Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is Amazon's free service for self-publishing. You upload your files, Amazon prints each copy when someone orders it (print on demand), ships it, and pays you a royalty. There are no printing costs upfront and no stock to keep.
Create the account
- Go to kdp.amazon.com and sign in with an Amazon account, or create one. You can use your normal Amazon shopping account.
- Fill in your Account information:
- Author/publisher information: your legal name and address.
- Getting paid: the bank account where royalties are paid.
- Tax information: a short interview that confirms your tax status. Non-US authors can claim reduced US withholding if their country has a tax treaty.
- Wait for the account to show as complete. You can create and upload books before this, but you can't publish until it's done.
Before your first book
- Your name or a pen name: KDP lets you publish under a pen name. KDPify keeps your authors and pen names in Authors (the people icon on the book list) and reuses them across books.
- Free ISBN: KDP gives every paperback a free ISBN. Low-content books, such as journals and some colouring and activity books, can publish without one.
- Disclose AI: KDP asks whether your book contains AI-generated text, images or translations. If ChatGPT or Gemini drew your pages, the answer is yes for images. Answer honestly: it isn't shown to buyers, and it is required.
- Your own content: you need the rights to everything in the book. Don't ask a chat to copy characters, logos or artwork that belong to someone else.
Next, publish your first paperback: automatically with the KDPify browser extension, or by hand.