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25 Awesome Tools For Authors and Self-publishers

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You could be a magazine editor, copy writer, blogger, author, poet, song-writer, self-publisher or a creative writer of any kind.

All the tools we’ll now see are going to benefit you in many ways!

1. Yarny

The first one we’re going to see is called Yarny which is an ideal software for fiction-authors.

  • First, create a free account so whatever you write gets saved and synced to the cloud.
  • Then name your novel – here you could also give yourself a goal of writing a specific number of words and track it!

We can start writing our chapters on the left side of its screen, and those are called as snippets in Yarny. These snippets could then be reordered if you decide to change the order of your writings by dragging and dropping.

You could also create a group and combine a set of snippets by clicking at the icon given in the bottom left corner of the tool. The ideas for people, places, and things can all be stored on the right panel, and organized by tags.

This tool also saves different versions if you decide to discard and revert to older plots. Once done, download your work by clicking on icon given at the bottom by choosing the format you want. It also offers different themes to suit your mood.

Did I tell you that Yarny is totally free!

2. iAWriter

iAWriter promises a distraction-free interface to let our thoughts flow on to the screen. It supports Markdown formatting, and we can choose to gray out all the words except the sentence that we are currently writing. They call it the ‘Focus mode’.

This software also highlights different parts of speech in different colors.

While this offers a paid version, there is a trial that you definitely want to try and even buy this which comes only for $19.99 for its Windows version and $29.99 for the Mac version.

3. Wordslingr

This is basically an online community for writers to help fellow writers to become better by providing feedback on their writing. Not just that, it provides feedback at all levels of the writing journey – be it writing, editing, formatting, or publishing – but that’s part of the paid version.

The free version of Wordslingr’s interface is similar to Yarny in terms of setting writing goals. You can change the default goal of 750 words and also change the word count to any number you want.

Create a new file by clicking on this button, and choose a template if you want to. There are multiple templates available to choose from, in case you run out of ideas. It’s editor is quite simple in its interface, with the regular formatting tools.

One key feature is the in-built Thesaurus, and dictionary. The real fun begins while writing the story where you could activate the navigation from the view menu and create your characters, outline, note down your researches.

4. Wavemaker

Wavemaker is a totally free tool!

With Wavemaker, you could easily write a whole novel!

It provides options to structure your draft novel manuscript into chapters, scenes, and notes – which can all be shuffled around in the order you want.

This virtually runs on any device, and the writings can be synced using Google Drive. This also works offline, so you could write from within a train or in your next flight to that city.

It provides planning boards to move around your plot ideas.

5. Sigil

Sigil is a free and open source software available for windows, mac, and Linux OS, that you can use to self-publish your next book.

This is an amazing piece of software to create deeply customized ePub files that can be used for submitting to many online publishing vendors, including Amazon KDP, Nook, iBooks, etc.

It comes loaded with a plenty of features, so much so that, it might take a while for us to get used to its interface. If you know HTML, CSS, then you can create a custom css file to easily decorate any part of your eBook. Although, Sigil could seem intimidating when you use it for the first time, it is a highly flexible tool with an in-built editor to directly edit the parts of your manuscript.

The only downside is that you cannot import Word document files – it supports only HTML and epub files. Not to forget that Sigil’s functionalities can be infinitely expanded with its plugins that are available from this mobileread forum page.

KDP eBook Setup – MetaData Guidelines

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Kindle eBook Details – Setup page

Language – select your book’s primary language – it’s the language in which your book was written.

The book’s title, subtitle information you specify on your book’s cover / interior files such as the Front Matter, MUST match the fields you fill up while setting up the book on KDP.

If your book is in a series, like the The Shiva Trilogy – enter a suitable name such as that.

A series number, is optional. It shows the readers which part of the book the reader is looking at (either to purchase, or just browsing on Amazon) – Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3 / Book 1, 2, 3 and so on. This helps your readers to read your books in a certain and specific order. Or else, they could pick up the wrong order, thus confusing the scenes or the flow in your story or sequence.

Design Tip: Also, as much as you can, try to keep your book series’ cover design themes similar – so they are “visually together” when people search for it.

Again, to reiterate, the above information must match on both places – inside your book/ on your book’s cover AND the metadata fields in the eBook Details page while setting up your eBook/PaperBack in KDP account.

Edition Number tells the readers which version your book is in – if you have updated your already published book, then enter your updated edition number. If you are publishing for the first time (your book), then it will become your Edition one. This is an optional field.

Primary Author or Contributor: if you are the original author who wrote the book, enter your name (or Pen name). Ensure not to mislead people by entering famous names, unless you share the same name as them. Primary Author name field is mandatory, while the Contributors names are optional. You could enter an additional Author name, Translator name, Editor name, etc. And just so you know – if you are the one who did all of that, there is no need to enter your name multiple times. The Primary Author name will suffice 🙂

Description. This field is a free ticket to your book’s success. A large share of your book’s success depends on how well you describe what your book is all about in this field. Use HTML if you like, but provide a great summary, a cliffhanger type description (for novels), bulleted list of contents, an elevator pitch to your readers for them to be enticed enough to purchase your book.

Publishing rights: Unless you are publishing a public domain book, you can select that you own the copyrights to the book you are uploading.

Keywords: Going by the face value of what they suggest, many people only enter key ‘words’, while forgetting that we can actually enter key ‘phrases’ in those 7 goldmine fields. These keywords/key phrases will determine many factors for your sales, next to the description field. These could also decide which additional categories your book might fall under. So use them wisely – make use of tools like Rocket, or even Amazon’s own search field suggestions.

Use all the Keyword fields!

Categories: this looks simple. But not easy – just choose two categories that best describes your book’s subject. It’s quite a relief to know that we can always test this by changing after a week or so by doing some A/B testing on which category has more reach, or which works best overall. But don’t deviate or mislead by categorizing your book into totally vague categories. Be relevant.

Age and Grade Range: Be your own best judge by choosing this field appropriately. It’s an optional field, but if you have written an adult or erotica novel then be kind in choosing an appropriate age limit in this field – you will save a family’s upbringing culture by doing that!

Finally, Pre-order: this field is active only during the first time you publish a book and when your book is in draft status. After publishing, it shows day and date of when your first edition got published. Also, this field is not available for Public domain books nor paperbacks – only new eBooks.

That’s all there is about the Kindle eBook Details section of the eBook setup process. I will write on the eBook Content setup and eBook Pricing setup pages on another detailed blog post.

Till then, you take care!

Is having more than one Amazon KDP account allowed?

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KDP accounts are linked to your Amazon accounts.

So, yes you may have two are more KDP accounts.

BUT – and that’s a big BUT, the problem comes when you link to your Tax ID or other unique IDs specific to you (PAN number, SSN number) where your details from the first account may match to your second account when Amazon runs a background check or even when simply validating your new account.

If you have two separate bank accounts, two separate Tax IDs, then separate KDP account may not be a problem – by two – I mean yours and your spouse’s or any other family member’s whom you can use with their permission.

To conclude, there is no real reason why anybody needs more than one KDP account unless your first account is in trouble and you want to jump to another KDP account that you need to have as a backup. If the publishing is done correctly without getting into copyrights or plagiarism issues, then one KDP account is enough.

A Guide to Publishing Public Domain Books on Kindle (Amazon KDP)

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Last updated: December 24, 2020

Table of Contents

  • Introduction to public domain
  • What is public domain?
  • 25+ awesome sources to find PD books
  • How to use Google to search for PD books
  • How to know and choose which public domain book to publish?
  • Self-publishing – download checklist PDF and other free resources
  • How to Differentiate Public Domain books
  • How to Annotate and Illustrate books for Kindle
  • Best Practices

Introduction

This is a living article which means I will keep updating this page for new and fresh content often.

So, please bookmark !!

How to Publish Public Domain Books on Amazon Kindle

You can see a lot of resourceful links here, to:

  • public domain books, and audio books,
  • tips, and techniques to correctly edit public domain books so that your KDP Account doesn’t get warned or banned,
  • how to check for copyrights,
  • how to set up your public domain book in your KDP eBook setup process, and more information like that with screenshots and details.

Just bookmark this page and keep visiting it often.

Don’t forget to allow push notifications for this website – that will help you get notified whenever this gets updated, so that you need not even remember to bookmark or keep visiting often to check for fresh content – your browser will do that job for you.

Alright, now let’s get right into the business of publishing public domain eBooks that gets loved by people:

What is Public Domain?

Public Domain is a platform on which any articles, books, images, media, or any content that are made freely accessible to the general public to consume, edit, or make commercial usage possible.

Amazon KDP has been allowing and regularizing the publishing of Public Domain books on its Kindle platform, to allow creators to add-value to the existing old classics, and also make some money on the side doing it.

How to use Kindle Create Software to Format eBooks

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After completing this detailed guide, you will be able to create your own well-formatted eBooks to publish on Amazon.

You can download Kindle Create from here. This is available for both Windows (Version 7 or later) and Mac (MacOS Version 10.9 or later).

Kindle Create now offers three different types of book formatting options.

  1. Novels, Essays, Poetry, Narrative Non-fiction.
  2. Comics (you’ll have to enable ‘Early Access’ in order to view this from Help – Settings option) (only PDF)
  3. Textbooks, Travel Guides, Cookbooks, Music books. (only PDF)

Note: if you want to format Comics then make sure you enable ‘Early Access’ to see this option.

Early access can be enabled from Help >> Settings here:

When it comes to using a .doc or .docx format to begin formatting, you also get to choose the language from the ‘Content Language‘ drop-down menu as shown here in the screenshot.

Choose your eBook’s Language

When you begin uploading your doc or docx file, depending on the contents and the number of pages in your Word document, it takes a while, to open this up in Kindle Create.

After the import is successful, you will see the ‘Continue‘ button…just click on that; and click on ‘Get Started‘.

If your document had its own Headings already, a pop-up shows all the Suggested Chapter Headings at the beginning. You could just click on any of the button to close it (if you like them, click ‘accept‘, if not you can ‘reject‘ the suggestions).

About the Kindle Create Workspace

The Kindle Create Workspace is divided into three main sections.

  • On the left-hand side, we have the ‘Contents Pane’,
  • The middle section is the ‘Edit Pane‘ and
  • On the right-hand side is the ‘Properties Pane‘.

On the left side, the thumbnail pages show how your book has been divided, to help you ascertain if the chapters are organized correctly.

If the Word document already had any Table of Contents, then those entries will be used in this conversion (at the time of importing) to create Kindle’s interactive Table of Contents, sometimes referred to as the NCX file.

In the EDIT PANE, you can even directly edit any text that you want to correct. This doesn’t mean you can use this Edit pane to completely write your book right here, but to just correct any discrepancies from the importing of the Word document.

In case, you have a large quantity of text to edit, then you can do so on your source file, then copy – paste them into this Edit pane within Kindle Create. To do that, you can make use of the Copy and Paste functions from within the Edit menu.

The Properties pane on the right side is going to be your friend in formatting all your Chapter headings, and other text in your book.

Simply click on the text that you want to change, in this example, let’s say, the Chapter title – click on the text and click on ‘BOOK TITLE’ button (technically known as ‘Elements’) given on the right side within the Properties pane.

Keep editing in this manner for all your text and headings. There are decent formatting options available

  • indentation,
  • spacing,
  • paragraph alignments,
  • color,
  • subscript,
  • superscript,
  • strikethrough text,
  • highlight text, etc.

…from these sections on the properties pane, based on which part of the ebook you click to change.

If you ever wanted to revert to your original formatting settings, simply click on this ‘Clear’ button to strip all the formatting from the selected text.

That being said, in general, try to finish all your formatting Work within your Word processor itself before importing the manuscript into Kindle Create.

Customizing the TOC

You can do so for copyrights, and other front matter sections too. While doing this exercise, see that the thumbnails given on the Contents pane with the pages now automatically align/update themselves with the assigned titles/headings on new pages.

Deciding which pages to be included in the Table of Contents is quite easy in Kindle Create.

Here’s how to do that:

When you click on the page thumbnail on the Contents pane – a checkbox shows up on the properties pane which reads ‘Include in Table of contents‘.

You can either check or uncheck as per your requirements for all your pages. Optionally, you can also change the chapter listing name using this box by typing in whatever name you want the chapter to show within the TOC.

You can validate these entries and the entire TOC when previewing by clicking on this TOC icon given at the bottom as shown in the screenshot.

Periodically, it’s a good practice for you to save your work by clicking on the ‘Save’ button given on the top right corner.

The first time you try to save, it asks for a file name, and the file type will be KCB.

Once you finish formatting your complete book – click on the Preview button (next to ‘save’ button) to see how your book looks in various devices. We will have ‘tablet’, ‘phone’, and ‘Kindle e-reader’ options to choose under the Device drop-down menu.

After choosing your device, you can navigate to see how the pages display on the selected sampling device.

For adding any images into your document, click on the ‘Insert‘ button to choose and insert your image into the ebook. Remember to add your Alt text and choose the image size from the properties pane given on the right side of the Kindle Create tool.

If you like what you see while previewing, go ahead and hit on the Publish icon. If you have further changes to make, simply continue to edit your document.

Now while hitting on the Publish button, your ebook will be saved as a KPF file, which you can upload through your Kindle Direct Publishing account.

What to Include in the Front Matter of an eBook

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There is a significant amount of material that can go in the front matter of an ebook.

Many authors get overwhelmed or easily confused how much is necessary and also what to include in what order.




After reading this guide, you will be an expert in adding front matter to your eBook. All the sections we see in this video are also available as a FREE Word Template, which is just a click away – all you have to do is just simply go to the downloads page to get these templates for free.

If you would like to view this blog post as a video, you can watch it here. And for all those who want to continue reading, just continue reading 🙂

Now, how much or how little front matter is needed, is a question that you need to answer yourself based on your readers or ebook. There is no hard and fast rule to include everything you see in this video, but choose wisely what you include, as there are sections that are vital to protecting your ebook, like the copyrights page.




Please also keep in mind that if there are too many sections or pages that form part of your front matter, then the preview available through the ‘Look Inside’ feature of Kindle ebooks will only show your front matter and very little actual content of your ebook. So, choose your sections wisely.

Front matter of an eBook

I have included examples from my book, Frugal Blogging, in the above video, which can be purchased from Amazon.

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1. Praise for your ebook: if at all your book or the contents of your book is already praised by your readers through samples, test readings, or for whatever reason, you could include them at the beginning, after the book’s cover. Many authors include not just their current book’s praise but also the praises received from previous books. If you have none yet, feel free to skip to the next section.

2. TITLE page – this is where you include your book’s title, subtitle, your name as the author name, any logo – all centered and BIG enough to catch the eye of the reader. Nothing else goes in here. Don’t clutter this page with any extra items, or text. The less text on this page, the better.

3. Copyright page: it’s good to include the copyrights page RIGHT after your title because it’s something that 99.99% of the readers will skip reading as it’s all just legal talk. But it’s also wise to keep it here because we can say upfront about any disclaimers here so readers can take caution if at all they read this text before they proceed to read the main chapters in your ebook. you will also have the opportunity to mention your edition year here, so if there is any book series or editions that you want to quote, you can do so here in this copyrights section.

As a reminder, if you want a free template in WORD format for the copyrights page and everything else from this video, simply download it from this URL, which is also just a click away in the video description.

4. Next comes the Dedication page. Here’s the manuscript of my ebook Frugal Blogging with more than 250 pages- I have dedicated this book to my parents, by the way, and it has just a line of text in italics and center aligned. You can do something similar here, but it’s an optional section. If you have none to dedicate your book to, feel free to skip this part.

5. Next in the order can be some optional sections – in my book, I have used this space to insert some more disclaimers related to the content of my ebook – which is followed by my own bragging. I mean, “about the author” section and why somebody should read my book – this is a place where if you have already written more books, you can link to it. I do this twice in my book – once here on the front pages and then again at the end of my ebook as a CTA – call to action. So, after all, if a person read my book till the end, which is almost 260+ in word format itself, and obviously it will be more in Kindle format coming to around 330+, then I will safely assume the reader will be interested in reading my other books as well. This is your opportunity to entice your readers to become more interested in your author brand.

Although fiction writers can skip sections like ‘what this book covers’, ‘why to read this book’, etc. non-fiction writers can include them here. but again these are not hard and fast rules, and if you feel these must be before your first chapter, go ahead and do so. No harm there.

6. Then comes the Contents section. A table of contents is a very important section, especially when it comes to ebooks. a clickable TOC is vital because readers cannot simply flip pages like we can do while reading a paperback or a hardbound hard copy book. Ebooks are displayed on just one plain screen of an electronic device staring at our readers – thus a clickable TOC is a must. Be it fiction or a non-fiction ebook. This can be easily achieved if you have been using STYLES in Word, so when a TOC is inserted, the heading tags will be picked automatically forming part of your Table of contents. Just make sure NOT to include page numbers in your contents page.

7. Next, in the list is Acknowledgments section – if at all you need to thank some people or acknowledge them for their contributions made so you could finish your book, then it’s here.

8. Next, if you have any Foreword, Preface, or Prologue, they can be placed here, right after your Acknowledgments section but before your first chapter.

You can download this list ALONG with the FREE Word Templates by going to the Tech Library TV website’s Downloads section.
If you haven’t already created your free account there, please do so NOW to get this as well as an unlimited access to get all the future reading materials that are not available elsewhere on the website.

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25+ Most Amazing Websites to Download Free eBooks

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In today’s amazing blog post, we will see 25+ lesser-known websites to download FREE eBooks.

These could be used to simply read ebooks for leisure, to learn and to expand our knowledge, OR we can also use some of the websites given here to get your public domain ebooks that are sometimes totally FREE to even publish on Kindle.

I have obviously not included famous ones like the Project Gutenberg as many already know about that website.

Go ahead and download this list in PDF format from the downloads page, to find out some new websites along with some bonus tips at the end of this FREE report.

Download PDF (350 KB)

As you will see in the above FREE PDF report, there is no shortage of websites that let you download and read books for free. If not already done, make up your mind to start reading to become better in anything you are doing.

Readers are, definitely Leaders. If not for others, this at least can help you “lead” a better life.

If not already done, simply download the free PDF report by clicking on this link NOW.  And you can refer to it anytime in the future.

How to Order Proof and Author Copies of Kindle Paperback Book

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This is a great news for authors!

Amazon KDP has recently announced (Jan 13, 2018) that it provides low-cost copies of books for its authors.

You can watch more details on the video above.

So, if you have written or writing a book that is going to be published as a paperback, you now have two options:

  1. Order (upto a maximum of 5 copies) proof copies of your paperback book or
  2. Order (999 copies per order) Author copies of your paperback book.

Both these are priced at the basic costs – shipping, taxes, and printing cost. The margin that you place for marketplaces will not be included in ordering these books.

 

KDP Royalties – Earn Through Direct Deposit Worldwide

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If you are a Kindle publisher, you might be facing a problem in not being able to receive direct deposit worldwide, while “check” is the only alternative to receive royalties from international sales of your eBooks.

We will sort that issue for you in this blog post!

Amazon provides 13 marketplaces worldwide, as you know, that comprises of US, India, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, AND Australia.

 

how to use payoneer to earn kdp royalties

However, we certainly don’t have bank accounts in all the 13 countries across several continents, unless you excessively travel across the globe and have a place to stay everywhere!

So, now comes the genuine problem of how do we get paid Kindle eBook Royalties from all the countries where Amazon operates?

Amazon currently offers 3 options:

  1. Direct deposit, also known as EFT or electronic funds transfer,
  2. Wire transfer, and
  3. Check/cheque – all options are based on the location of your bank.

Minimum Threshold Factor:

The benefit of direct deposit into your bank is that there is no minimum threshold. For check and wire payments, there is a “minimum threshold” in each marketplace after deducting the applicable taxes. That’s why, you can go ahead and update your bank account details – be it State bank, Axis bank, ICICI bank, or any local bank you have an account in your country.

Please note that although Amazon calls it “Wire transfers” sometimes they refer to “ACH transfers” and there is a difference between the two. Let’s now compare and contrast between these 2 options – ACH and Wire transfers to understand it better.

Difference between ACH and Wire Transfer

Wire transfers move funds from one bank to another in one business day, and the funds can even be made available within that day; sometimes when you receive a wire transfer, you won’t see the funds immediately. If you receive a genuine wire transfer, you can be confident that the funds were sent, as they cannot be reversed. Wire transfers almost always come with a fee tag.

Whereas, ACH transfers often take two to three business days to complete. Banks process ACH payments in batches – they’re all done together instead of being handled individually. On the other hand, ACH transfers are quite safe too, except that they can be reversed in situations of fraud or a mistake of overpayment. However, ACH transfers are almost always free, especially if you’re receiving funds into your own account.

So which option is best?

As you would have observed by now, “Direct deposit” is the best way to receive royalties from Amazon. It’s also the fastest, most secure and environmentally friendly way to receive your royalty payments.

Wire transfers or ACH transfers are the second best options, but only if Amazon has allowed this mode of payment. The 3rd one – check payment is the last option which even Amazon feels it an overhead – a note of caution here that Amazon is planning to phase it out, that is…discontinue it by the end of 2017 for some marketplaces.

How to enable Direct Deposit for all the 13 Marketplaces where Amazon operates?

Let’s now see how to update bank accounts for all the marketplaces so you can get an EFT from worldwide sales. To do this, we will use a Payoneer account (opens in a new tab) which helps in establishing a virtual bank account that acts as a local bank account but can help receive funds in international currencies.

how to use payoneer to receive royalties worldwide

Signing up is a simple 4 step process where you will give your details to create your account with Payoneer. Once done, and to receive funds into the Payoneer account from Amazon, we need to update our PAN number (Permanent Account Number – applicable for indie publishers in India) as well.

Here is our new Payoneer account welcome page.

Payoneer welcome page screenshot

 

Now, this is the secret sauce of this entire setup. Please read and follow these settings carefully.

Click on the ‘Global Payment Service‘ icon as given in the screenshot below.

Global payment service option in Payoneer

Click on EUR and get all the bank details here that are created just for you.

how to earn kdp royalties through EFT Worldwide

Enter these bank details into your KDP account page and you will be just fine, so hereafter you need not wait until a payment threshold is met because, with EFT, there is no minimum threshold.

KDP Account setup - update bank information

After the above update is done, whenever there are royalty earnings in Euro, Great Britain Pound, or other currencies that you choose to update through Payoneer, they will get directly deposited into your Payoneer account.

You can, later on, move your earnings from Payoneer to your local bank account. In case of Indian customers, this process is automated and the funds are usually transferred to the bank account within a couple of days after receipt of international royalties.

Watch this blog post in video format here:

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know in the comments section below.