Nancy Hendrickson

For self-published authors who wanted to get their work in front of Amazon’s massive traffic, putting their work on the Kindle platform seemed like a no-brainer.

At the beginning of 2009, almost anyone with a U.S. bank account and an article or book in digital format could publish to Kindle—including the bad, the good, and the ugly.   The Kindle was like a lawless frontier boomtown  – - anything goes.

All through the spring months of 2009, I encouraged entrepreneurs and small business owners to write a great article or book and get it on Kindle; after all, having your work on Amazon IS a credibility builder in any business. Sadly, some of those people did publish, but the quality of their work was  . . . . shall I say . . . . crap.

In the end, Amazon brought a sheriff to town and the wide open field of “publish anything” came to an end.

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.

For the past many years, authors like me have supplemented their book and article-writing income by selling e-books. Promoting and selling e-books was a quick and easy way to re-purpose short stories, magazine articles, and books (fiction and non-fiction) with virtually no overhead.

The good news: profits were high; the bad news – - sales were dependent on the author’s ability to drive traffic to a website.

Thanks to Amazon’s Kindle Electronic Reading Device, all that has changed.

Now you can sell your creative works (fiction or non-fiction), set your own price, and have a potential audience of the tens of thousands of Kindle owners.