Can You Kindle It?

I was quite daunted the first time I put a book on Kindle. In fact it took me two solid days of faffing about to do something that really should only take a matter of minutes.

I did find various snippets of helpful advice scattered round Blogland and Caroline got me thinking that maybe I should blog about it.

I don’t know everything (far from it) but I know the basics.

I found I was stumped by daft things like whether you have to use double line spacing (you don’t).

Most formatting doesn’t transfer to Kindle and the less of it there is the better.

Use page breaks between chapters and column breaks to leave a space between a heading and the text or if you want to leave a space between blocks of text.

Step by step this is how I did it.

First get a Kindle account. You can use the same log in as for your normal Amazon account and get it all set up so it’s ready when you are. I can’t remember exactly what I had to do, but I do remember it being quite straight forward.

Most questions are answered on the Kindle site.

You will need to download a tool to convert your Word document into ebook format. I use Mobipocket creator. Kindle have their own program. These programs are free. You should also download Kindle if you don’t own a device so that you can preview your book on your computer. Be warned, it won’t look as good on the PC screen as it will on the actual Kindle.

Once you have it as you want it, save your document as “web page, filtered”.

Open up your Mobi (or whatever), open your web page document and then build. It is as simple as that, it really is. And it takes seconds to do.

Open your newly created Kindle document. You should see what your book will look like – and if you don’t like it or spot mistakes, delete it and go back to your Word document and sort out what you don’t like, then save again as web page, filtered.

But assuming you are happy with it log in to your Kindle account and get started.

Oh, a cover! Too cowardly to get into the business of getting one from elsewhere, I used photos. Fiddled with them in Photoshop and added text over the top. For The Mother of the Bride & Other Stories, I used a photo of my oldest grandson sitting on his aunty's knee at my oldest son's wedding.

Kindle takes you through it all step by step. You add your title, your blurb, contributors (you!) and your cover image.

You are asked to say whether your work is in the public domain or not. And choose the category you want your work to appear in.

You will have to choose whether to enable Digital Rights Management. This one gave me a headache, but from what I read it is best to enable DRM. This is the one thing you cannot change once you’ve published your book.

You can change just about anything else, but not the DRM status.

Upload your book. Preview it (this preview will give you a far better idea of how it will look). Save it.

Next you have to set your price. You can set it in US dollars and tick to have all other currencies set accordingly. And choose your royalty rate, 35% or 70%. There are certain conditions according to which rate you choose, but it is all explained on the Kindle site.

Finally you publish and in less than a day your book will appear on Amazon. You have a dashboard on KDP where you can access your book and change price, blurb or anything else. Changes are usually made within a few hours.

I’m not very good at explaining things, but I hope I’ve been able to help someone and if there is anything else I haven’t covered that I may be able to help with, ask in the comments and I’ll do my best.