Having just put my book on Amazon.com, I learned a few things that might be of interest to other authors and save them some frustration. I’m going to keep this as a sticky post as I may add more tips to it in the future.

Tip #1: When you are typing in your book description, do NOT under any circumstances click on the [Source] button and add HTML tags like <p>, <br>, etc. The instructions say you can do that, so I did. But then I discovered that all those HTML tags appeared in my book’s description. I had to frantically go edit it to get rid of the tags. This leads directly into …

Tip #2: Try your best to get your book’s description right the first time so you don’t have to go back and edit it. Why? Because, after you make the edits, you will have to navigate through the rest of the pages you filled out when publishing your book, then the book will go through the review process again, though it will remain up on Amazon.com while that is happening. I think having to go through all of that just to change the description is really dumb and a lot more effort than it should be. There should be a way to simply edit the book’s description and not have to wait through the review process again.

Tip #3: If you have an Author Page, you will, of course, want your new book to be on it. Instructions I found said that you need to manually add the book in your Author Central account by clicking on the “Add a Book” button in the Books section, but I found that I didn’t need to do that. It said that my new book was already added. It did not, however, show on my Author Page. It took quite a while for it to do so, several hours, in fact. I wasted a lot of time searching the Internet to find out why my book wasn’t there when all I would have had to do was wait for it to happen.

Tip #4: If your eBook is not quite but almost ready for publication, consider putting it up for pre-order. When you do pre-order, your book is already available for people to order, but you don’t need to uploaded the files until a few days before the release date. My eBook was all ready, but my paperback version wasn’t. Putting the eBook on pre-order meant that I could potentially go ahead and make some money on it while I was getting the paperback version finished up and ready to publish. By the way, paperbacks cannot  be put on pre-order.