How To Format Your EBooks For Amazon's Kindle

If you are not utilising Amazon Kindle already to show yourself as a believed author, you really should be. It's a good technique to make authorization and trade name yourself as an skillful. The only downside of Kindle is that it's a little bit uncomfortable to get the formatting just right.

Now I've composed a number of articles about the ability from Kindle and the its profits - think back there are authors who've literally sold 1000000s of Kindle ebooks, one who hit the headlines a fewer months back - over a million copies in 1 year at just 99cents. Not much I get wind you say, but that guy netted across $330,000 and just think about the viral exposure he found -what do you think will happen the future time he brings out a ebook on Kindle? It's not rocket science, so get involved...

The easiest way to do it is to upload the written document at once to Kindle Direct Publishing. The web site is kdp.amazon.com. Once this is done correctly, your book can be viewed on Kindle devices and any device with a Kindle app. This lets in PC's, Macs, Androids, Blackberry phones, iPhones, and iPads.

Arranges Kindle Accepts

Kindle will accept several different formats:

- Microsoft Word (.doc or.docx)

- ePub (.epub)

- Plain text (.txt)

- HTML (.htm,.html or.zip)

- Adobe PDF (.pdf)

- Rich Text Format (.rft)

- MobiPocket (.mobi or.prc)

While lots of folks of course choose to upload Microsoft Word documents directly to Kindle, I'd notify against this. The reason is that there's additional secret writing in Word documents that the Kindle reader can't handle. What this code will do is mess up your formatting completely. Your graphics will be screwed up and your fonts misaligned.

I commend using Rich Text (.rft) or plain text (.txt) because neither have any additional code that can make things hard for the Kindle reader.

Images In Your ebooks

Images have to be in .jpg format. They should be adjusted in the center only. Don't copy and paste them into your written document; they should be inserted instantly. Presently, the Kindle device itself only shows images in greyscale, but devices with Kindle apps can show full color.

Other Formatting Considerations

- No headers or footers

- No bullet points

- No strange characters that the device might not be able to read

- Bold, italics and indentations are alright

- Add a page break at the end of each chapter or they'll all run together

- Use 'indent' under Paragraph Settings instead of tab key if you need to indent

I propose making the table of contents at the very end of your Kindle formatting. The reason is that the page numbers will be different than those of your original document. It looks pretty weird to have an incorrect table of contents, so do this as a last step and make sure it's right.

Before you upload, you should also scroll direct the book slowly one last time looking for anything funny. Be on the observatory in particular for humorous page breaks or tabs that you forgot to take out.

Using MobiPocket Creator

Another option that makes formatting a Gordon Bennett of a lot easier is to use MobiPocket Maker. This is a free program you can get from MobiPocket.com that converts HTML files into .prc, which is an eBook format. It turns your HTML file directly into Kindle-ready eBooks, which means one more step (converting.doc file to HTML, then HTML to .prc) but eliminates a lot of the formatting hassles.

Once you publish your first Kindle eBook, you'll get a sense for which files exercise best for you. Just don't get frustrated if you have to do a little re-formatting. It becomes 2nd nature after a while. And if you're going to be publishing a lot (which you should be!), it's well worth it to download MobiPocket Creator because it makes it much easier.


ebooks for kindle