Using Word to Self-Publish eBooks, Audiobooks, and Printed Books on Amazon & Everywhere Else

Step-by-Step Guide with Screenshots for Fiction and Nonfiction

De: Marsha Bauer

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

You want to use your Word file to self-publish eBooks, audiobooks, and printed books—but don’t know how.

Or maybe you’ve been paying someone to publish your book or format it for print—and now want to do it yourself.

This book provides step-by-step instructions—and screenshots—for using Word to self-publish eBooks, audiobooks, and printed books. You can use these formatted Word files at Amazon KDP, Barnes & Noble, and Draft2Digital, an aggregate book distributor that partners with numerous book publishers, including Apple Books and Kobo.

I provide detailed instructions for how to format both fiction and nonfiction layouts. You’ll end up with very professional-looking eBooks and printed books.

Your manuscript is already in Word. You just need to format it. It doesn’t take much effort to create an eBook or audiobook. You’ll publish those first. Then you’ll use your formatted Word file to create a printed book, adding the headers, pagination, section breaks, mirror margins, and size it needs.

My instructions will make all the formatting easy.

Though Word is the focus of this book, I provide instructions for creating an Amazon KDP account and then using the resulting Bookshelf to upload your Word files, then preview and publish your books.

I’ll tell you the information you need to gather before uploading your Word files, such as book categories and keywords. I’ll also explain royalties, ISBNs, ASINs, and Digital Rights Management. You will need to make decisions about them as part of the upload process.

If you don’t have a cover image, I’ll explain the cover-creator tools that KDP provides to help you create one. You can use the same cover for the eBook, audiobook, and a 5" x 8" paperback!

This book will guide you through the entire publishing process—at KDP and everywhere else.

My Qualifications for Writing This How-To Book

I am the author of genre fiction, and have done both traditional and self-publishing. I also formatted the Word files for the nonfiction books I manage—a memoir and mathematical book—as well as children’s books.

With self-publishing, I began by publishing wide—selling to multiple book publishers—at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Draft2Digital. I now use Amazon KDP for all I write, but still publish wide for the books I manage.

I have a master’s in English, and have been a high school English teacher, technical editor, and technical writer for a large computer company.

I’ve had considerable training with authoring tools and making what I write both user-friendly and readable.

With self-publishing, I create my own covers, and format my Word files. Given my technical background, if I couldn’t do my own formatting, it would just be—sad.

Be Aware: This book demonstrates many fancy fonts that can be used on a title page or in a drop cap. On a reading device, these fonts will all show up looking like a serif font that looks like Times New Roman. The print version of this book accurately shows the fonts.