At long last!  The third and FINAL part to our Kindle Tutorial Trilogy of Terror! (no, seriously, try it, it’s terrifying…*shiver*…)

You can read PART 1: OPTIMIZING THE IMAGES by CLICKING HERE

You can read PART 2: THE HTML DOC by CLICKING HERE

So now you’ve put together your images, your text, and wrapped it all up in a nice HTML bow.  Time to put this puppy up and online for Amazon shoppers everywhere to buy it!  How best to go about it?  Are there any tips you should know about?  And, heck, how exactly does publishing content on the Kindle store work?

Digital Text Platform

You’ll need to sign up for a “DTP” account – the DIGITAL TEXT PLATFORM is Amazon’s special platform for publishers (independent or otherwise).

Once you have an account and are logged in, you’ll be redirected to your publishing “Dashboard”, where you’ll begin to indeed publish your first book(s)!  The information you need to fill in is broken into three sections:

1. ENTER PRODUCT DETAILS
2. UPLOAD & PREVIEW BOOK
3. ENTER PRICE.

Enter Product Details

Above you’ll see the first half (the left side of the screen) for entering your product details.

• ISBN: This isn’t necessary, but obviously use it if you have one.
• TITLE: The full title you want on the Amazon Storefront.  We’ve found it best to add additional descriptive words to the title line so that your comic appears for searches from the Amazon homepage or a Search Engine page, and not just from inside a particular category.  For instance, instead of “The Desert Peach #2″ we entered “The Desert Peach #2 (Comic) (Kindle 1 & 2 Special Edition w/ Extras)”.  We originally displayed the title as just “The Desert Peach #2″, and our sales immediately increased after adding the additional descriptors.  This is due to the fact that many won’t be searching for a particular title, and indeed, putting  a book up on Amazon – especially for the Kindle – is all about finding a NEW audience, who don’t necessarily know your book exists.  What you want are folks interested in “Comics” on the “Kindle”, and you want your comic to pop up first when they search for this broad criteria.  Especially as the Kindle Store DOES NOT HAVE A COMICS CATEGORY – even though you can select such a category when publishing on the Kindle (this category exists outside the Kindle Store, and so your Kindle product will show up for “Comics” on the Amazon main store, where there is a comparatively hefty competition to get noticed, but NOT if people are searching directly inside the Kindle Store).  If people in the Kindle store want to find comics, they’re going to have to type the word “Comics” into the search bar.  Might as well have that word in your title then, eh?
• DESCRIPTION: If you have critical acclaim for your book you’d like to have posted, do it here.  Put it right at the top, and then do your product description.  There is NO HTML ALLOWED in this part.  No bolding, no links, no images, no nothing.  Just plain text.  If your book is a webcomic with a website or if there is some sort of link you want to post – such as a link to downloadable Kindle screensavers (more on this in a future article) – then you can type it in as a copy-and-pasteable plain text http link.
• PUBLISHER: That’s you.  Or your company.  Even if the book was originally published in print by another company, you should put YOUR company’s name here, as you are the publisher of the digital content.  Amazon may ask for proof of digital rights.
• LANGUAGE: Probably “English”, but be honest.
• PUBLICATION DATE: Choose a date 2-5 days in the future.  Amazon takes up to 5 business days to approve your submission and publish the book on the store.  Best not to have the posted publication date too far behind it’s actual posting.  In our experience, unless Amazon asks for proof of digital rights, they publish in about 2-3 business days.  If they ask for proof of rights and you respond promptly (the day of), they take 4-5.

And above is an image of the second half (right side of the screen).  Which includes:

• CATEGORIES: You can select 5 categories total.  While there is a “Comics” category with a “Graphic Novel” sub-category, don’t waste too much time here, as these categories are not currently displayed inside the Kindle store proper.  I usually select “Graphic Novel” and “Comics and Cartoons” and then the other 3 selections I focus on the Fiction sub-categories that best apply.  You definitely want to spread your book into the proper niche categories, and again, find that audience that would likely be interested in your comic, but wouldn’t know to look for it – you need them to stumble upon it.
• AUTHORS: You can select more than one and do so – even if only one person worked on the comic, give them full credit, and choose them as “Author” and then again as “Illustrator”.  It’s always questionable if a book is actually a Graphic Novel/comic book or not when there is no Illustrator credit given.
• SEARCH KEYWORDS: While there is no limit listed here, Amazon will only pay attention to the first 8 that you enter.  So stick to that limit.  Put the book title, the author(s) name(s), and then terms like “comic”, “horror comic”, “graphic novel”, german military, etc. are the most useful.  In our experience, without using the book title and author name and category-like keywords, the comic does not appear in searches, or will appear surprisingly far down the list (too far!).  Put these terms in the title and also in the keywords, and you rise swiftly to the top.
• EDITION NUMBER: This is the digital edition number.  If it’s the first time, then 1 or 1.0 is the thing to put here.  You may (likely) re-publish to improve the digital edition after receiving reader feedback, in which case the edition will rise to 2.0, 3.0, etc.
• SERIES TITLE: The overarching title of the series.  Possibly not the same as the main Title.  For instance, “New Moon” is the Title, “Twilight” is the Series Title.  My apologies for using that as an example.
• SERIES VOLUME:  The issue number, or GN Volume number.
• PRODUCT IMAGE: The cover of the piece to be displayed on the Amazon storefront.  Can be jpeg, png, tiff, or gif.  They ask for a MINIMUM of 1200px on the longest side.  Basically, they want a print quality image.  It’ll look nicer.

Upload & Preview Book

This one is pretty easy, if you’ve already followed all the instruction in the last two Kindle Tutorials

Simply click “Browse” and select the ZIP file for your Kindle-adapted comic, then upload.  This will take 5-15 minutes, so go grab a drink while you’re waiting.

Once the ZIP file is uploaded and converted, you’ll see the blue-ish box appear as in the image above (”Your document has been successfully converted…”).  Once that appears, you can then click on the “Preview” button to see what your final product will look like.  Like so:

Word of warning – THE PREVIEW LIES!!! Or, well, stretches the truth.  For one thing, the image quality is much poorer on the Preview than on the Kindle itself.  However, the quality of the image on the Kindle is MUCH worse than the how the images will appear on your computer!  So in short, there’s no actual way of verifying precisely how the images will resolve on the Kindle itself, until the book is published and you buy a copy for yourself and take a look-see.  Do not – I repeat DO NOT use the preview to verify how good or poor the quality of your images are.  However, you can use the preview to make certain all the images are displaying properly and in the correct order.  And do yourself a favor – go through the whole comic and make certain of this.  Re-publishing is a bit of a pain (see below), so you’ll want to minimize how often you do that.

Enter Price

Last but not least you’ll need to select a price for your comic.  Make certain the “Amazon Kindle Store” checkbox is checked (otherwise the comic won’t be published), and then plug in your price as you can see above.  YOU CANNOT SELECT “FREE” OR “0.00″!  Amazon allows a MINIMUM price point of $0.99  While you don’t want to ask for any price too high, remember that Amazon will take 60% of every sale (you read that right).  So you’ll only receive, before taxes, $0.30 of every dollar.

Publish!

Once all that is done, scroll back up to above the “Enter Product Details” section and find that “PUBLISH” button (as circled in red above).  Click that and then there’s no turning back!  Your product will be published.  You will first see a green box appear announcing that your product is “Under Review” and will be published within 5 business days.  Simply keep coming back and logging into your DTP to see when it’s “live”.  When it is, the green box will be gone and in it’s place will be the old 3-section listing but now with the work “LIVE” next to it.  Click on “LIVE” to be taken to the product page on Amazon.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

You’ll have ‘em, trust me, here’s some answers in advance:

1. I click on “LIVE” and went to my product page – why are there no details here? It’s just an image and a bare-bones listing!!!  ANSWER: It takes almost a solid week for your Product Description Details to be added to the listing page.  For the first week your comic is Live, it’ll be a stripped down, pretty unimpressive listing.  Don’t fret, everyone has to go through that.  It’ll all pop into place eventually.
2. My product’s been under review for weeks! Why won’t it go live? ANSWER: It happens.  If it doesn’t go live after a solid week has gone by, email dtp-feedback@amazon.com They’re pretty fast with replying these days (1-2 days max), and they always fix the problem.
3. Oh my god, my comic looks terrible on the Kindle! I want to republish!  ANSWER: Read below, this is a touch involved….

Re-Publishing

If you want to republish your work because you’ve become a more talented Kindle comic adapter, or your first attempt was a botched job, or for whatever reason, you have to REPUBLISH FROM SCRATCH.

Even though the Amazon support boards mention that you can simply click “Publish” again on the current product, this will only work if you’re updating the Product Description or Author info or anything in the DTP.  What you cannot do is upload a new ZIP file and then have that replace the currently published version.  The DTP actually allows you to upload a new version and click “Publish”, and it certainly SEEMS like it works.  But after going through the 5 day review and having the new edition supposedly published…it ain’t.

What you need to do is open up the “ENTER PRICE” part of the currently published edition and uncheck the “Amazon Kindle Store” checkbox.  This will unpublish the work within about 1 to 2 business days.  NOTE: 1 out of 3 times, while the unpublished version will no longer be purchasable form the Amazon Kindle Store, the listing remains.  This becomes a problem after you republish from scratch and suddenly there are two or even more listing of the same product – and only one of them the one you WANT people to buy!  If this happens, you’ll need to email dtp-feedback@amazon.com and they’ll fix it within, on average, 1-2 business days.

You’ll know that this has happened, and that it’s a problem, because your old listing will still be there on Amazon, as seen above, even though in your DTP it says that the listing is now a “Draft” instead of “Live”.  Most importantly, in that green box you see in the upper right hand corner – where normally you could purchase the digital comic – you’ll instead see (here’s a zoomed-in shot):

And there you have it!  If you see that, contact Amazon support via the email above and get ‘em to take that puppy down!

THE END.

Yaaaaay!  You know know pretty much everything you’ll ever need to know to publish for the Kindle, at least for now.

But this isn’t quite the end, either, coming soon are two more Kindle articles from us:

1) BONUS MATERIALS AND INTERACTIVITY With Kindle Comics!

and

2) MOBI and ZIP FILES PUBLISHED OUTSIDE OF AMAZON

C’ya then, kids!

*Proof of Digital Rights is defined by Amazon as:

Specifically if you are not the author of the title, please confirm that you have all rights necessary to distribute the title in eBook format, and provide any written documentation you have from the author or other copyright owner of the title (such as a contract or other written authorization) which gives you all rights necessary to distribute the title in eBook format, or any other documentation or evidence you have of your copyright ownership (such as a copyright registration number).

If you are the author of the title(s) and you have retained the eBook rights to the title(s), please confirm that you are the author of the title and that you have retained the eBook rights to the title, and provide any documentation or other evidence you may have of your ownership (such as a copyright registration number).

Related posts:

1. Adapting Comics for the Amazon Kindle Part 1 – Optimizing Images
2. Adapting Comics for The Amazon Kindle Part 2 – The HTML Doc (Tutorial)
3. Robot Comics Launches on the Amazon Kindle
4. The Desert Peach #1 for Amazon Kindle 1 & 2
5. The Desert Peach #2 for Amazon Kindle 1 & 2