter title.  Otherwise, even if you have the title centered on your Word document, it may end up left-justified on a Kindle screen.  

6.)   Create your book cover in a separate document.  I recommend paying someone a flat fee to do the cover art for you, unless you’re artistic enough to do it well yourself.  (I approached a talented high school artist at the school where I teach and offered to pay him a reasonable sum to come up with a cover for me.  I was quite pleased with the results.) Here’s an article listing useful resources if you’d like to create your own; it also has a list of cover artists you can hire.
      Here are Amazon’s criteria for how the cover should be done.  Note that it needs to be at least 625 pixels by 1,000 pixels.

7.)   Go to https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin and sign in or create an account.  Some people recommend keeping this separate from your regular Amazon account if you already have one.  You may also want to create a new email address to use just for issues relating to publishing your book; for example, [email protected].  While you’re at it, some recommend opening a new bank account just for this, such as one that offers free checking with a low minimum balance.  That way it will be easy to keep track of your earnings, and if you ever decide to pay for advertising or other book-related expenses, you can do it all from the same place.

8.)   Once you’ve created/logged into your KDP account, click on “Add a new title”.  Then fill out the info in the “Kindle eBook Details” tab. 
“Description” means a professionally-written back-cover blurb (not just a casual explanation of what the book is about). You should take the time to write a really good one, as this will have a big impact on whether potential customers choose to buy your book. I’ve compiled some useful advice about blurb-writing here on my blog.
For the “Publishing Rights” part, if this is a book you’ve written, you hold the rights.
Before you choose any “Keywords”, I recommend first reading this article about how to pick good ones.
Be as specific as you can about your book’s “Categories”. The more specific you are, the easier it will be for potential customers to find it. If your book is for children or youth, I recommend filling in the optional age and grade range info – again, it will make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for. This article talks about choosing good categories for Amazon.
Before you decide if you’ll release your book now or later (under “Preorder”), you may want to consider how you plan to market your new release. It won’t sell itself, unfortunately! For example, you may want to connect with other authors and readers on social media. Facebook author groups can be a great place to get tips from others about what promotional strategies have worked for them, and even in arranging a blog tour to advertise your new book. Setting up a book for preorder can be helpful in this case, since Amazon will provide you with a preorder link that you can use in any posts you create.
Go on to the “Kindle eBook Content” tab.
When you get to “Digital Rights Management”, experts recommend not enabling it.  Yes, there’s a greater chance that people may obtain your book illegally, but DRM also hinders readers who have purchased it from reading it on multiple devices, and thus may discourage them from buying it in the first place.  Most writers agree that it’s worth it not to enable DRM. (This article explains more about that.)

9.)   If your manuscript is all ready, follow the instructions here to upload your book (if you’re using a PC).  Scroll down to Man2010’s comment, where he says, “TESTING YOUR EBOOK”.  I recommend also previewing the book on your Kindle for PC, as well as on actual Kindles of the different types, along with any other devices you have or can borrow that have the Kindle app.  (The formatting may not always look exactly the way it does on KDP’s previewer, and you want to know ahead of time what customers will actually see and if anything looks wrong.)
If you’re using a Mac, click here for the instructions on how to upload your document to the KDP site.  You just need to read the first part that says, “Creating a Zip File for Images and an HTML Book File”.  However, it says to save your Word document as a webpage, filtered.  Macs don’t actually offer that option, so just save it as a webpage.
In the “ISBN” section, bear in mind that you don’t need one to publish a Kindle book. This article might help you decide if you want to buy one.
When you have uploaded your cover and completed everything else on that page, go to the “Kindle eBook Pricing” tab.
Choose whether to enroll your book in KDP Select. If you choose to do this, you are promising that for the next 90 days, you will not make your book available in digital format anywhere online except Amazon. This article lays out some pros and cons of “going exclusive” with Amazon.
In the “Territories” section, you automatically hold worldwide rights to your book unless you’ve ever specifically sold or given those rights away. 
For “Royalty and Pricing”, here’s an article with some thoughts about pricing your ebook.
In “Matchbook”, your book is only eligible for Kindle MatchBook if you also have it for sale in paperback format. You can choose to make the ebook available for a discount (or even for free) to those who have bought the paperback from Amazon.

10.)  If anything in the above process doesn’t work right for you, or if your formatting seems to be messed up in any way, I recommend visiting the KDP support forum, where people have posted hundreds of different questions and answers.  (“Ask the Community” is the most useful place to look.)  Chances are, someone else will have had the exact same problem, and others experienced with publishing to Kindle have probably already replied with suggestions that will help you too.  If you can’t find the right solution to your problem, just login or register, choose one of the topics under “forum/category”, and then “post new thread” (at the top), where it will let you type in a question of your own.  I suggest you select the option to have it email you when anyone replies.  People tend to be pretty quick about answering on there.

11.)  When you’re done with everything else, click on “publish your kindle ebook” at the bottom. The information and your manuscript will all be sent to Amazon, and your book should appear for sale to the general public on their website within 12 hours.
12.) Make sure you also click on “(your name)’s account” at the top right of the screen and check that you have entered the right bank account info and all the rest. 

13.)  Go celebrate! After all that, you’ve earned it!

*Instructions for Special Formatting:

If you press “enter” twice in a row (like to show that time has elapsed in your story or to leave a blank line between verses of a poem or after a title), the text might look the way you want on a Kindle, but not necessarily on the Kindle application for other devices that some of your potential readers may use.  Don’t ask me why the formatting works differently, but it does!  Here’s how to make it look good across the board:

1.)   Highlight one line or section of your document you want to change to a new format, such as a chapter title.  Then click to open the “styles” menu at the top of your screen in Microsoft Word.  It will show you which one of a list of styles your highlighted text currently uses.

2.)   Click on the little arrow just to the right of the name of that style, and then click “modify”.  A window will open up to allow you to modify the style however you like.

3.)   Give your new style a name, such as “Chapter Title”.  Then select the features you want it to have; for example you may want it centered and bold.  Click on the “format” button at the bottom left, and then click on “paragraph”.  This will open another window where you can adjust the spacing.  If you want a little space after the title of a chapter before the first paragraph starts, change the “spacing after” to 24 pt.  (Assuming you’ve been using size 12 font, this is the equivalent of leaving one blank line after the title.  If you’d like it to have a little more or less space than that, try a larger or smaller number until you’re satisfied with how it looks.) 

4.)   Click “ok” and then “ok” again.  The chapter title that you highlighted in your document should now change to the way you want it.  Go to the next chapter title, open the “styles” menu, and you should see the name of the new style you created.  This time, all you have to do is click on it, and the new chapter title will change to the format you created.  Fix the rest of your chapter titles in the same way.

5.)   You can create as many new styles as you want in this way.  Anywhere that you want to press “enter” more than once or use special formatting like centering, underlining, font size changes, etc., you should use a style.  Unfortunately, it still may or may not look exactly the way you want on Kindle for PC, but your styles should transfer over beautifully to any other device.


Many thanks to those whose websites, blogs, and good advice I borrowed from to create this list!  I hope their input is as helpful to others as it has been to me.  

 Want to publish your book in paperback as well?  Click here to read my blog post on preparing your manuscript for paperback publication through KDP Print.

If you discover any broken links, outdated information, etc. in the above list, I’d appreciate your letting me know so I can keep this information as current and useful as possible.  Thanks!