If you’re looking for a great way to make money online, then it’s crucial that you at least consider selling Kindle titles. This is an excellent way to make a particularly passive income and it has a ton of advantages even above and beyond other similar business models.
And to help you get started, here are all the steps that you need to take in order to get set-up and started. It’s usual in these kinds of resource sheets to share all the external references, guides and texts that you need to quickly and easily carry out the goals in the main ebook. We’re going to do that here to an extent but the main bulk of this text is instead going to be your resource by providing you with the steps and requirements you need to format and upload your files.
Kindle Format 8
Kindle Format 8 is the name that Amazon gives to the accepted Kindle formatting guidelines. You can find detailed instructions for this over here:
eBook Manuscript Formatting Guide
https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A17W8UM0MMSQX6
This contains all the information you really need to know and makes it nice and easy for you to find the specific information you’re looking for.
Follow the steps below to create your own book that adheres to this format. You’re also going to need Office 365 though, so make sure you head to the following link to grab that:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products
File Format
The file format you’re going to use is HTML. This is the same file format that is used in order to create a website and it’s important because it allows you to add in links, bookmarks and some basic formatting.
The good news is that you can very easily create these files in Word just by saving your usual DOC file or DOCX as a HTM or HTML. Just select ‘Web Page, Filtered’ or ‘Web Page’ when the ‘save as’ dialogue comes up in Word.
Fonts
Make sure only to use standard fonts. While you might like the idea of installing fancy fonts from Font Squirrel etc., this is only going to prevent your file from working properly.
Images
Images must be in JPEG format and should be inserted in the page with ‘center’ alignment. It’s also important that you insert them the proper way by going to Insert > Picture. If you just copy and paste, then the file actually won’t be included and so it’s not going to show up properly.
Adding a Table of Contents
A cool thing to add is an active table of contents. ‘Active’ means that your readers will be able to click the chapter titles and then jump directly to that page in the book.
Doing this is very easy in Word. Simply select ‘Heading 1’ from ‘styles’ (found in the Home tab) when you want to create a new chapter and use ‘Heading 2’ and ‘Heading 3’ for sub headings. Once you’ve written your whole book, you can then click ‘References > Table of Contents’ and then choose the style you want.
Make sure that you click to update your table whenever you update the book – otherwise the link won’t point to the right place!
It’s also very important to make sure that you add in page breaks whenever you start a new chapter, and in fact whenever you start a new page that you definitely want to appear on a new page. This can be useful when using images (above) because it lets you avoid the image straddling more than one page and then leaving an awkward gap with no text.
Additional Pages
There are numerous additional pages that you will often want to add to your books. These include:
- A title page
- A copyright page
- Dedication – This is up to you but can be a nice touch that adds professionalism.
- Preface – This usually goes just after your dedication.
- Prologue – A little introduction that is normally inserted just after the preface.
- Bibliographies
- Appendices
- Notes
- Glossaries
You don’t need all of these but it’s up to you if you wish to include them.
Additional Tools
Some additional tools that might come in handy include:
Kindle Previewer:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765261
This is used in order to preview your book once you’ve handled all the formatting. It needs to be downloaded and installed but will let you know precisely what the ePub will look before you upload it.
Kindle Textbook Creator:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002998671
It’s beyond the scope of this resource sheet but if you want to create a textbook, then you’re going to need some additional formatting options. This tool will help you to create a book that students can use but note that it is currently still in beta.
Free images: There are a few places you can find free images to use in your book. You need to ensure that they’re ‘creative commons’ which means that you are legally entitled to use them. You also need to ensure that they’re labelled for ‘commercial reuse with modification’ which means you’re allowed to profit from them and you’re allowed to edit them if necessary.
Some great places to look include ‘LittleVisuals.co’, ‘Superfamous.com’, ‘OpenPhoto.net’ and ‘VintagePrintable.com’. The latter offers images that have re-entered creative commons because they’re so old. There’s some cool stuff here though if you’re writing the right type of book!
Publishing
Finally, in order to publish your book you simply have to head over to Amazon KDP website and start following the simple steps.
Click ‘Create New Title’ and then you’ll be prompted to provide the following:
- the book name
- subtitle
- series title
- volume number
- edition number
- language
- author
- publisher
- contributors
- ISBN (if you’ve purchased one)
- Categories
- publishing rights
From there, you can begin the uploading process and then finally, you’ll get to set the pricing and royalties. This is all explained in much more detail in the full book but if you’re looking for an easy guide to pricing your book, Amazon offers just such a thing:
https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A22DBITFA52H1S
Keep this guide by your side while formatting and uploading your book and just remember: if you get anything wrong, there’s nothing stopping you from updating your listing later on!
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