How to Get Your Book on Kindle...

Rather than put my feet up now that my book is live on Amazon, I thought I would share with you my experience of getting the book onto Kindle.  I am sure there are many who, like me, were a bit fearful of trying to have a go and are strongly considering paying someone else to Kindle-ise your book for you.

Having been through it myself, I can tell you that there really is nothing to worry about AND, if you do a couple of simple things BEFORE you get to far into drafting your manuscript it can be even easier!

I don't intend this to be a detailed exposition of how it is done.  It has already been done many times before and I'd rather share the website that I used rather than repeat it all here:

http://declanconner.com/kindle-formatting/


Declan Conner is an experienced self-pubber and although the layout of his site is not very orderly, there is a wealth of excellent material there - and not just on formatting.

Anyway, here are a few things that I think might be worthwhile knowing:

1) The biggest time saver for me would have been knowing that it is good practice when writing for Kindle to only have one space after a full stop (a period if you are reading this from the US!), whereas normally you would have two,  Yes, of course I did not know that and had to go through the entire manuscript to delete them all.  Infact I had to review a couple of times to weed out the ones I missed and I probably did not get them all of them in the end!

2) The same applies to a slightly lesser extent on the indenting.  I had used a different convention than suggested by Declan so I had to re-edit the document to get it right.

3) The one thing you might not have encountered before is bookmarking and hyperlinking.  This allows the reader to easily navigate from the table of contents to individual chapters.  Declan also recommends putting bookmarks at the end of each chapter so you can be taken back to the contents page.  I found Declans guide here a little confusing but I still managed to figure it out.

4) Once you have the manuscript properly formatted, you need to create the file in the right format.  To do that you can download Mobipocket Creator from the Amazon site.  The good news is that it really couldn't be easier to use and you can have the finished file in less than a minute.

5) The file needs to be checked to make sure it looks OK in the Kindle format.  I downloaded the Kindle Preview tool but ended up managing to see it in my Kindle PC version automatically - so that was good.

6) At this point you are ready to upload to Kindle.  This was a little trickier than I had anticipated, simply because there are a couple of very important decisions that need to be made.  By this point it was in the early hours of the morning and I was struggling to maintain focus.  Some of the key decisions include:

a) Should I protect my file (DRM) or leave it open?
b) At what price should I sell my book?
c) In which category should I sell my book?
d) Should I participate in the Lending Library program, which meant I was signing exclusively with Amazon for a minimum of 3 months?

I will write more about each of these in future posts.  But the good news is that once I had these worked out, the upload process was really very smooth. Within 3 or 4 hours, my book was for sale on Amazon.  The wonders of modern technology eh?

The only snag was that my cover was missing.  The upload process should have used the image within the Kindle file but it didn't seem to be working.  So I went back and uploaded that separately - within a few hours it was up.  Phew!

Introducing George Chedzoy!

One of the most important skills that any budding writer has to master has nothing to do with writing at all!  That is the skill of networking.  And so it is time to practice this art by introducing you to George Chedzoy.

I have known George for five or six years.  I have never actually met him, except in cyberspace.  I first came across him on ebay when I was wasting time just searching for various things.  I think I was looking for holiday accommodation in Abersoch, Wales.  Anyway, George happened to be selling his children's book on ebay, by hard copy installments (sounds old school now eh?  But this was before ebooks had really got off the ground).  As the story unfolded around Abersoch, a place I love, I was an easy sell and purchased the first few installments.  I still have them on my shelf actually!  But it seemed like George had given up on his mission as I never saw the final installments for sale.

A couple of months ago, I was again searching for something about Abersoch.  George's book came to my mind and I wondered, perchance, if his book had ever been completed and  was now available.  I searched and by a huge stroke of luck, he had just started a blog publicizing his newly completed novel and had just started selling his Kindle book on Amazon.co.uk.!

I was delighted and I was even more delighted to be his first ever online customer of the book!  We've since struck up a good working relationship including  learning from each other's marketing initatives as well as providing detailed reviews of our books on a chapter by chapter basis.

We  now both have links to each others blogs on our sites, but I will take the opportunity of highlighting it again in this post:

http://georgechedzoy.blogspot.com/

And here is the link directly to his book on http://www.amazon.co.uk/:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005E0AK2O/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=georched-21&camp=1406&creative=6394&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B005E0AK2O&adid=04C82CES6ANB56V1J1CY&

You can find much more about his book on either site - but suffice it to say you will particularly enjoy this if you like good old mysteries in the Enid Blyton style, as I certainly do.  The book is very reasonably priced as well so I highly recommend. By the way, you may not know that you can download a Kindle app to your PC to view these books - you don't need to buy a real Kindle...

Anyway that's all for now..