Category Archives: Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing

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8 Tips For Formatting Your Book

These tips from Don Massenzio may help you make formatting decisions. I particularly like the idea of using 1.5 line spacing instead of single spacing in print books. Maybe I’ll try that next time!

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Check out my Beginner’s Cheat Sheet for formatting your hard copy book in InDesign!

Don Massenzio's avatarAuthor Don Massenzio

This blog post is designed to help fellow independently published authors improve the quality of their work, but most of the tips here apply to the formatting of any book. I’m speaking of the formatting of books for the consumption of readers, not formatting your manuscript to send off to an agent or publisher.  There are a whole other set of rules for that exercise.

I’ve put together a list of ten tips that you should consider when putting your book together. They are not in order of priority, but together, they can make your book stand out from the millions of others available through your favorite sales channel.

1. Put Some Thought Into Your Cover

I have to admit, this was something I didn’t waste a lot of time on when I published my first book, Frankly Speaking. I just went ahead and used the Kindle cover creator and cranked…

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February 20, 2017 · 4:43 pm
January 15, 2017 · 9:00 pm

6 Basic Tech Skills for Writers

Tech skills for writersHere’s a post about some of those mysterious tech skills that can confound non-tekkie verbal people like us writers. Check it out—whether you need to communicate with editors or with beta readers or if you just want to format your own book for Amazon or Smashwords. I can attest that you DO need Styles, and I’ve found GIMP, a free program recommended by this post, to work wonderfully as a graphics editor. You’ll need this information to format your hard-copy editions as well. Let me know what you think!

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Filed under Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, ebooks publishing and selling, indie publishing, Print on Demand for fiction writers, Publishing, self editing for fiction writers, Self-publishing, Smashwords, Tech tips for writers, Working with literary editors, Writing, writing novels

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November 7, 2016 · 10:58 am

A Book Production Checklist for Indie Authors

A comprehensive list for producing your own book for ingram, CreateSpace, KDP, and others! Lots of links and resources. Thanks, Chris!

Chris The Story Reading Ape's avatarChris The Story Reading Ape's Blog

An extract by Carla King, on BookWorks Site:

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Are you ready to upload your book for sale to the online retailers?

Got all your front and back matter, images, fonts, and ISBNs?

Use this checklist to make sure you’ve done everything you can to create a quality book that competes with books produced in the traditional publishing houses.

But first, here’s a quick overview of the entire book production process.

It begins with an unedited manuscript and ends with a check of the final proof before distribution.

Continue learning at the following link:

Book Production Checklist

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November 3, 2016 · 10:38 am

Do you know how to publish an ebook with pictures?

Here’s some simple advice that may prove useful even if you’re not working on a children’s picture book! Jean Cogdell tries things out for us and shares!

Jean M. Cogdell's avatarJean's Writing

Using MS-Word?

Success at last! When I loaded it up to KDP, everything worked!i-did-it

If you write children’s books or comic books, I’m sure you’ve heard of Kindle Kids’ Book Creator. This program is terrific. However, the program limits which electronic devices that can open and read the book.

I wanted my picture books to be available on e-readers and tablets. I found out after using KKBC for A Most Reluctant Princess; this wasn’t possible. Using KKBC limits which electronic devices available.  Since publishing my first picture book, I’ve read tips, blogs, instructions, and watched videos searching a way to use MS-Word.

No one had the answers I needed. So, I began experimenting until I figured out a process that worked.

My new book, A Reluctant Little Prince, in e-book form, is written on MS-Word and can be read on a Kindle. Yay!

For the print version…

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Filed under Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, book design for creative writers, ebooks publishing and selling, indie publishing, Self-publishing, Tech tips for writers, Writing

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October 31, 2016 · 9:58 am

Some Helpful Advice on Copyright, ISBNs, and More

Books leading to a door in a brick wallJoel Friedlander is always a wonderful resource. Today’s “Mailbag” covers some important questions about copyright and ISBNs, as well as some questions about vendors and formatting decisions. Check it out!

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October 5, 2016 · 11:14 am

Free Book Promotions? What Do You Think?

Book open to the starsHere are some evaluations of book promotion services from The Book Designer (a great site for all things indie). The question is whether sites like these are better than membership in KDP Select.

Share with us your own views! Have you tried any of these services? Do you have others to recommend?

 

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August 26, 2016 · 10:59 am

How To Set Up An Amazon Giveaway

Just what I needed! I was hovering over the Amazon Giveaway screens for King of the Roses and discovered I didn’t know how the odds-setting worked. This post, from February of this year, explains it! This is Nicholas Rossis’s “secondary blog” that shows a reblog button, but you can access the original, with many informative comments, here. Now watch for my Giveaway, coming up next week!

Nicholas C. Rossis's avatarNicholas C. Rossis

Amazon has recently started offering everyone the opportunity to offer a giveaway. What’s interesting about this is that you can run one for pretty much any item in their inventory – except for ebooks. So, you can run a giveaway for your print edition, but not your Kindle one.

Alternatively, you could go all the way and offer people, say, a Kindle. Or, indeed, an item that is somehow related to your books. For example, if you’ve written a cookbook, you may give away kitchen gadgets or aprons. The key here is to be imaginative and original.

So, how would you go about it? Here’s the complete how-to.

Step 1: Find your book

Right after the reviews, you will see a “Set up an Amazon Giveaway” button. If you can’t find it, press Control-F (for Find) on your browser and enter the word “giveaway”…

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Filed under Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, business of writing, ebooks publishing and selling, Free Books, indie publishing, King of the Roses, Marketing books, Money issues for writers, Print on Demand for fiction writers, Self-publishing, Tech tips for writers, V. S. Anderson, Virginia S. Anderson, Writing, writing contests, writing novels

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August 6, 2016 · 1:59 pm

Closed for business: Two big things that could penalize your Amazon author account (and how to prevent them)

Here’s help negotiating Amazon’s review process! So much mystery!

Troy Lambert's avatar

Make no mistake. If you have heard me speak before almost anywhere or read anything I have to say about writing, I emphasize one thing above all else:

“You can be as artsy as you want to be while you are writing your book, but once it is finished, it is a product. A product you must distribute and market in order for it to sell.”

There’s another part to this reality of writing as a business: the number one distributor of ebooks remains Amazon, and for most authors about 80% of their sales would disappear, should the online giant refuse to sell their work. Discoverability on Amazon is the number one trick authors, publishers, and book marketers are trying to crack. Of course, if it works on Amazon, the same method will likely increase sales on iBooks and Nook as well, provided an author even offers their books for…

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July 3, 2016 · 12:12 pm

My First BookBub Rejection

I highly recommend alfageeek’s candid, nuts-and-bolts reports on the marketing process. See, for example, his series on Twitter ads. Now here’s one on Bookbub, which is way out of my league at present. but which might be useful to you.
And may I echo his exhortation: If you’ve read either of my books, PUH-LEEZE post even a few lines of a review.

Joshua Edward Smith's avataralfageeek

EntropyI decided to take a shot at doing a promo with BookBub. Over the past few years, they have become the most effective marketing platform for e-books. Their reputation is that they reject almost all submissions, and they never tell you why they rejected you. But if you manage to get accepted, then you will sell a lot of books. They regularly update a chart that shows exactly how many books people in various categories and price points sell. That’s useful, because if they accept you, the listing is very expensive.

I signed up to their email list to be notified about Erotic Romance novels, since that’s the best category for my novels. (Even though I can’t say that on Amazon.) I was pleased to see that the books being promoted were not out of my league. Of the 24 Erotic Romance books they have listed right now, there…

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May 2, 2016 · 9:37 am

Formatting in Word for PC users

Here’s a detailed post by Melinda Clayton from Indies Unlimited on stripping unwanted formatting from your Word document before submitting it to Kindle. Her directions apply to PC users. I use a Mac, and was able to format my books fairly easily following Mark Coker’s directions for Smashwords. In both cases, making sure you have a clean document is essential.

beautiful business woman scared

My InDesign experience is much more complicated. I’m close to submitting to Ingram and will see how it works. More on my crazy journey into InDesign for IngramSpark coming soon!

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