I have been publishing on Amazon KDP for over 3 years now, and in that time, I have managed to sell over 100,000 books. I know that publishing on Amazon KDP can be a bit overwhelming, especially if you are new to the process.

To help make your life a little bit easier, I’ve put together a list of my favourite tools and resources that have helped me get to the level I am at today. I hope that these items help you too.

First on the list is Bookbolt.

Bookbolt offers several features that help self-publishers. You can easily create your book covers and interiors with their design studio. They also offer puzzle creation software so that you can create activity books with ease. They also offer a number of premade interiors for you to use. I bought a lifetime membership to Bookbolt when I first started publishing in 2019. I have tried various different options during my time, such as Canva and Adobe Illustrator, but they don’t come close in my opinion.

You can check out my video here showing you a walkthrough of the new & improved Bookbolt design studio – https://youtu.be/eqb37k3m8S4

Check out Bookbolt – https://bit.ly/3f0rDpC

Canva

Canva is great for beginners to publishing. If you want to design book covers for free, I highly recommend it. Canva is not my first choice for cover design, but I use Canva for so many other things, such as thumbnails for my YouTube videos, social media advertising, and more.

Check out Canva – https://www.canva.com/

Creative Fabrica

Creative Fabrica is a digital marketplace that offers a wide range of digital assets, such as fonts, graphics, templates, and more. This site has everything you need to create beautiful, unique designs for your books. You can get full access for a whole month for just $0.99 to see if you like it.

Check out Creative Fabrica – https://bit.ly/35MZBwK

Adobe Illustrator

I use Adobe Illustrator to design my A+ content and to modify graphics that I have downloaded from Creative Fabrica. There is a big learning curve at first, but once you get used to it, it is a breeze, and you can do some pretty impressive design work that you can’t do with Canva and Bookbolt.

Here is a video showing how I use Adobe illustrator to create A plus content – https://youtu.be/u2RyI5I4KL0

Check out Adobe illustrator – https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/illustrator.html

Hidden Gems Keyword Tool

This tool is one of the best around! It reorganizes your keywords perfectly so that you make use of all the possible space in your 7 keyword boxes. The more keywords you can fit into the 7 keyword boxes, the more search terms you can rank for! If you have been leaving wasted space in your 7 boxes, that may be the reason sales are not as high.

Here is my tutorial on how to use the find keywords and how to use this handy tool – https://youtu.be/fP1U6wGOeZE

Check out Hidden gems keyword tool – https://www.hiddengemsbooks.com/amazon-keyword-tool/?fbclid=IwAR3IHLhfcZJFhZdmUBoBC10DYnqZ1yYZzTae3S-lJR3LaH-1tkCFUnkPx7I (free)

Helium 10

Helium 10 is a great tool if you can afford it. It is very pricey, and that is why I only recommend it for the busiest period of the year for us publishers, Q4. You can put in the ASIN of the best-selling book in a niche you wish to enter, and Helium 10 will analyze and provide you with lots of keywords that the book ranks for on Amazon.

For Q4, I run a lot more ad campaigns for my books. I use the keywords that Helium 10 recommends to help my ad campaigns generate a lot of sales.

Check out Helium 10 – https://bit.ly/34NU8oI

Linktree

Linktree is a great help for social media. It allows you to create a single landing page with multiple clickable links. All you need to do is drop the main link to your account in your social media bio and then add clickable links to each of your books on Amazon with your Linktree account. Users can easily click on the link in your bio and then navigate through all of your links, making it a smooth process.

Check out Linktree – https://linktr.ee/ (free & paid versions)

Booklinker

BookLinker is another fantastic tool that should be combined with Linktree. It provides you with a unique URL for each book that redirects the customer to their local Amazon store. This is a great solution to make it easier for your global audience to purchase your books.

To simplify it even more, once you have created this universal link for your book, a user from the UK can click on it and be redirected to your book on Amazon.co.uk. If someone from the USA clicks on the same link, they will be taken to your book on Amazon.com. This makes the buying process easier for the customer and should result in more sales.

Once you have created your links on BookLinker, add them to your Linktree landing page.

Check out Booklinker – https://booklinker.com/ (free)

KDP Category Browser

The KDP Category Browser is a great tool for finding the best categories for your books. Type in any word in the search bar, and you will be provided with the best matching book category on Amazon, and you will be given the full category path.

Check it out here – https://www.kindleranker.com/articles/kdp-category-browser/ (free)

Ds Amazon Quickview

DS Amazon Quick View is a free chrome extension that allows self-publishers to see the BSR (best seller rank) of any product on Amazon. This is very helpful as you can learn which books are selling well in a niche. It is also useful to determine whether a niche is worth entering or not. If you find a niche and all of the books within that niche have BSRs over 1 million, it probably isn’t a good niche to enter due to low demand.

Check out Ds Amazon Quick View – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ds-amazon-quick-view/jkompbllimaoekaogchhkmkdogpkhojg?hl=en (free)

KDP Champ

KDP Champ is something I have stumbled across recently. This tool tracks a lot of important KDP data. You can track your advertising spend across all marketplaces, compare your monthly stats against each other, see how many paperback and hardback sales you have, and KDP Champ will also tell you how many organic sales you have gotten each month (this is very useful).

This tool also notifies you of sales on desktop or via their phone app and lets you know when you have received a review on your books.

I love data, and I love this tool!

Check out KDP Champ – https://tinyurl.com/KDPCHAMPMOTS

Photopea

Photopea is a free alternative to Adobe photoshop. The layout is very similar and you can do many of the same things. Photopea is fantastic for creating mock-ups for A plus content and for advertising your books on social media.

Check out Photopea – https://www.photopea.com/ (free)

Eye Dropper Color Picker

This free chrome extension allows you hover over any colour on a web page, and it will provide you with a hex code that is a perfect match. This is very useful if you come across website, books and products with beautiful color combinations. You can copy the colors and use them to create eye catching book covers.

Check out Eye Dropper – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/eye-dropper/hmdcmlfkchdmnmnmheododdhjedfccka?hl=en (free)

Colorspace

Colorspace is a useful website for helping you find a variety of color combinations for your books. If you have found a color that you wish to use for your book cover background, you can enter that hex code into the palette generator, and you will be given tons of different colors that compliment it. You can now choose a color palette that you like and apply it to your text and other elements.

Check out Colorspace – https://mycolor.space/ (free)

ChatGPT

I fell in love with ChatGPT as soon as I tried it. The possibilities are endless, and using it can save you a lot of time. ChatGPT is like having a personal assistant; you can ask it pretty much anything, and it will instantly reply with an intelligent answer. It is fantastic for a lot of businesses, but for self-publishing, you can use it for idea generation, editing and proofreading, marketing advice, pen name ideas, creating descriptions, and much more. It is currently free, but I can’t see it staying that way. I would happily pay up to $100 a month because that is how much I like it.

Watch my video on how to use ChatGPT to Create books 10 times faster! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjUe8Iuyi2k

Check out ChatGPT – https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/ (free)

I’m sure there are lots of other resources that can help with self-publishing, but I can only recommend things that I have tried and found helpful.

I hope these resources make your life easier! Good luck on your self-publishing journey.