Ok, so you’ve written a book (or just have an idea for a book) and you want to publish it, but you have NO IDEA HOW TO DO SO. I know what you’re thinking: how can an ordinary person like me publish a book. You want to share the book with the world. Well, you can do it. It’s a learning curve, but my intention is to help your journey be much smoother than mine.
My wife, Jade, and I get asked all the time how we publish our books. I’ve published a few books with a few publishers and plan to publish many more, and so I’ve learned as much as I can, and today I’m going to share with you what I know. Warning: it’s not everything you need to know, but it will get you much further in the process much faster. Don’t worry about finding a publisher who will like your book. We’ll explore that, but I’ll focus this video on a form of publishing that anyone can do regardless of whether some initial people like it or not. I say, just get the book out there.
Video Contents:
- Opening Skit: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=28
- Intro: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=198
- Idea: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=390
- Writing: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=451
- Editing: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=512
- Images: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=695
- Formatting: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=831
- Publisher: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=1602
- Uploading: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=1760
- Cover: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=2057
- eBook: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=2401
- Audiobook: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=2599
- Promote: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=3263
- Closing skit: https://youtu.be/Bp22gh5ETIs?t=3465
Get the Yeti Mic here: https://amzn.to/3b0XuCw
So, here’s what we’re going to cover in this video:
- Writing your book from scratch.
- We’ll go from idea formation to organizing your thoughts.
- I’ll give you some tips for editing your book.
- And some tips for adding images.
- Then, we’ll talk about formatting your book, and getting it ready to publish. For most people this is the tricky and difficult part. I made it simple.
- I’ll also talk about choosing a publisher, and for this video, I’ll show you how to self-publish through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (or KDP) system.
- I’ll show you how to get into your account, set up the book, upload the book, create a cover, select pricing, and finally we’ll publish a book together (in real time)..
- And I’ll give you a few pointers on promoting the book.
- I’m also going to show you how to turn that print book into an eBook and an audiobook for publication to millions of devices all over the world.
And we’ll take you through this one bit at a time. Behold!! This is my patented 12 step program for publishing.
- Idea
- Writing
- Editing
- Images
- Formatting
- Publisher
- Uploading
- Cover
- eBook
- Audiobook
- Promote
- Enjoy by eating ravioli
You can come back to this video over and over for reference. If you want to jump to a specific section in the video, check out the time stamp links in the description. I’m excited to share this with you, so without further ado, let’s get into it.
Let’s talk about organizing your book ideas.
We’ll start the journey with just getting your book together. I’m going to assume you’re someone like me, relatively decent with computers and writing. Your first step is to get your words down. I can’t write it for you, but unless you’re going to hire someone to do it, here are some tips to help you through your writing process.
- Brainstorm – Get all your ideas down out of your head and onto paper by just free-writing without any restrictions.
- Moveable parts – It’s helpful to write your ideas on post-it notes or cards that can be moved around and organized.
- Organize – By moving around and filling in the gaps to make it complete.
Now for writing the book.
The next step is to just sit down and write it out. This process may take months. You may need to research, rewrite, and revise several times. Here are a few concepts that might help you.
- Block Out Time – Most of your writing work will just take time to get your ideas out and on paper. Time is what is needed. The best idea I have for you is to block out some time in your schedule and stick with it.
- Be Consistent – The best advice I have for you is to be consistent with your efforts and just get the job done. If you decided to embark on this journey, make sure you are making daily and weekly progress regardless of how weakly it is.
Here are some tips for editing.
Once you have your book manuscript all written out, you will want to edit and comb through it and make it more and more perfect. In other words, edit it. You will need to read through your book over and over editing for punctuation, grammar, semantics, word use, and general comprehension. When it comes to the big ideas, ask yourself, does this need to be here? Or does this convey the message to my reader in the most concise and comprehensible way? When it comes to editing spelling, grammer, punctuation, and all the mechanics, there are two ways you can edit your book:
- Pay Someone – You can either edit your book yourself or hire someone to edit it for you. The first book we printed we paid about $500 to edit the 150 page book. This is going to be your best option if you can budget it. It saves time, and it’s better to have another trained set of eyes look it over for the first time.
- Do It Yourself – If you don’t feel that you know enough about punctuation, grammar, or word use, no problem. What better way to learn than by doing. In High School, I was much much stronger in math than in English. But, later on in life I found myself in Law School and serving as part of the Law Review Editorial Team. So, what I didn’t know (or didn’t know I didn’t know) I just had to teach myself by looking up every rule I wasn’t confident on. And it worked. I learned the skill and so can you.
Now, don’t get too worried if your book is not perfect. It’s better to get it out in the world and make changes in future editions than to never publish it at all. Your reader will appreciate the substance over the form. And when you self-publish, no one will read through it or potentially reject it before it goes to the presses. And you can always update the book on the fly as the books are printed as they are ordered. Although having a nicely polished book not only makes it easier to read and comprehend, but it also reflects on your credibility and level of care for the subject matter of your book.
Now, for some tips on adding images.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Including pictures, charts, and graphics in your book can really enhance your efforts to communicate your story or idea. Beware, however, you can’t just pull any image and put in your book. You must have the rights to use the image. If you just search for an image and include it, you may get a letter from the image owner demanding payment, and they may easily get a judgement against you. But, don’t worry. There are many ways you can get images to use in your book. Here are 4:
- Ask – If you see an image that you want to use, just ask the owner. There is a chance they may give you permission (in writing) to use the image in your book.
- Create – You can always create an image by taking a picture yourself, drawing a picture, creating a chart or graph.
- Hire – Get someone with the skills to create an image for you. On Fiverr.com, you can hire someone for a little as $5 to create an image for you. I’ve done it and have gotten some pretty good stuff. Also consider hiring a student to draw, take a photo, or create something for you. Get their permission in writing to use it in your book (email is fine).
- Free – There are many royalty-free image websites out there. I use these images all the time. Here are some of the sites I currently use to get some great images from:
Okay, let’s talk formatting.
Once you have everything in your book that you want, it’s time to get it into a format for publication. MS Word is the most popular word processor for putting your book together, but you can use anything like Apple’s Pages or Google Docs. Here are some elements you can consider having in your book (usually in this order). All of these are optional except, of course, the Title Page, Copyright, and Chapters. If you are not using a section, leave it out. You can, of course, download templates from your publisher (which we’ll cover next).
- Title Page – This page stands alone (this is not the cover, we’ll do that later). It contains your title, your subtitle, and maybe even the name of the author(s) or contributor(s), and you can include the Publisher’s name or Logo (you if you are self publishing like we are doing here), and the year of publication. This page always falls on the odd page or right hand side.
- Copyright – This is where you state your work is copyrighted and give information regarding the source of the book. This is on the left hand page. Here is what I would include:
- Copyright © <Year of Publication> by <Your Name>
- All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.
- First Printing: <Year of first printing>
- ISBN <Enter your ISBN> – we’ll talk about where to get this further below.
- <Your Publishing Company Name>
- <Your Street Address or Post Office Box>
- <Your City>, <Your State> <Your Zip Code>
- Dedication – Here is where you dedicate your work to individuals or groups. Keep it short and sweet, etc. This is not the page to thank people, that’s the Acknowledgement page – coming up. The dedication is the right hand side immediately following the copyright page.
- Contents – A table of contents page with page numbers. The contents page starts on an odd page, so the right hand side of the book. The table of contents may take several pages. If your chapters are only numbers, you may not need a contents page. If the chapters have titles, then a contents page makes sense.
- Acknowledgements – This is the page where you thank people who supported you in the creation of the book. This page or pages always start on the odd page. Acknowledgments typically follow the table of contents. This and all pages leading up to the intro are numbered with small case roman numerals.
- Forward – This is usually written by someone else who is commenting or recommending the book to the reader. It is usually a person of some circumstance that will add credibility to your book. This starts on an odd page.
- Preface – The preface is written by the author usually and explains or shares insights into the inspiration or creation of the book. Also starts on an odd page.
- Introduction – This is where the author can instruct the reader how they can get the most out of the book. It’s a “how-to” introduction to the book. This also starts on an odd page, but it can also start on an even page. The introduction also starts the page numbering at 1. Previous to this page, the numbering was lowercase roman numerals.
- Chapters – Starting with the first chapter, each subsequent chapter has the same formatting. Each chapter starts out on an odd page (right hand side of the page). The chapters will make up the majority of the volume of the book.
- Appendix – You may have as many appendixes that you want. You may have none. This is where you keep any supplementary information that doesn’t belong in the body of the text.
- Notes – You may wish to include notes to your book. Alternatively, you can include footnotes (numbered notes where they note appears on the bottom of the page) or endnotes (where the numbered notes appear in this notes section at the end of the book).
- References – This is where you may wish to reference all your sources or bibliography.
- Glossary – If you have many terms that may be new to your readers, you may wish to include a glossary of terms. This is where you would include it.
Pro Tip: Visit one of the publisher’s how to pages and download a template to use. I got a great template from lulu.com that I love to start with. Here it is.
Document Setup Formatting
At this point, you have all the substance. Now, it’s time to make it all look pretty. Before you start, decide what form your book is going to take. The book we are formating here is going to be the US Trade 6×9 trim size, a very popular size. Here are some tips to get things working right:
- Page Setup – You will need to set your paper size. To do this, you simply need to select Page Setup from the menu. Select Manage paper size, and add your own. You will need to add a bit to the page size if you are including images outside of the printable area like tabs.
- Margins – Set the margins and gutters according to your book size. The number of pages will determine the size of the gutter – a thicker book requires more space in the crevice. Check the KDP help documents for the gutter size you need.
- Font Setup – The next thing you may want to do is to choose the font and indentation you want for the whole book. Using the document theme and style guide will really help keep things uniform. Adjust the entire style rather than individual sections, so your adjustments will be throughout the book. To do this, right click on the style and choose modify and choose all the qualities you.
- Table of Contents – The Table of Contents will automatically populate if you have named your titles correctly. To add a table of contents, click on reference and table of contents.
- Styles and Headings to Chapters – Add section headers – Use the document styles to organize your section headers like making your chapter names Heading 1.
- Add Section Breaks – Odd breaks before pages like chapters you want on the right hand side. Adding the section breaks as odd breaks will make sure the chapters and other elements of the book begin on the correct side of the book.
- Make sure to unlink the sections between after the table of contents and after the preface. So the page numbering will be unique to each of those sections:
- Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Contents – no page numbering or page headers
- Acknowledgements, Forward, Preface – page numbers are in small case-Roman numerals, continuing the number of pages including the table of contents, so you might start with, say, page 9 or ix.
- The rest of the book (Introduction, Chapters, Appendix, Notes, References, Glossary) – all have normal page numbers and the page headings containing the title and the author’s name on even and odd pages respectively. You can leave out the header and numbering on the first page by ticking the “Different First Page” box.
- Add Page Numbers – For page numbers, you can choose to either place them in the bottom or in the outer edges (different even and odd pages). You can choose to exclude page numbering on the first page. Remove any numbering from the title page through the table of contents. Add lowercase Roman numerals to acknowledgments, forward, and preface sections. The rest of the book can be regular numbering.
- Add Page Headers – Include your name (Author’s Name) at the top of the odd number pages, and your book’s name at the top of the even number pages.
- Review – Take as many looks through the book that you need to take in order to feel confident the manuscript is finally finished.
- Print – Remember to update the table of contents before printing to pdf. Then print to PDF either from the print menu or from the export menu. Don’t convert it quite yet, as we need to enter the ISBN (special book number), which we will do in a minute.
Another Pro Tip: Get out another book and look at the formatting, how things are placed and what things look like. There’s lots of wiggle room to make your own book how you want it.
Let’s talk about choosing a publisher.
When we published our first book, we published with Balboa, and we paid about $5,000 to get the book published. This is called assisted self-publishing. You’ve got self-publishing, assisted self-publishing, and traditional publishing. With traditional publishing, you just had to hope a publisher would like your book and decide to invest in it. This was necessary because of the tremendous cost of printing a book. Because it costs so much to set the book printing up, you would need to print and sell thousands of them to make any money. With recent technology advancements, a publisher can print one single book as the book is ordered. Therefore, we now have self-publishing and ANYONE can publish a book. You can do all the uploading and set up work yourself, or you can pay someone to help you along the way like we did for our initial book. The choice is up to you. Since the first book, we have published all our books for free (and much easier) on Amazon.com (KDP or Kindle Direct Publishing) and lulu.com. Every publisher has their pro’s and con’s. Lulu, for instance, has some formats that KDP doesn’t have like coil binding or hardcover, etc. Amazon, has a huge market, and although you can publish your lulu books on amazon.com, you will get a bigger royalty going directly through Kindle Direct Publishing. So, it depends what you want to do with your book. For this video, I’ll show you how to do this on KDP (amazon.com’s publishing service). We choose this because it is super easy and known and trusted by millions. Your first step is to set up an account with KDP.
Uploading the book
You have polished your book in the previous step, so now you just need to put it in PDF form. Here are the steps:
- Log into your KDP account using your amazon.com account credentials.
- Click on create print book (we’ll do eBook later)
- Set up the details of your book.
- Select
- Language – select the language of the book.
- Title and the subtitle (best to copy and paste everything from the book to make sure you have it all right).
- If your book is part of a series, you can include it here. The same thing with an edition, which indicates a version of the book. Today, we are publishing an updated version of this book including additional information, a new chapter and more images, but rather than call it the second edition, we’re going to call it the 2020 edition.
- Enter the author’s name. This can be your pen name. That’s really up to you. You cannot edit this after you publish the book.
- Enter a description. Take some time to craft a good description that would not only attract your readers but give the shopper a good idea of what your book is about.
- Publishing rights – If you created the book, you own all the rights to it, so click the box that indicates you own the rights.
- Key words – Add some keywords that might help people find your book. We’re not going to discuss keywords here, so just make your best guess. After you publish the book, you can’t change elements like title or author, but you can change the description and keyword.
- Categories – In addition to the description and the key words, you can tell your potential readers, book sellers, and libraries what category your book fits in. There are no real rules. Just use your best judgement. It appears that you can change the categories after you publish your book.
- Adult – Last of all, indicate whether the book contains adult content.
- Next page
- Get an ISBN. An ISBN is an International Standard Book Number. It is used to identify individual books. All printed books on this particular platform need an ISBN. Publishing on a site like Lulu.com, you can but are not required to have one. You can purchase one yourself, but here is a free one. The only catch is that if you use KDP’s ISBN, you may not use that ISBN to publish your book to a different platform.
- Once you have your ISBN, copy and paste it into the copyright page of your book.
- Leave the publication date blank. The date the book is published will be automatically entered here.
- Now here is where you can choose your print options. Here are my favorite options:
- Choose your kind of paper and ink. I like the black on white paper. You can make a selection and right before you are ready to publish, you can order a proof copy of the book to see if you like these options.
- 6in x 9in trim size – or whatever suits your book. The size you choose here and the amount of pages in your book will have an affect on the size of the gutter and margins in your book.
- No bleed (unless you have tabs or something in the cutoff area). An example of a book with bleed is this book we published that had handy tabs on the side, which we included in the header and footer of the pages of the book in Word.
- Next, you just need to choose the finish, matt or glossy finish. I’ve got to tell you, I love this matt finish – it’s so soft.
- Now to upload your manuscript. You’ll need to go back and prepare your PDF complete with the ISBN. You’ll have a chance to preview it and make changes later. Honestly, every time I am preparing a book for print, I swear I upload about 10 versions of it. A title, image, margin, or something just doesn’t look quite right or is out of bounds, and I need to correct it in MS Word, print to PDF, and upload again. Once you add your cover, you can preview this.
- Let’s create and upload a book cover.
- You can use Kindle’s Cover creator, which isn’t bad. I used it for the first book I published on KDP, and it still has that cover. You can upload your own images or use some of them that are there.
- Here is another way to do your cover. Select, “Upload a cover you already have”. It needs to be in PDF format, and I’ll show you one way to do it.
- Here’s how I did it:
- Download a cover template (link here) from the link right above in the description. By this time, you’ll know the trim size and the page count (doesn’t need to be exact). Download the template to your computer and unzip the file. It will give you a PNG file (an image) and a PDF file.
- Open the PDF and check the properties for the actual size in inches. Write this down somewhere. We need to make a new PDF in the exact same proportions.
- Open Canva.com, (create an account if you don’t already have one) and create a custom project with the sizes of the PDF in inches (or centimeters if you are operating from a different country).
- Once you have the project started, upload the PNG file as a guide to help you know where to put your elements. You will likely need to adjust the file size of the image, which isn’t a problem because we just need to end up with a PDF of the correct size. We’re just using the PNG file as a guide. I usually adjust the transparency of the image, so I can overlay it.
- You’ll want to include the following elements in your cover:
- Front Cover
- Title
- Subtitle
- Author(s) name
- Edition (optional)
- Spine
- Title and Author
- Back cover
- Book blurb – about the book
- Author blurb – about the author
- Start by getting an idea of what you want to include in your book.
- You can look at the covers of other books to get an idea of what you would like to include. The only requirements is that it contains the descriptive elements of the book.
- Grab some images you want to use. For this cover, we are going to get an image off of pixabay.com.
- Add all the elements.
- Make sure to leave space for the UPC image, which KDP will add for you later.
- Overlay the template again to make sure all your elements are in the right place.
- Remove the guide and share the image with your loved ones to make sure people other than you will love it.
- Front Cover
- The next step is to download as PDF (printable).
- Upload the PDF to KDP.
- Then you can, “Launch Previewer” – this step takes quite a few minutes sometimes, as KDP does a lot of computing in the background.
- Review the preview of the book and check for elements that need to be fixed. Repeat the process until it is perfect (or at least passable). When you are ready to proceed, click on, “Approve.”
- At this point, KDP will give you the print price of the book, and you can proceed to the final page in the process:
- Here’s is where you can identify where you want the book to be published. Just leave it on, “All territories”
- You can enter a price here and see how much you will receive as the author.
- At the bottom of this page, you can also request proofs of your book, and get an idea of what it will look like before you send it out into the world.
- Approve and publish if you’re happy with what you see.
- Your book will be reviewed by KDP and if there are elements that need to be changed, they will let you know and you can submit it again for publishing. They just want to make sure you are producing something quality. If you are not sure it is good enough, leave it up to them to decide.
- Once you publish, there are elements of your book that you will not be able to change.
- Congratulations!! You’re published. Well, sort of.
- The review takes about 72 hours. I’ve had them respond sometimes on the next day, and sometimes it seemed like it took several days.
- Pat yourself on the back.
Now, you can take it further.
Now, let’s create the ebook.
Now that you have the print book done, it’s easy to create an eBook from the same file. Actually, you can do the ebook first and then the print book. It’s up to you. That’s what I like about this universe, you have so much freedom. You can actually upload your book in several different formats including right from MS Word. However, for this tutorial, we are going to use the Kindle Create software. For creating an ebook with KDP, here are the steps:
- First of all, begin the project by adding your Kindle eBook.
- Review the information that was copied over from the print book. The eBook requires age and grade range. And you have the option to make it available for preorder.
- On the next page,
- Enable Digital Rights Management. You can read more about it there.
- Here’s where we are going to pause and prepare the book for uploading.
- Download the Kindle Create software. Install and open.
- Open your file (.docx) in Kindle Create, and it will unpack the book.
- Add front matter (title page, copyright, contents,…). I just copy and paste these into the templates KDP has and then delete the elements in the body of the book.
- Identify your chapters by clicking on each chapter heading and identifying it as a chapter.
- Check images. Some of your images might need to be re-added. All ebook images need to be JPG format. You can also add captions to each image.
- Review your ebook thoroughly for completeness.
- Export and upload.
- Create cover
- Repeat cover creation above only just for the front cover.
- What I did was just download the other cover and cropped off the spine and the back cover.
- Upload it in JPG format.
- Review the book with KDP’s eBook previewer. You don’t have to read the whole thing, but just review enough to make sure you are happy with the book.
- You don’t need to add an ISBN, unless you want to. I didn’t.
- On the final page, select pricing and other options.
- Last of all, just publish it. It will also need to be reviewed.
Now, let’s creating the audiobook format
The easiest way to create your audiobook is through ACX, this is audible.com (also Amazon’s) service. It’s really easy to create and promote. Here are the steps:
- Create an account on ACX.com
- Add your title by searching for your title online. You may need to wait a while before your title shows up. You can start recording in the meantime. I believe before you were just able to add a book by adding the details. Now it appears that you must publish elsewhere and find it. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be published on Amazon. I’ve found books I’ve published elsewhere on ACX. I don’t know what to do if you can’t find your book – ask their tech support team.
- Complete the initial information.
- Add a cover. Just follow the instructions. You can use much of the same information above. If you are using Canva, for instance just create a custom image 2400 x 2400 pixels.
- Your next step is to upload your audio files like I’ve done here. Guess we’ve got to create those files first.
- I use Garageband and Audacity to prepare the files.
- You can do all the recording and editing in Audacity, and … it’s free.
- So, to keep things simple, use Audacity software to record, check, and export your audio files.
- Download audacity at https://www.audacityteam.org/
- Use an ACX check (Google “ACX check plugin”) to ensure your audio will pass. I have helpful links on this page below.
- You will need to set up your recording space.
- I used a closet because it was an inner room and didn’t pick up outside sounds. You’ll need to stop recording every time a truck passes, a plane flies overhead, or someone starts to mow their lawn.
- I draped blankets around all over and did everything I could do dampen and eliminate every sound. Turned off the AC, made sure I wasn’t wearing noisy clothes, make sure my stomach isn’t making noises.
- Get some good recommended equipment.
- I had purchased and tries so many inexpensive mics for $20 or $30 and the recordings were still very poor, and didn’t pass the sound inspection. Getting a good mic made all the difference. No amount of editing will save a poor recording.
- The mic I use is the popular Yeti mic. It cost me about $80-$90. I’ll include my Amazon affiliate link to the mic below. Using the link supports the channel. You pay the same, but give me credit for recommending the product to you. I honestly believe that I could not make a recording that passed the sound check without a good mic.
- Yeti mic: https://amzn.to/3b0XuCw
- Once you’re ready, record your audiobook. You’ll need all the following elements:
- Opening credits
- Closing credits
- Retail Audio Sample
- All the chapters
- Now to Edit it. Once you have the files, make sure they will pass the ACX inspection.
- You’ll want to edit out sounds that you don’t want to be there. If I cough in the middle of reading, I clap my hands really loud to give a visual (here is the issue) marker. And I write down the time and move on.
- Here is a tip: take your time. Your book’s price is actually set automatically on the time length. This is evidence that people are paying for the time they are entertained or educated. So, relax and have a good time with your audience.
- Along with removing mistakes or unwanted coughs or sounds, you’ll need to make sure the quality is good enough, loud enough, quiet enough, and clear enough.
- The cool thing about Audacity is that someone has created a ACX plugin that checks this for you. This is awesome because it takes days (currently due to the COVID shutdown 30 days) for ACX to check your audiobook. So, if you can get it to pass this check, it will more likely pass ACX’s protocol.
- To check with the ACX check, search on the internet for the plug in add on and install it.
- Make any adjustments. I’ll share some of my adjustment methods here.
- Track -> Mix -> Mix Stereo Down to Mono
- Add beginning room tone (you need just a second or so at the beginning of the file)
- Effects -> Normalize -3.0
- Alternatively, search for the RMS Normalize plugin and set it at -20db
- Click Effect -> Limiter.
- Set Type=Soft Limit,
- Input Gain Left: 0,
- Input Gain Right=0,
- Limit=-3.5,
- Hold=10,
- Apply Make-up Gain=No -> Click OK.
- (Optional) Noise Reduction
- Click Effect -> Noise Reduction
- Noise reduction 18
- Sensitivity 6 (or 2, depending)
- Frequency smoothing 3
- Noise (Reduce)
- Ok
- Analyze -> ACX Check
- If it doesn’t pass the inspection, keep trying adjustments
- Google for help
- And if you can’t get it, consider hiring someone to do it for you. You might be able to find someone on Fiverr.com
- Now to export the file
- File -> Export -> Export as MP3 ->
- Name it,
- Bit Rate Mode: Constant;
- Quality: 192
- Chanel Mode: Force export to file
- Repeat with all the files.
- An alternative process that has also worked for me is…
- Stereo to mono
- Noise reduction
- Limiter (maybe X 2)
- RMS Normalize
- ACX Test
- Export
- An alternative process that has also worked for me is…
- Finally, upload all the files to ACX.
- Publish
- The pricing is set by ACX and determined by the length of your audiobook, so take your time and be entertaining as you read – don’t rush through it.
- Add Supplementary Audiobook Accompanying PDF. You can add a PDF to your Audoibook, so your listeners can view charts, images, and other supplementary information easier to see rather than describe. Currently1, you just need to email support@acx.com with your PDF (under 99MB) and confirm that you only want it available for download after purchase.
Here are some helpful links:
- ACX:https://www.acx.com/help/acx-audio-submission-requirements/201456300
- Video about Garageband: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeHMtoOn6Lg
- Video of editing in Audacity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBucUZOdtzQ
- Garageband: settings: https://robdircks.com/garageband-settings-for-audiobooks-acx-audible/
- Studio software: https://blog.acx.com/2013/09/18/acx-studio-gear-series-part-2-daws/
- Audacity settings: https://writingcooperative.com/book-narration-made-easy-7260ac37f0e7
Editing in Audacity or any other audio editor is tricky. Here are the settings I use, although your files and your situation might be a bit different. The truth is I just floundered around until I got it to sound good and pass the ACX check.
Let’s talk about publishing & promoting your book.
The last thing you have to do is the most important: LET PEOPLE KNOW YOUR BOOK IS AVAILABLE!!! Sometimes people think that once they publish it, people will notice it. Not so. If you don’t do anything, nothing sales – no matter how good the book is. It’s like what Robert Kiyosaki said, “They give awards to best sellers not best writers.” You need to be able to sell the book before people will enjoy and be benefited from the book. Pro Tip:
- eBook – From the KDP menu, you can create a promotion to give away free copies of your book for a day or two to get your book out there. Great for giving a gift to loyal fans before you announce it to the rest of the world.
- Audiobook – You can do something similar with the audiobook by generating free codes from your account. Just go into the back of the account where you see your sales and click on your sales dashboard and select the “Promo Codes” tab. Follow instructions and send those codes to individual people who commit to downloading and listening to your book.
- Print – You can also print Author copies at a reduced price and distribute as you wish. To do so, simply log into your KDP account and click on the “Order Author Copies” button next to the book.
You’re Done!
You probably celebrated when you finished your manuscript or hit, publish on the print book already. If you’ve followed everything here, you now have your book published (or at least under review to soon be published. Let me be the first to congratulate you.
Footnotes and References
- This is the latest information, which you can read here: https://help.acx.com/s/article/can-i-add-a-pdf-of-additional-information-to-my-audiobook#:~:text=We%20can%20add%20a%20single,to%20support%40acx.com.
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