Publish an Ebook in Amazon's Kindle Book Store!

How would you like to be a published author on Amazon.com? I did it!

Check out my book listing on the left.

Amazon has come out with a new book reader electronic device, called the Kindle. (See the Amazon ad below.) Some people think this may be the next big thing for reading books. It could be – it does look very easy to use.

So a couple of days ago, I was browsing Amazon.com, and I found this question:

Are You an Author or Publisher? Find out how to publish your own Kindle Books

“Yes!” (I thought to myself.) “I am an author! I just published a book yesterday!”

So I followed the link and got my book published in the Kindle program. It took less than 24 hours for it to be live.

It is free to do this – so far. I guess they are trying to get a lot of books in Kindle format so that they can sell more Kindle readers.

The help they give you is confusing, to say the least. So I’m going to give you some tips on how to get this done as easily as possible with your ebook.

1. Quick Start Guide

   First, get this Quick Start Quide. It’s a lot easier than wading through all their help materials and forums.

2. Uploading Your Book

   You can upload your book in a variety of formats, but they recommend HTML. I used the Word format document (.doc) from which I created my PDF. I saved the Word document as a Web Page (.html) from inside Word (doing a “Save As…”). This worked well.

3. Preparing Your Links

   Before saving your Word document as html, though, you need to go through and change all the links in your document to “human readable”, since they will not be clickable from the Kindle reader. For example, instead of a link like this: Top 100 Moneymaking Blogs, you need to show it as: www.45n5.com/top100 or http://www.45n5.com/top100/, so that the people reading your book on their Kindle can read the link and type it into their browsers.

4. Formatting Tips

   Once your book is uploaded, you will be able to preview it to see how it will look in the Kindle. They do give you the option of downloading their HTML file and correcting it. But I found it easier to just correct my original file and re-upload it.

   Here are some tips for formatting:

   • Don’t have page breaks. The Kindle will break pages where it wants to anyway. The Kindle pages are smaller than a regular page. If I wanted something to appear on one page (which I did for my title page), I just noted how it turned out in the Kindle and then adjusted the spacing accordingly in my original, then re-uploaded it.
   • Put your headings in a different color. I had my headings in blue for my ebook anyway, and I noticed that it looked good in the Kindle.
   • At first, it seemed like the Kindle was inconsistent in how it displayed my headings. I went back to my document, and coded the main headings to be H1 and the subheadings to be H3, and that seemed to take care of it.
   • Leave some space before and after your headings. It will pretty much format in the Kindle the same as you have it in your Word document.
   • Just keep trying. If you don’t like the formatting, change it and re-upload it. The process is pretty quick, once you get used to it.

5. Keywords

   Choose your Search Keywords carefully. This is how people will find your book in their searches. I can search and find my book under the keywords I originally entered. I thought of a bunch more and entered them, but they don’t work yet. It probably takes a while to get your search terms into their index.

6. Product Image

   Uploading a product image is optional, but I highly recommend it. Haven’t you ever browsed Amazon.com and just skipped right over those products that did not have an image? Even the most simple image is better than none.

   Amazon’s requirements are an image in .tif or .jpg format, with at least 500 pixels on the longest side. They recommend 1200 pixels.

   

   I tried enlarging this little picture of my ebook (see it on the left), and I uploaded that. It looked horrible, though.

   Then I noticed that most book images on Amazon are just a flat image of the cover, so I created a quick cover image in Microsoft Image Composer. That’s my image editor – I don’t have Photoshop.

   

   You can create your cover image in any image editor. I just did a blue background, put on text for the title and author, and put an image on it. (Does the image look familiar? I cropped a part of my blog header for the image.)

   I created mine at 850 x 1100 pixels, just because I know a sheet of paper is 8 1/2 by 11, so I knew the proportions would look right. I think it turned out fine. A lot better than no image at all.

7. Pricing

   Although my book costs $36 on Clickbank, I priced it at $9.99 on Amazon’s Kindle. They advertise the Kindle by saying that most books for it will be at $9.99 or lower, so I did not feel that many people would buy it if I priced it higher than that.

   Kindle books are different than ebooks. You can’t print them out or click the links in them. You need the Kindle reader in order to read them.

   If you are upset that I am charging $36 on Clickbank and only $9.99 on Kindle, then be my guest and purchase the book on Kindle – and buy the $399 Kindle reader so you can read it!

   The price the publisher gets right now is 35% of the sale price on Kindle. So I’ll get about $3.50 for each book.

   For me, that’s ok. I have lots of links in the book to my blog, so I might get some new blog readers. I’m sure Kindle readers are a different audience than blog readers, so I probably would not reach these people otherwise.

8. Getting Started

   Here is the link to get started with Kindle:
   http://dtp.amazon.com/mn/signin.

Well, this turned out to be quite a log blog post. Congratulations – you are nearing the end!

I had heard that it is hard to get a book or ebook published on Amazon.com. It sounded like a lot to go through. So I was pleased at how easy the Kindle process is.

I figure it can’t hurt to have my book on Amazon’s Kindle book list. Even if I don’t make many sales, I’ve got the prestige of being a published author on Amazon.com!

In the future, I plan to investigate how to get my book on Amazon’s regular (non-Kindle) book list.

Do you plan on uploading your ebook to Kindle?

- Pat Doyle