Free Self-Publishing Tools That Make a Difference

Yes, you can research your niche, design a cover and format both a paperback and an ebook with free tools, and still get your book on Amazon. Below are the free tools I use or recommend, in the order you would use them, and where free falls short.

One of my early group coaching clients, Betty, had a very small budget. She kept asking herself how she would pay for the formatting and how she would pay for the cover. She did not know there was a free way to do either, so she was close to stalling. I took her through these tools one at a time.

How do I check my niche for free?

If you pick the wrong genre or niche, you will struggle to sell, however well you write. People tell me they will just write the book and trust that readers will find it. In my discovery sessions I have never met an author who was selling a lot of books in an unprofitable niche. There are exceptions, but mostly the problem is the niche.

You can check it for free with Amazon itself:

• Open the category your book would sit in and sort by bestsellers.
• Click through the books one by one and look at their sales rank.
• Note how many of them have a good rank. If many books in the category rank well, readers are buying there. If only one or two do, be careful.

If the books like yours are selling steadily, that is a good sign.

The paid way to do this is KDSPY or Publisher Rocket, which do the same research much faster. When money is tight, the free route works.

How do I check whether interest in my topic is growing?

Google Trends is free. Type in the topic you are writing about and you will see whether interest is rising or falling over time. Google says it shows relative search interest, scaled from 0 to 100, based on a sample of real searches (Google Trends help). So it shows direction, not exact numbers. If fewer and fewer people are searching, that is a problem.

Fidget spinners are the example I like. Search for them in the US and you will see a huge spike in 2017, and then almost nobody searching. That is the kind of topic you do not want to build a book around, because nobody cares any more.

Can I make a book cover for free?

Canva has designed book cover templates you can start from on a free account, and some of its images and templates are marked as paid, so check what your design uses before you export. You can swap the images for free, royalty-free ones from Pixabay or Pexels.

One tip: keep the fonts and the colour scheme the template already uses. The people who made those templates do this for a living. Changing everything usually makes the cover worse. When I was starting out on a shoestring, I put some books out with Canva covers, changed only the pen name and the title, and those books sold really well.

A warning. I do not recommend designing a cover from scratch unless you are a graphic designer. Readers rarely know why they like one cover and not another, but they do know when a cover looks home-made. Do not make a cover in PowerPoint. If you have a budget, hire a designer. If you do not, start with a Canva template. You can read more in What You Need to Know About Covers.

Can I format my book for free?

There are two parts to formatting, and there is a free route for each.

The paperback. Put your book into a word processor at the right page size, then export it to PDF and upload that to KDP. For the cover, KDP’s formatting help says any image or background that should reach the edge must extend 0.125 inch (3.2 mm) beyond the trim line, or the file is rejected. I do not love this route, because Word hides extra characters and spacing that can cause problems, but it works and it costs nothing.

The ebook. For the EPUB, you can use the conversion and layout tools at Draft2Digital, which its FAQ says you can use at no charge, including downloading the finished EPUB. The free program Calibre also converts between ebook file types. I have seen problems with both. They will pass Amazon’s checks, but your readers may find that the table of contents or the bullet points do not behave. Open the file in Calibre or in Amazon’s free Kindle Previewer and look through it before you upload.

If you have a budget, I still think it is worth paying for a formatting tool, because it gets the details right every time. I recommend Atticus now; I used to use Jutoh. But if you cannot yet, the free route gets a book on the market.

For more on formats, read What Is the Correct Format for Kindle Books?.

What do all of these have in common?

None of them costs anything to use. You can research your niche, check the trend, get a cover and format both versions of your book without paying anybody. That only helps if you are aiming at the right niche, so do the research first.

Your turn

What cheap or free tool do you use the most that I have not mentioned? I would like to know, because there may be something I have missed that works just as well. Tell me in the comments.

If you want help choosing a niche or planning your first book, book a free 25-minute discovery call. For the tools I would pay for later, see Must-Have Self-Publishing Tools and Cheapest Self-Publishing.

Free 25-minute self-publishing call with Chris Baird

Tell me where your book is now. You leave the call with a clear next step for publishing it.

Book your free call

Free, 25 minutes on Zoom, no card needed.