Editors and proof readers are worth their weight in gold: if you could afford them you wouldn’t be reading this. Now is not the time to be shy. Ask friends and work colleagues to read your book and be brutally honest about what they like or don’t like. Send copies by email; printing costs money. Thank them, but avoid promising to acknowledge them by name; it will prevent them from reviewing the published book.

Create an Author Page on Facebook in the name you intend to use plus “writer” or “author”. E.g. Writer Jane Doe. Blog about your book to attract interest. Send friend requests to authors, buy their books, tell them how much you enjoyed them, and add a permalink to your review on Amazon. If you hated them, forget posting a review: keep quiet. After an interval, ask each if they would beta-read your book: some will. Email volunteers your book and brace yourself for criticism. Act on any made by more than one person.

Know your genre. Is everything you’ve included likely to be acceptable to your target audience? The Amazon “Look Inside” feature is free and very helpful, as are the book descriptions. Find the genre you think you’ve written, see what comes up when you try key words and compare it to your book. When you get it right, you’ll find many similar books.

Run a spell and grammar check on your document. Before you click IGNORE, Google any point of grammar that you don’t understand. Find at least one friend prepared to go through your story word by word. Whilst waiting, read it aloud; the eye sees what it expects to see. Use FIND on every name, and every common mistake you make, such as she’s when it should be she’d: “he’s” will pick up both sexes.

Amazon publish a free book called Building Your Book For Kindle. It has simple, clear, instructions for formatting your document. Follow them; nothing looks less professional than an eBook without a working Table of Contents. The only part you may ignore are the instructions to convert your Word Document to a PDF. Correctly formatted Word Documents upload more successfully.

Do not be tempted to “build a cover” on Amazon. Search out sites offering photographs and spend the “almost” bit of your nil budget, about $16, on a good one that you can use for a print book later. Use Photoshop, or any similar programme, to add the title etc.

Uploading to Amazon, choose relevant key words: include those you used to establish genre. Spend time on your blurb (book description); it is your “shop window”. Choose the higher royalty level; you won’t be selling to Japan, yet. Do join KDP, and set a sensible price: high enough to show a worthwhile saving when you run a Countdown promotion, but leave the “free” option until you publish a second book for fans of your writing to buy.

Good luck!