Publish an Ebook in Amazon’s Kindle Book Store!

That $399 is pretty steep. They’ll have to get it down to under $100 and make up the difference on ’software’ (ie book) sales.

Anyway, best of luck to you on your eBook!

Great article! I was looking around the web to find out how publishers can get their content on the Kindle service, when I saw your article at Blogging Zoom.

Is there a similar process for adding blogs for Kindle subscriptions or is that done in a different way? I noticed that some of the big blogs are already in the Kindle Store at Amazon, but how about the other blogs or the smaller blogs like mine?

I too think the $400 price is high, but perhaps not for the early adapters, and the people who like to jump in when something new comes out. I was also surprised to see how many user reviews were posted in just days after the Kindle was launched. Apparently there may be a strong niche market for this service.

Kind of makes you want to start writing more doesn’t it?

Good rundown, Pat. I’ve been meaning to try to figure out what was behind Kindle, as usual, Amazon did apoor job in actually explaining what it was, other than an expensive gadget. Now that I see the whole program laid out, it makes more sense, but they are certainly off the mark.

As Frank C. noted, it is almost as if Amazon didn’t sell books. We’re used to paying $20 and up … even way up … for physical books. insrtead of cutting their own throat with $9.99 books they would be smarter to sell the electronic books at the traditional prices and make the Kindle cheap or give away with a larger purchase. Apparently, they never heard how Gilette made a business out of giving away the razor to sell the blades. (Hmm, razor blades, what the heck are they?) LoL.

I actually dropped by to recommend a great, free, photo editor/image handling tool called Paint.net It has many of the features of PhotoShop and other high-priced tools but is free and makes good use of the Mircrosoft .Net framework which is often on your PC doing little or nothing anyway. I find it very useful for doctoring photos, converting formats, etc. A kewl tewl.
http://www.getpaint.net/

Dave, that makes sense to me! And thanks for the tip on the photo editor. I will check it out.

Emma, thanks!

Thanks, Kacie. I thought it was expensive, too, but believe it or not, a lot of people are buying it. It is actually sold out at Amazon right now. One of my brother’s coworkers has ordered one.

Pat, Thanks so much for this post. I was on the Amazon site for the 3rd time this morning trying to find out how to publish for Kindle, and their instructions and help network are close to useless. Your detailed entry here is much appreciated. I already know HTML but couldn’t find any good explanation on how to convert a book to that format. My manuscript was in Word when it went to the designer, and from then on it’s been in PDF format, and there have been some changes. So I’m not sure whether to go back to Word and make all those changes, or convert the PDF into text and add formatting.
A question: Did your book contain illustrations? Do you know how Kindle handles them? If they’re too wide/tall for the Kindle screen, does Kindle reduce them in size? Thanks for any info on that.
In return, I can offer help if you need it on getting your book itself on sale at Amazon, I’ve done that (“Practically Shameless”).
Thanks again for this very useful blog entry.
Alyce Barry

Jen, thanks for the info on booksurge. I will look into it. I would love to get a book published on Amazon (besides the Kindle book).

Clickbank is great. They take care of everything. It is very easy. I found out that they do review your book. They requested one change for mine, but I was happy to do it.

Hi Christopher – glad to be of help! How do you like your Kindle so far?

Hi Andrea, I don’t see why you couldn’t advertise your ebook wherever you want. I must admit I didn’t read through all their terms, but I don’t see what could be wrong with advertising, as long as you are not spamming or something.

Thank you.

Thanks for your tips. I wish to publish my first ebook in Amazon Kindle. However, I don’t have a bank account in the US. Can I publish my ebook for free? Appreciate your advice.

How do I update my book?? like tags,and all that? by the way, I can’t see the book on Kindle unless i re-upload ??

I’ve finally decided to publish my novel “Haley Cork and the Blue Door” as an e-book, but when I try to create an account on Amazon I get a failure notification. Is anyone else experiencing this problem, and does anyone know of a solution?

Hi all:
I have three books at this time on Kindle, however I would like to add a (free) short story so readers may see some of my work. Can you explain just how I may go about this?

Thanks
Raymond Mayotte

Thanks for a very useful article. I can’t find the answer, though, for the most important part, as far as I’m concerned: what is the optimum web page size that I should prepare my content for so that it looks best on the Kindle? 1024×768? 640×480? Any ideas there?

This is extremely important for me, because I have a lot of headings and TOC’s with lengthy sentences. If I have to trim too much text, it reduces its usefulness a lot.

Thanks for anything you can do to help.

The DTP site has an applet which simulates a kindle. It would be prudent though to get a Kindle to verify elements which may differ from the hardware or expectations. With the introduction of the DX another complication has been added. Try to steer away from captured text images since they cannot be resized to fit. Having the hardware will also help during the post preprocessing cycle in formatting text flow and anchors. The applet does a shoddy job of reproducing the hardware behavior as I have witnessed.

Wow! That’s more than 1/4 of the clickbank selling price. Well, marketers get higher amount than the owner itself in that case?

Excellent post, thank you – I just set up a trial of my book last night and wondered why my pretty formatting and hyperlinks didn’t work at all!

One question – can you change font sizes on the html document? I had some heads in 8pt and some in 12pt and they all came out the same. Also, you say to use colour – but does the Kindle use colours? I thought it was mono.

You can also download a kindle book from Amazon to your personal computer for free. I did it on my desktop PC and really should have downloaded to my laptop for portability. The Amazon site also says that it will soon support a Mac download.

Hi, Pat! Thank you for your tips! I brainstormed an idea for a “chic lit” book series this weekend — and plan to get started soon! Thank you, again!

Diane (pen name = Cara Craig).

Niki, it has been a while since I did it, but yes, I believe you need to re-upload it to see your changes.

For updating your book, do it the same as the first time. It depends on what format you used. I used Word, so I would update in Word, then save to HTML and upload. I guess you could change the HTML directly too, without using Word.

I’m not sure what you mean by tags. If you mean HTML tags, make your changes in Word or change the HTML directly, then re-upload.

Hi Raymond,

I’m not sure how you would offer a free story on Kindle. Maybe you could offer it on your website instead?

Hi Max,

You should not format the content for any particular size of page. The Kindle will size it the way it wants to.

I believe if the headings and TOC’s are too long, it will just wrap the text.

The best thing to do is just try uploading it, and see how it looks. You can always change it.

Good luck!