Let’s help our parents self-publish!
(I actually wrote this back in 2019 and then forgot to publish it, since the next six years were, you know, busy. But with a little updating, it still works in 2025!)
I was recently asked for advice by someone whose elderly mother wanted to self-publish a series of fantasy novels.
So, if you have a parent who wants to self-publish, or you have another relative you want to help self-publish, here are some tips!
SEPARATE ACCOUNTS
First, make sure your relative publishes the book through his or her own Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing account (and Kobo and Barnes & Noble and the others if you don’t do Kindle Unlimited), rather than your own. It might seem more convenient to do it through your own account, especially if your relative is elderly and not computer-savvy, but it’s still a bad idea
Why? Suppose the books do well! If the books generate more than $600 in a year, Amazon will send you a 1099 form and report your relative’s book income to the IRS as your income, which is an enormous pain to fix come tax time. So it’s easier and simpler for everyone to have their own Amazon and other vendor accounts. Besides, as we all know, business relationships with family can be tricky, so it’s better in the long run if everyone has their own accounts and the money goes into their own accounts.
EPUB FILE
To publish an ebook on Amazon, you need a ebook file called a EPUB file. Amazon used to require MOBI files, but they’ve been moving away from them to EPUB, and as of March 2025 they’re not going to accept MOBI files any more. All the other vendors likewise use EPUB, which has won as the de facto Accepted Standard for ebooks. Technically, you can upload a Word document to KDP, but sometimes the formatting gets mangled, so it’s simplest to use an EPUB file.
The cheapest way to create a proper EPUB file is with a free program Amazon has called Kindle Create. The program lets you import a Word document, which it then converts into a EPUB. It works best if the Word document is formatted correctly – ie, all the chapter titles are set to Headings within Word, and so forth. You can also make some formatting changes within Kindle Create as well. It’s a WYSIWYG program (what you see is what you get) so it’s relatively easy to use. Additionally, if you set Kindle Create to export your document as an EPUB, you can also use that EPUB on the other stores. It doesn’t violate the terms of service or anything like that.
If you don’t want to use Kindle Create, you can use an excellent free program called Calibre to convert the Word document to an EPUB. Calibre is sort of the Swiss Army Knife of ebook creation.
For non-free options, $45 dollars you can get a copy of Jutoh, which runs on either PC or Mac. Like Kindle Create, Jutoh allows you to import a Word document, and then generate EPUB files.
Another paid program is Atticus, which can also do the file conversion and has a bunch of other features. It’s $147, but I’ve never actually used it so I can’t offer an opinion one way or another.
Finally, the Cadillac option of ebook creation is a $199 program called Vellum which unfortunately is Mac only. It’s basically a souped-up version of Kindle Create that can make EPUB files and also properly formatted PDF files for paperbacks.
I’ve tried all these options, and I also use an EPUB editor called Sigil, but these days I nearly always use Vellum because it’s so convenient and quick. Like, it cut by 90% the time I need to produce a PDF file for a paperback book.
COVER IMAGE
You might have to spend some money here. The cover is probably 95% of getting someone to try the book. Like, for my SILENT ORDER series, I’ve gone through five different iterations of the covers on the fourteen books, and the sales went up significantly on the final version because I had finally gotten it right for the the genre. So people really, really do judge the book by the cover, so it’s important to have a good cover.
Generally, you can find someone who will make a cover from stock photos for about $200 to $300 per cover. To find a cover designer, probably the easiest way is to check out Reedsy.
I wouldn’t recommend doing the cover yourself unless you have graphic design experience. I do my own now, but I took some Photoshop courses and put a lot of practice into it. But it’s usually very easy to spot when someone does their cover in Microsoft Paint or Canva or whatever.
I’d also recommend avoiding AI images on the cover. AI images are very easy to spot, and enough people hate AI that they will refuse to read anything with an AI cover on principle. (My rule of thumb is that if anything says “Jonathan Moeller” on the cover and is for sale, no AI was used to create any part of it.) Amusingly, the skill required to make an AI image look good on a book cover also means the designer could create an excellent cover without using AI images.
SHOULD YOU PUBLISH IN KINDLE UNLIMITED OR NOT?
Basically, it comes down to choose a specific set for advantages and disadvantages.
For KU, the advantages are that you only have to deal with the Kindle Direct dashboard instead of four or five different ones. You also get the “pages read” income from Amazon on top of sales, and KU books tend to stick higher on the Amazon ranks than non-KU books. You can also make a book free for five out of every ninety days. The disadvantages is that you’re limited only to Amazon, and for me personally, only about 45% to 55% of my sales are on Amazon on any given month.
For going “wide” (the usual term for publishing everywhere and not just KU) the advantages are 1.) more than one revenue stream, 2.) not completely dependent on Amazon, 3.) you can reach more countries than Amazon is available in, and 4.) you can reach non-Amazon customers, and in the US and UK particularly, there are a substantial minority of people who hate Amazon and refuse to buy anything from it. The disadvantage is that you lose the promotional tools available to KU, and it can take a long time to build up a readership on all the different retailers.
The easiest promotional strategy when wide is “permafree”. That’s where you make the first book in the series free on B&N, Kobo, Apple, and the other retailers. Eventually Amazon price-matches, and the book is free on all platforms. I’ve done that for CHILD OF THE GHOSTS most of the time, and I’ve given away like 150,000 copies of it over the last few years. Though pricing a book to free is a mental hurdle that some authors can never quite get over. These are the people who say “a Starbucks latte costs $4.99, so why shouldn’t my book cost $9.99?” and then they price their book at $9.99 and never sell any copies.
CONCLUSION
I think for the absolute beginner, the easiest way forward is to publish with Kindle Unlimited. It’s like the “tutorial starter quest” for self-publishing. Try KU for three months, and if you don’t like it, you can take the books out and try them on other platforms.
-JM