For Part I Selling Your Book on Kindle
Okay, you have a Kindle account and are ready to sell. What next?
Before you can do anything, you need to prepare your book for Kindle formatting. Unlike e-books that can be spruced up with beautiful graphics and color pictures, Kindle books are best suited for non-graphical books.
Kindles can only display four shades of gray – - so if your book depends on a lot of pretty pictures, it probably isn’t suitable for Kindle conversion. Think of what a basic paperbook book looks like (black print on off-white paper) and you’ll have a good idea of how your book will look when displayed on the Kindle screen.
As someone who enjoys creating a beautiful document, I was disappointed that I couldn’t use all those colorful images in my Kindle book, but . . . . I compensated by creating gorgeous covers! (see below for how to create a Kindle cover).
In brief, there are four steps to get your books/articles uploaded and converted
1. Prepare your content for Kindle conversion.
2. Upload your prepared content to Amazon.
3. Amazon converts your document to Kindle format.
4. You may preview and edit, or publish immediately withour further editing.
You may upload several formats to Amazon, including HTML, unencrypted .mobi e-book files, Microsoft Word (.doc), plain text (.txt) and Adobe PDF). Amazon’s preferred format for uploading content is as a single HTML file. If you are using Microsoft Word, the recommendation is to ‘Save As HTML’ (in a filtered or simplified format, if available).
While plain text (.txt) files are supported, you need to use as little formatting as possible in your text files. Use as few hard line breaks (ends of lines terminated by hitting ‘Enter’) as possible. Ideally, every paragraph of your text will be one long line that is automatically wrapped in Notepad (or similar editors) at the edge of the editor screen, and re-flows the text when you resize that window.
Adobe PDF files are supported, but the quality of conversion is difficult to guarantee.
Steps for Simple Kindle Document Preparation Using Microsoft Word (no table of contents)
First, pick up a paperback book and look at the formatting. Most books are single-spaced with a double space between paragraphs. You’ll want your Kindle document in basically that same format. Here’s the easiest way to prepare your document:
1. Tab in the first line of paragraphs (Not all Kindle books have tabbed paragraphs, but visually it’s easier to read on the Kindle if tabs are used on the first line of a paragraph)
2. Single space your document
3. Double space between chapters or sections
4. Use Microsoft Word’s Heading styles on each chapter title (or section title). To do this, highlight the name of the chapter, then click on the Heading 1 style button. *If you do NOT want a Table of Contents, you can skip this step.
5. Spell check! (I have a note taped to my monitor reminding me of this step).
6. Save As: Web Page, Filtered (if you’re using Word 2007, this setting is under Save As: Other Formats)
If you own a Kindle, send your document as an e-mail attachment to your Kindle account e-mail, i.e. janedoe@kindle.com Amazon will automatically convert your document to Kindle format and send it back to your Kindle wirelessly.
This step isn’t required, but I always do it so I can view the document on my own Kindle to make sure all formatting is correct. Once I’m satisfied with the results, I’ll upload the document to Amazon.
For more information, video, audio on Kindle, see below.
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{ 1 comment }
Can you successfully convert bulleted lists this way? Or does all that go screwy? What about making sure that everything in the article has a Word style applied and that there are no spaces, returns etc? Does that not matter when doing it your way?
I was also told the Table of Contents doesn’t translate well into HTML and have to be manually entered. So I’m confused. Have you had any of these problems?