# How to self-publish a book: the whole sequence > Every step from finished draft to a book on sale, in the order they actually happen, with the decisions that are hard to reverse marked. Canonical: https://buk.press/blog/how-to-self-publish-a-book 19 September 2026 · 6 min read Finish the draft, get it edited, decide your identifier and your price, produce a print PDF and a reflowable EPUB from one source, design a cover that survives a thumbnail, upload to Amazon KDP directly and use a distributor for everywhere else, then sell direct alongside both. The two decisions that are expensive to undo are exclusivity with Amazon and which format your manuscript lives in, and both get made early by accident. Most guides to this are either a sales pitch for one service or a list of twenty steps with no sense of which ones matter. This is the sequence, with the two genuinely hard-to-reverse decisions marked so you make them deliberately rather than by default. If you have not decided between this and querying agents, [self-publishing versus traditional](https://buk.press/blog/self-publishing-vs-traditional) is the question before this one. ## The shape of it | Stage | What it is | Reversible? | |---|---|---| | 1. Finish and edit | The manuscript | Yes | | 2. Choose your source format | Where the book lives | **Painful** | | 3. Metadata and identifier | Title, categories, ISBN | Mostly | | 4. Produce the files | PDF and EPUB | Yes | | 5. Cover | Front, and spine for print | Yes | | 6. Price | What it sells for | Yes | | 7. Channels | Where it sells | **Partly** | | 8. Launch | Telling anyone | Yes | ## 1. Finish, then edit Drafting and editing are different jobs and doing them together is why books do not get finished. Finish badly, then fix. Then get someone else to read it. The three levels, in descending order of cost and of how much they change the book: developmental (is the thing working), line (is the prose working), proofreading (is it correct). Most self-published books need the first far more than they need the third, and buy the third. [Self-editing your book](https://buk.press/blog/self-editing-your-book) is what to do before spending anything, and it removes most of what a paid edit would otherwise bill you for. ## 2. Decide where the manuscript lives This is the first of the two expensive decisions, and it is usually made by accident: the book lives in whatever you happened to open. It matters because everything downstream is an export from it, and because you will do that export more than once. A typo found after publishing, a [second edition](https://buk.press/blog/second-edition-of-a-book), a new store with different requirements: each one sends you back to the source. - **A proprietary project file** (Scrivener, Vellum, Atticus) ties the book to that application and, for Vellum, to owning a Mac. - **A Word file** is portable and carries its formatting as direct styling, which is what makes conversions messy. - **Plain text** is readable by everything, forever, and separates the words from the design. The test: if the application you are using vanished tomorrow, could you still produce both files? If the answer is no, that is a real risk sitting under the whole project. ## 3. Metadata and the identifier Boring, and read by every store's search. - **Title and subtitle**: [how to title a book](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-title-a-book). The subtitle is where the searchable words go. - **Description**: [writing a book description](https://buk.press/blog/writing-a-book-description), which is a sales page, not a summary. - **Categories and keywords**: [book metadata and categories](https://buk.press/blog/book-metadata-and-categories). Two narrow categories beat one broad one. - **An identifier**: [do you need an ISBN?](https://buk.press/blog/do-you-need-isbn) is a shorter question than expected: the stores will assign one free, and buying your own matters only if you want the imprint to be yours. Write these once, in a file, and paste them into every store. Divergent metadata across channels is a slow, silent mess. ## 4. Produce the files Two deliverables, and they are genuinely different things rather than two exports of one: - **A print PDF**: fixed pages, correct trim size, margins with a gutter, embedded fonts. [What print-ready actually means](https://buk.press/blog/print-ready-pdf), and [A4 vs Letter vs trim size](https://buk.press/blog/a4-vs-letter-vs-trim-size) for the page itself. - **A reflowable EPUB**: no page size, the reader chooses. [EPUB vs PDF](https://buk.press/blog/epub-vs-pdf) is why you need both. Then check the things that go wrong: [widows and orphans](https://buk.press/blog/widows-and-orphans), [page breaks](https://buk.press/blog/markdown-page-breaks), [font embedding](https://buk.press/blog/pdf-font-embedding), and [EPUBCheck](https://buk.press/blog/epub-validation-errors) before any upload. This is the step people outsource or buy an application for, and it is the step that repeats. [bukpress](https://buk.press/) exists for that repetition: a Markdown manuscript in, a typeset PDF and a reflowable EPUB out of the same file, with the design saved once and reused, so a correction is one edit and one rebuild of both rather than two formatting sessions that slowly stop matching. [Self-publishing from Markdown](https://buk.press/blog/self-publish-from-markdown) is that route end to end. ## 5. The cover It is a thumbnail before it is a cover. It will be judged at about 100 pixels wide, next to nine others, by someone scrolling. - **Ebook**: [ebook cover dimensions](https://buk.press/blog/ebook-cover-dimensions), around 1,600 × 2,560. - **Print**: front, spine and back as one flat file, and the spine width depends on your page count and paper, so it comes last: [print cover, spine and bleed](https://buk.press/blog/print-cover-spine-and-bleed). Genre convention is information, not a lack of imagination. A cover that looks nothing like its category tells a browser the book is not for them. ## 6. Price Decide it before a store suggests one. [How to price an ebook](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-price-an-ebook) has the royalty bands, and the short version is that Amazon pays 70% between $2.99 and $9.99 and 35% outside that, which shapes the whole category. Print is arithmetic rather than judgement: the printing cost is set by page count, and your price has to clear it. ## 7. Channels, and the decision that binds you This is the second expensive one. Upload to **Amazon KDP directly**. It is the largest audience and there is no reason to reach it through a middleman. [How to upload a book to Kindle](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-upload-a-book-to-kindle) is that process, and [KDP's formatting requirements](https://buk.press/blog/kdp-formatting-requirements) are what it checks. Use **Draft2Digital** for everywhere else (Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, the library systems) from one file. [Draft2Digital vs KDP](https://buk.press/blog/draft2digital-vs-kdp) covers why both, and why not to let the distributor handle Amazon. Sell **direct** alongside both, because that is where the margin and the email addresses are: [where to sell your ebook](https://buk.press/blog/where-to-sell-your-ebook) and [how to deliver an ebook to buyers](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-deliver-an-ebook-to-buyers). The binding decision is **KDP Select**, which makes the ebook exclusive to Amazon in 90-day periods in exchange for Kindle Unlimited. For genre fiction with a series behind it that is often where the money is. For non-fiction sold to a professional audience it usually is not, and you have given up the right to sell your own book on your own site. Choose it knowingly or not at all. ## 8. Launch Publishing is not launching. Adding a file to a store notifies nobody. [The book launch checklist](https://buk.press/blog/book-launch-checklist) is the sequence; [how to get book reviews](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-get-book-reviews) is the part that keeps working afterwards. The one thing worth doing early is collecting email addresses while you write, because on launch day a list is the only audience you control. ## What it costs Nothing compulsory except your time. Editing is the one expense worth paying for, a cover is the second, and everything else has a free path. [What it costs to self-publish](https://buk.press/blog/what-it-costs-to-self-publish) is the honest accounting, and [publishing a book for free](https://buk.press/blog/publish-a-book-for-free) is the version with no budget at all. ## Frequently asked questions **How long does it take to self-publish a book?** From finished draft, two to six weeks of real work, most of it editing and cover. The stores themselves review an upload in under 72 hours. **Do I need an ISBN?** Not to publish: KDP and the distributors assign one free. You need your own if you want to be the named publisher, and it is optional for ebooks in most cases. **Can I publish the same book on Amazon and elsewhere?** Yes, unless you enrol in KDP Select, which makes the ebook exclusive for 90 days at a time. The paperback is never exclusive. **Do I need both a PDF and an EPUB?** For print and ebook respectively, yes. They are different formats for different jobs, and a PDF sold as an ebook reads badly on a phone. **What is the biggest mistake first-time self-publishers make?** Treating publication as the finish line. The file going live is the midpoint; nothing happens until somebody is told the book exists. **About this article.** Written by the team that builds bukpress, which turns Markdown into print-ready PDF and EPUB books. Spotted something wrong or out of date? Write to [support@buk.press](mailto:support@buk.press). ## Read next Explainers 12 September 2026 · 5 min read ## [Self-publishing vs traditional publishing](https://buk.press/blog/self-publishing-vs-traditional) Traditional publishing buys your rights and pays an advance in exchange for editing, a cover, sales representation and physical bookshelves. Self-publishing keeps the rights and roughly ten times the per-copy royalty, and hands you every job the publisher would have done. The deciding question is not which pays more per copy; it is whether your book needs a bookshop. [Read it](https://buk.press/blog/self-publishing-vs-traditional) Explainers 4 September 2026 · 5 min read ## [What it actually costs to self-publish a book](https://buk.press/blog/what-it-costs-to-self-publish) The unavoidable cost of self-publishing is zero: the major ebook and print-on-demand platforms charge nothing to list and take their cut from sales instead. A realistic budget for a book you want to be taken seriously is between $500 and $2,500, and roughly two-thirds of that should go to editing, which is the one job nobody can do for their own manuscript. [Read it](https://buk.press/blog/what-it-costs-to-self-publish) How-to 19 September 2026 · 5 min read ## [How to upload a book to Kindle, step by step](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-upload-a-book-to-kindle) Create a KDP account, click Create, fill in the title and metadata, upload a reflowable EPUB and a cover around 1,600 × 2,560, set territories and price, and submit. It reviews in under 72 hours. The upload is the easy part: what makes it go wrong is arriving without the EPUB validated, the description written, or the categories chosen, and two of those fields are awkward to change once the book has reviews. [Read it](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-upload-a-book-to-kindle) ## Write it in Markdown. Ship a book. bukpress turns the file you are already writing into a typeset PDF and EPUB: your type, your covers, no watermark, ever. [Get Lifetime, $27 once](https://app.buk.press/signup)