Breaking Orbit: How to Write, Publish and Launch Your First Bestseller on Amazon Without a Mailing List, Blog or Social Media Following (Serve No Master Book 4)
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Many people ignore the free gift at the start of the book. If you format incorrectly, Kindle will automatically skip your free gift page and never even show it to your readers! As a reader, you may decide that you have no interest in a free gift from an author until you see if they are any good. Who wants a free gift from a book that stinks?
Giving people a second chance to take action after they have seen the content you can deliver will allow you to build a relationship with this larger group. These people will be your biggest fans. You turned them from skeptics into believers.
Share Your Life
You need an author page with links to all of your social media profiles. Ideally, these links will all use the same naming convention. If you search for “Serve No Master” online, you will find my blog, podcast and all my social media profiles on the first page. Consistency makes it easier to engage with your readers.
We started off creating your website and social media names to prepare for this point in the book. You may have noticed that my social media content is connected to my brand, not my name. My name is extremely common. There are other Jonathan Greens out there who are far more successful and talented than I am. Having people search for me in an ocean of people with the same name is annoying. Just getting a friend to find me on social media by searching my name doesn’t work.
Additionally, this is a core brand for me. I create books, products, podcasts and more under this brand. It’s memorable and catchy. For my pen names, I simply use their author name for everything. If you want to create an entire brand around a pen name, that’s viable. It just takes a little more work at the front to put everything together.
What Else You Got?
You also want a page with pictures of other books that you have written. Let your reader know that there is more waiting for them and they don’t have to wait for your next release; it’s already here.
Some people fill the back of their books with reviews and testimonials. I’m not a big fan of this personally. If someone has reached the end of your book, you don’t need to tell them how great it is. They already know if they liked it. Reviews and testimonials are useful before someone buys your book, not after they read it.
A really smart move is to include the first chapter in your next book. This will increase the odds of them purchasing and reading the next book in your series. The more reasons you give the reader to stay engaged with your books the better.
Get Reviews
The final experience of your book in Kindle is crucial. The very last step is to appeal to your readers to leave a review or at least a rating. As an up-and-coming author, you know how tough it is to get reviews. I’m going to share a few of my most powerful techniques later in this book, but getting readers to take action at this point is crucial.
Some authors write a very long appeal and encourage the readers to fire up their computer, head over to Amazon, find their book listing and then post a review. This process takes far too many steps, and nobody liked your book THAT much.
At the end of a Kindle book, Amazon displays a very special page. The contents of that page can make or break you as an author. At the top of the page, there are five empty stars. If you can get a reader to simply click the fifth star before leaving your book behind, you will fly up the rankings.
Asking people for an easy action will get you much better results than asking for a difficult one. Once someone has left the star rating, it is much easier to later get them to write a deeper review, and I’ll show you how to do that later.
For now, you want to end your book with an appeal for your readers to give you that crucial five-star rating.
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Tools of the Trade - Formatting
There are hundreds of schools of thought on formatting your book for Amazon. I’m not an expert on every single method, but I have tested many different methods and found the process that works the best for me. I use a Mac for all of my work, so some of my software is Mac-only. On my website, I have some walkthroughs from one of my assistants who uses a PC, showing how to format on PC as well.
There are loads of tools out there that I find difficult to use or overly complicated. You may find that you prefer a different workflow, but these are the tools and the process that I use when formatting my books.
Vellum
My favorite formatting tool is Vellum. I can import my book into Vellum after the editing process is complete. The organization is simply beautiful, and it’s so easy to make any necessary changes. I can drag and drop sections to move around the order as needed. The software provides a preview of every different Kindle model, so you can see how your book will look to your customers.
Eventually you are going to release bundles and collections of your books as a revenue booster. When that times comes, Vellum is a dream come true. You can drag pages between different projects. Assembling and formatting your collection will take only five minutes. Once you create the perfect author page with your social media links, you can just drag it into your other books.
Vellum exports into multiple formats, and I love it. It is how I will format this book and all my other books for the foreseeable future. As of now, this software is Mac-only, but perhaps in the future they will release a PC version.
I have used a lot of other formatting tools in the past, but I have already taken all my older books and reformatted them using Vellum.
My favorite thing about Vellum is the development team. When I first used the software, it couldn’t format bullet points. If you had bullet points in your original document, you could copy and paste them into Vellum, but there was nothing native. I emailed support and within a few weeks, they pushed out an update that included incredible native bullet points.
Very rarely does a software developer respond so quickly. It’s nice knowing that any changes or ideas I have in the future will get added to the software.
You can play around with the program for free.
The pricing structure is a little strange. You don’t pay until you export your book into the Amazon-friendly format.
It’s thirty bucks to export one book, a hundred bucks for a pack of ten, or two hundred bucks for unlimited. Releasing books is my business, and that two hundred dollars has saved me hours and hours of work and stress. There are ways to format your book without spending any money, but I find them challenging.
Scrivener
I love Scrivener. There are loads of authors who swear by Scrivener’s ebook export option. You can bypass the need for Vellum and have Scrivener output a file in the correct format for Amazon. I don’t know if I’m just missing something, but my exports from Scrivener always have problems. They are usually ninety percent of what I want, but then I still need to go in and clean up things.
There are loads of great exporting tutorials online, and I have tried to follow them, but I just couldn’t get it quite right. For me, the final presentation is everything, and I find exporting from Scrivener directly into an ebook format too difficult.
I have recently switched to using Scrivener exports to create my paperback version, however. For a very long time, I copied each chapter from Scrivener into a Word template. It was a tedious process but generated professional quality books. Recently, I start exporting from Scrivener using a particular paperback book formula. I’ll have to show you on my website because there are a bunch of key little steps in the process that require screenshots or a video walkthrough. If you miss one checkbox, your export will be unusable.
I export into Word format and do my final editing in Word. Once the Word formatting is perfect, I will save as a PDF and upload that to CreateSpace for my final version.
If you purchase only one tool from everything I mention in this book, go for Scrivener. The developers don’t have an affiliate program, so I don’t get a penny for the recommendation. But it’s the ultimate workhorse. You can learn to format your books into any format you need using this tool. It just takes a little work to learn the process.
&nb
sp; Calibre
Calibre is another excellent formatting tool. This tool is free, it’s open-source, and it’s updated several times a week. I used Calibre to format my very first book, and I have some walkthroughs that I will email you showing how to use this tool to format.
I mainly use it to convert books between multiple formats, from EPUB to PDF to MOBI and back. It’s very powerful and can generate the final file you will upload to Amazon. I would love to share a more extensive explanation with you here, but I don’t want to be disingenuous. I haven’t formatted a book with Calibre in a very long time.
Formatting a book with Calibre is a little harder than Vellum, but you may find it easier than going straight from Scrivener.
Calibre works on both Mac, PC, and Linux.
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Formatting for Kindle
Knowing the correct formats to upload is very important. When I first started working with Amazon, I was very frustrated and considered the formatting part of the process the most daunting.
It doesn’t have to be hard. Once you know what Amazon wants, the process is quite smooth.
You cannot upload a .docx Word document to Amazon. The format is not compatible with the Kindle software. You need to generate a .mobi, .epub, or a .zip file. Those are the two formats that work best and will give you a great-looking book.
I currently upload my books to Amazon’s Kindle platform using .mobi exports from Vellum, but in the past I uploaded many books using the .zip format. Both will maintain your book structure and look great when you check in the Kindle preview tool.
Pay Someone
You can always pay someone else to format your book. With most people you pay to format your book, they will give you back an uneditable version. I hate this. You write your book, pay someone to format it for you and then you launch the book. A week later you get an email pointing out a single typo. If you want to correct that typo, you have to correct your copy of the book and then send that file to the formatter and pay them all over again.
The last time I tried to hire a formatter, it ended with me in a rage and a full refund. He made some mistakes in the formatting and demanded that I pay double to fix them. He could have simply emailed me the editable file to let me fix it myself, but he refused to do that.
I do use professionals when I want to upload a book to Smashwords. That’s where you upload a book that you want to be permanently free. Their formatting algorithm is baffling to me. So, I hire a professional.
My books are fluid and change over time. I will update this book dozens of times over the next ten years as technology changes and Amazon adapts. I want to keep this book relevant. Paying someone else every single time I want to update or make a small change is a nightmare. The cost would become prohibitive, and I don’t want to have any factor weighing against giving my readers the best experience possible.
There are full-service companies that target new authors. They charge from a few hundred to a few thousand bucks. Some of them even take a percentage of your sales revenue. As far as I’m concerned, they’re gouging every single person.
If you really can’t handle formatting yourself, hire someone on Fiverr to do it rather than dealing with one of these nightmare houses. They will charge you hundreds of dollars for ten bucks of work, and their final product is never that great.
I know this is a burgeoning industry, but so far nothing I have seen has impressed me. Offering to format your book and then upload it for you is ridiculous. You can learn how to do all of this in less than an hour. It’s not worth throwing away hundreds of dollars that would be far better spent on marketing campaigns later on.
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Formatting for CreateSpace
For CreateSpace, where you will upload your paperback version, you can upload a Word file. The problem is the way Word files are formatted. They depend on the fonts inside of the recipient's computer. If your book uses a font that is not native inside CreateSpace, your upload will look weird. It is better to convert your book into a PDF format and upload that to CreateSpace. Your fonts will be preserved, and the book will look as you intended.
I always upload in PDF format so that my fonts are locked in and my positioning cannot be changed. If the program misreads your Word file, you can end up with a page count shift. Just moving one sentence from page seven to the top of page eight can cause a domino effect that turns your entire book into a train wreck. Word has a save as PDF option, so there is no reason not to do it.
Scrivener Export
Right now I export the final edit of my book using the “paperback compiler” tool inside of Scrivener. I export into Word format rather than PDF, however. I always find that something went wrong in the export and that I want to make some changes before the book is perfect in my eyes. Usually I do something wrong with the page numbers, the headings or the footers. I also prefer to build my table of contents inside of Word.
These are probably problems that are unique to me, but I want to be fully transparent with you. You can master the Scrivener export and push out a PDF directly without needing Word. I’m just not at that level yet. I like doing my final little tweaks in Word.
Before you can export from Scrivener, you have to start setting up your book in CreateSpace. Amazon allows you to choose different book sizes. A book that is 5x8 inches will be different from a book that is 6x9 inches; the pages will be different sizes. Once you know your final trim size, you can tell Scrivener to export the correct dimensions.
I like this process, and it’s the fastest way I know to prep a book for CreateSpace.
Resolution Requirements
I mentioned it earlier, but it bears repeating. Your images for CreateSpace must be 300 dpi, or they will look terrible in your printed book. Most images for the web are only 72 dpi.
When you upload a book with inferior images, CreateSpace will yell at you. You can expect a lot of warnings and flashing red exclamation points. If you try and push your book through despite these warnings, their manual reviewer might still stop your book.
Here is the best way to increase the dpi of an image: get the largest version of the image you can find, place it inside your book in Word, and then shrink it by dragging on the corners. As you shrink the image, the dpi increases. If you want to get more technical, head over to my website.
ISBN
Do not pay for an ISBN. This is another scam that people fall into, and they pay anywhere from ten to hundreds of dollars for one of these numbers. Amazon will give you a free one during the CreateSpace upload process. There is absolutely no benefit to getting your ISBN from another source.
Interior Template
Once you pick the trim size for your book, you can download a template for your final book file. I used these templates for a very long time and only recently switched to using Scrivener export. Amazon will provide a ten-chapter Word file with demo filler placed into each chapter.
This makes it very easy to copy and paste each chapter into your book without messing up the formatting. If you are having trouble with the other formatting methods, this is the easiest and cheapest way to do it. You don’t need any technical expertise.
When you copy in your text, make sure you use “copy and match formatting.” This will convert your text into the font and size of the template.
Cover Template
I order my first cover designs long before I finish writing the book itself. I have already received the first three designs for the cover of this book and requested some revisions to get to that perfect final version that you saw before you made your purchase.
When you create a physical book, the page count determines the thickness of your book. The spine of your book gets bigger as the book gets longer. If you don’t know the page count, then you don’t know how thick your spine will be, and therefore you can’t create the cover yet.
Once you have your front cover, you can wait on formatting your final CreateSpace cover until you have finished and uploaded the interior content.<
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Amazon generates a new template size for every additional twenty pages in your book. A book with twenty pages gets the same templates as a book with thirty-nine, but at forty you get a new template.
Creating Your CreateSpace Cover
There are two main ways to generate your CreateSpace cover: you can pay your Fiverr designer a few extra bucks, or you can do it yourself. I tend to do it myself because I like to make additional changes down the line.
You take the appropriately sized cover template from CreateSpace and open it with Photoshop or Affinity. Take the cover for your Kindle book and drag it over the front cover spot in the template. You may have to resize it a little bit, but the dimensions will match.
Now you just need to add your spine and back cover. You can either use a template or create these parts from scratch.
As an additional bonus for joining my mailing list, I will send you $67 worth of templates that I paid extra for the rights to. These are the EXACT templates I use to make my paperback covers.
The Uploading Process
Uploading a book to CreateSpace is confusing. You may have noticed that many independent authors only have a digital version of their book. They are intimated by the paperback process, don’t think they will make sales anyway, and then leave a great deal of money on the table.