Final Section: Step Nineteen

Publishing on Kindle

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Publishing on Kindle

What is Kindle?

A Kindle is an electronic device designed specifically to read books on. It is put out by Amazon.com and comes in a couple of different types. The basic Kindle has a screen that is made to mimic the way paper looks, which makes it very pleasant and easy to read. This version only comes with a white background and black lettering. It uses a technology called “electronic ink” that makes it looks very much like print on a piece of paper.

The Kindle Fire is both a Kindle reader and a tablet device which has a color screen and on which you can download apps and watch movies, much like on an iPad or iPhone. There are also Kindle apps that work on iPads, iPhones and on your computer, whether it is a Mac or a PC.

A kindle can hold hundreds and even thousands of books, so you can have a very large library that you can carry around with you where ever you go.

Why Publish Your eBooks on Kindle

When you publish your eBooks on Kindle, you reach more people and can build more of an audience than is possible with an eBook on your own site. You can also create an Amazon Author Central Page for yourself on which you can link back to your site or sites, especially your blog.

The Author Central sign up can be found here – http://authorcentral.amazon.com – and it’s free. You can also make money with your Kindle book! Not a bad reason in itself. Just like on your own sites, you can give your Kindle book away, although unlike on your own site, you can’t capture names and email addresses to do so. So why do that? If you are smart, within the book, you can put a live link (yes, you can have live links in

your books!) that leads back to your squeeze page. Many people put a back page that says something like, “for more information, please visit http://mysite.com.” It is even more powerful to have specific information that they can get on your site that isn’t in the book, so they must go there.

Also, you can actually sell a book on Kindle that you have been giving away on your own site to capture names and addresses. We recommend that you keep the price of such books under $5.00, but you can charge anything you want to.

Speaking of charging, one of the major differences between eBooks that you publish on Kindle and the ones you sell on your own sites is in the price. You can easily charge $19, $29, even $99 for an eBook on a web site if the information is good enough. On Kindle, it is difficult to do that since people are used to paying under $10 for their Kindle books.

When determining the price for your book, take a look around to see what else is available in your niche and under your subject.

Now that we know the basics, let’s look at…

Formatting Your Kindle eBook

One of the things to know is that a Kindle doesn’t do fancy fonts. On the basic Kindle, you get a basic Courier font and on the other devices, it is a basic Times Roman font.

You can play with the size of the font a bit, for headings and such, but know that one of the features is that, on a Kindle, the reader can change the size of the page, so how you are used to setting up a page in a document is useless with Kindle. If they decide to make it huge for easy reading, only a small portion of what you would have put on a regular page will show.

Alternately, if the reader wants to make the font very small, a whole lot can appear on one page.
Because of this, it is considered bad form to try to force page breaks in the document until the end of a chapter or the end of a section.

Another issue is that, unlike most eBooks, where a paragraph is separated by a double space (look at the paragraphs in this eBook, for instance) Kindle uses the more traditional printed book format of simply indenting the first line of a new paragraph. You can force it to do a double space, but it is best to only do that when you are moving to a new subject.

The formatting of a Kindle book can make a lot of difference. Connie now has a lot of books available on Kindle, but the first one she put up wasn’t formatted very well. She wasn’t even really aware of that until she hired someone to format the second one for her and saw how much better that one looked on a Kindle. She eventually went back and had the first one completely reformatted.

Many people originally create their Kindle book in Microsoft Word or in Open Office, which is a free office suite much like Microsoft Office. (You can get that at http://OpenOffice.org). There are ways to convert a pdf document into Kindle format, but the results are iffy.

The cover of a Kindle book should be turned into a graphic, and Amazon likes it to be a fairly specific size. They like an image that is minimum of 1000 pixels on the longest

side, and prefer it to be 2500 pixels on the longest side. This is quite different from what we are used to with our pdf eBooks, where we want images to be “web ready”, which means much smaller than that. Be careful when creating your cover image. Simply making a smaller image larger in an image editing program like PhotoShop will make the resulting cover look grainy. You should start with good, high resolution images.

Also remember that, on the basic Kindle, even your cover will be black and white, so don’t rely on color to convey any meaning in the image.

Also, if you have images in a Kindle book, the best way to have them is to center them on their own line as opposed to wrapping the text around them like you are used to with a regular eBook. This is also due to the way the Kindle allows the reader to resize the page. If the text were wrapped around images, this function could result in very weird pages. The best idea is to keep it very simple.

Once you have created your book in Word, you could upload that to Kindle and it will convert it for you, but the results would be far less than ideal.

The way that Amazon suggests you do it is this (we have even more ideas after the Amazon hints):

1. 1. You will want a title page and “front matter”. (Front matter can include the title page, copyright page, dedication, preface and prologue. They suggest you have a title page at the minimum.)
   2. The title page should be centered, with the title on top and the author name under that. After the title page, insert a page break. (This is where a lot of people get into trouble. Don’t hit enter continually until a new page appears and don’t use the traditional “ctrl-enter” to force a page break. To get one that will work with Kindle, go to “Insert” on your Word menu bar and choose “Page Break” from there. This is also how you separate the chapters from each other.
   3. Formatting text is, as mentioned above, different from what we are used to with eBooks. The paragraphs are automatically justified on a Kindle, and the paragraphs have an indented first line. Do not use the tab key to indent your lines in Word, however. Instead, click on “Page Layout” and specify the amount of indentation you want in the “Indent” option.
   4. When typing your paragraphs, do not, do not, do not try to force line breaks (hit your return key) at the ends of lines to make your lines a specific length. This will make your book really ugly on a Kindle. Instead, just continue typing until you get to the end of the paragraph. Then, use a return at the end of the paragraph to start the new paragraph. Word will automatically indent it for you.

5. For your Table of Contents, again, it is different from what we are used to. Page numbers don’t really mean anything on a Kindle, since the reader can have his page be as big or small as he wants it. On a PC, you can use Microsoft Word’s built in Table of Contents creator to create an active Table of Contents for your book. On a Mac, you will need to create a Table of Contents manually using the Hyperlink and Bookmark functions.
6. Kindle also has an option called “Go To”. It can go to the cover image, the table of contents and the beginning of your book. When you upload your book, the cover image is uploaded separately, so the guide item for that is automatically created. For the other items:

• • • Place your cursor where you want the book to start. This can be your dedication page, but usually it will be the top of your first chapter. Click on “Insert”, then “Bookmark”. In the Bookmark name, type “Start” (without the quote marks) and click “Add”.
    • For the Table of Contents, place the cursor at the beginning of the first entry in your Table of Contents and again, go to “Insert” and “Bookmark”. Name this bookmark “TOC” (without the quotes) and click “Add”.

7. Once you have your book formatted, use the “Save As” function within Word, and save it as a “Web Page, Filtered (HTM & HTML)” format. (On a Mac, save it as “Web Page (.htm)”. Always remember when formatting your Kindle book that simpler is better. The more complex you try to get, the more odd it will look on the Kindle device when someone resizes the page view.

Now it’s time for…

Geoff’s Formatting Trade Secret

Geoff formats Kindle books for clients all the time and has found a bit of a workaround that makes it somewhat easier. There is a free program called “Mobi Pocket Creator” that you can download here: http://geoffhoff.info/mobipocket Rather than doing the book marking and table of contents generation within Word, once the paragraphs are all there, the chapter titles, etc. and you have the images the way you want them to be, again, save in a filtered HTML format.

Open that document in any HTML editor. (Geoff uses DreamWeaver, but you can use any of the free HTML editors available.) He formats the chapter headings to be H1 tags and any chapter sub headings to be H2 tags. (There have even been instances when he went all the way to H3 tags for sub-sub headings.)

At the end of each chapter, in the HTML code, enter the code:

<mbp:pagebreak />

on its own line.

Once you have done that, open the html file in Mobi Pocket. (It’s in the “Import Existing File” on the front page of Mobi Pocket.) Once you’ve imported your HTLM file, click on “Cover Image” on the left hand side and tell it where the cover image is. It will import it right into the book. (When you upload the book to KDP, however, you should upload the cover anyway.)

Then, click on “Table of Contents” on the left hand side. Click “Add Table of Contents”, then tell it what code you used for your chapter headings. In the first line, put h1. If you used h2 and h3, put them each on their own lines. Then hit “Update” and it will create a table of contents page for you and put it in the correct place in the document, with all the “Go To” information right there. At the top of the page is a link where you can see what the table of contents looks like. It will bring it up in a browser for you.

There is also a section on the left called “Metadata”. On that page, put the actual title of the book, the author’s name or names, the publisher, if you want it to be published by your own company name, and the ISBN. (You don’t need a publisher or an ISBN for this. If you want an ISBN, and you have used one for a physical version of the book, you can use that again, here, but Amazon recommends you use a new one.)

Make sure you keep your Metadata information. You will need it again when you upload the book.

Enter the language, the main subject and a description of your book. Remember your keywords when you title your book and when you write your description. Amazon is one of the largest search engines on the Internet and you want to be found!

At the bottom of the page, enter the suggested price. Don’t worry, this can be changed once you upload it to Kindle.

Once you have done this, click the “Build” button on the top of your page. Build it without compression or encryption. This program creates a .prc document with the title of your book.

Once it has been built, Geoff likes to preview it before sending it to Kindle. To do that, download the free Kindle Previewer here: http://geoffhoff.info/kindlepreviewer

Open the .prc file in the Kindle Previewer. You can choose to view it as it would appear in a regular Kindle, a Kindle Fire, a Kindle DX, the app on an iPad and an iPhone. Check to make sure nothing is amiss in any of these devices. If something is, you can edit your HTML file a bit with your HTML editor, swap that file for the one you used in Mobi Pocket, recreate the table of contents and rebuild.

Once you are satisfied, it’s time to…

Upload to Kindle

You must have a Kindle Direct Publishing account. It is free to set one up. Go to http://kdp.amazon.com/ to set it up. (You can set it up with your regular Amazon account information.)

Once you have your KDP account and are signed in, click “Add New Title”. It asks if you want to enroll the book in KDP select. There are very good reasons to do so and some reasons not to. If you do, your book will be available in the Amazon Prime lending library. You must agree to make the book exclusive on Kindle for 90 days, however, so if you had planned on selling it elsewhere, even on your own site as a pdf, you can’t.

Why let it be available as a “lending library” book? For several reasons. It will get th word out about the book. For 90 days, people can borrow it, leave comments and reviews on the books Amazon page, and help it raise up in the ranks of Kindle books. You will also get some money each time someone “borrows” it, your share of the fund. It isn’t quite as much as you would make as an actual sale, but it is a very good way to get the sales started.

Enter all the information in the fields that it asks for. There is a space for keywords. Again, this is important if you want your book to be found by the millions of Amazon customers!

Upload the cover image. Remember, it must be minimum of 1,000 pixels on the longest side.

Upload the .prc file you built. (Or, if you didn’t use Mobi Pocket to build the book, upload your html file.)

Save and continue.

On the next page, you assign rights. We suggest worldwide rights, but you may want to do individual territories.

If you price your book between $2.99 and $9.99, you can choose to get 70% royalties for each book sold. If it is between $.99 and $200.00, you can choose to get 30% royalties. This is because Amazon wants to keep Kindle books reasonably priced. We have no advice on which to choose, you must calculate what is fair for yourself. If you want to charge more than $9.99, you may get less sales, so you have to figure that in.

Once you have entered all that information in, if you are ready to make the book live, hit “save and publish”. If not, just hit “save” and you can come back to actually publish it. That’s it. You now have an eBook published on Kindle! 

Now it’s time to….

Promote Your Book

Promoting a Kindle book is much like promoting any other product. You have spent the last several months learning different ways to do that. However, here are a few ideas:

• Tell people about it in all your social media
• Tell your email list about it
• Give the members of your list a bonus if they purchase it (You can either set up a special optin page with an “Amazon receipt number” field for them to fill out, or simply have them send you their Amazon receipt email to claim their bonus.)
• Get other people in your niche to promote your book. Give them a bonus or gift for doing so, and offer their people a gift for purchasing it. (Here, it is a good idea to have an optin form for them to fill out with the “Amazon receipt number” field to claim their bonus. This is a great way to gather more names for your list!
• Have a brief period where you price the book at $0.00 to get many readers. Often, if you get enough traffic during that period, you will move up in the Kindle ranks, get great reviews and the book can take on a life of its own. This is a great strategy for a book of straight forward information. Be careful, however. If your book is at all controversial, no matter how good it is, you will get lots of negative reviews from people who simply disagree with you. A lot of negative reviews will thwart it from taking on a life of its own, unless you can figure out a way to capitalize on that very fact.
• Send out press releases regarding the book being published.
• Write blog posts about it, with links to your book on Amazon.
• (P.S. It is not only okay, but encouraged that, when you give someone a link to your book, you give them your Amazon Associate link. That way, you make a few pennies more on each book sold!)
• You are a creative entrepreneur. What ideas can you come up with to promote the book?

Action Steps

Decide which of your current eBooks to convert to a Kindle book

Format it for Kindle, upload and publish it.

Promote your new book!

Next week:

Outsourcing.