Kindle Print (KDP)

Off-shore printing and distribution
Briars Books
Kindle offers a print-on-demand service. It will print your book at a printshop nearest the address from which the online order is placed.
  • Amazon's KDP print service is different from its e-book service. On this page we are talking about creating a print-to-order print book. See here for e-books.
  • KDP gets round the self-publishing author's problem of printing a book locally and facing exorbitant postage costs to get it overseas to the person who has ordered it. Kindle prints your book when an order is placed online and sends it off for printing to associated printers near the third party address. Your royalties from the book will be docked to offset expenses.
  • You MAY have the skills yourself to design your book cover and interior to Kindle specs, set up your account, run the Kindle gauntlet and publish. If you think you want to give it a go then Greg Gottfriend's excellent video will help you - from start to finish and everything in between. Kindle Create - KDP's own free online book and cover design software is intended to be user friendly will help you with standard books, comics, children's books, and fixed layout books. Gottfried demonstrates the app he uses, called Book Bolt, to help you design covers and the interior of your book. Book Bolt is not free.
  • Most people using KDP try to do it themselves - and there are plenty of guides and tutorials to help - but if they find they lack certain skills they will eventually end up asking experts to help them with covers and editing. It is quite common for an agency (like Briar's Books) to prepare the book cover and interior according to KDP templates and then pass the final proprietory kpf file on to the author to load up to their account and publish.
  • Bear in mind you will not get a printed proof of your book. You can order an online proof but the final printed book may not match it as closely as you may have hoped. (That's a drawback).
if it's all a bit daunting....

BriarsBooks regularly creates print books for printing locally and can adjust them to fit Amazon KDP formats. She also converts print books into e-books for uploading to kindle.