A QUICK GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING (FREE!) ON KINDLE
I. OVERVIEW:
This little primer is a brief (13 pages), rough overview of the steps
you need to take to self-publish your book for Kindle and is also
a "quickie" instruction sheet on how to create HTML files, using
the limited set of HTML formatting commands that Amazon allows
you to use in publications you submit for Kindle. Being published
on Kindle not only means your book will be available in Amazon's
Kindle Store for the Kindle device, but it will also be available
for all the other devices like the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android,
Mac, and PC for which Kindle "apps" are readily available. (The PC
app is free from Amazon; I'm not sure about the apps for other
devices, as I'm a Neo-Luddite, but I think most or all are free.)
This Part I is, briefly, a quick summary of the steps to take in
the process of self-publishing (free!) on Kindle.
I should point out that I'm a "Windows guy," so I'm not sure
how much of this information translates for Mac users. Most
of it does, I suspect, except that I don't know what software
Mac users would utilize to create or edit plain text files,
or to create a .zip file. Otherwise, the HTML coding should
(should) be the same, regardless of whether you use a Mac or
a PC to create your uploadable HTML file.
So here is a quick summary of what you need to do to get your
book published at Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP for short).
1. Write the book, preferably saving it as plain text (ASCII) and
then editing it with WordPad or NotePad (both are included with
Windows, listed under "Accessories," if you click on the "Start"
button and then on "All Programs"), in order to convert your book
into an HTML (hypertext) file. See paragraph 3 below for more on
how to turn plain text into HTML.
NOTE: Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) will accept .PDF files or Word
files, but they may not look like you expected and KDP advises you
not to. Word 2007 .docx files are not accepted at all, as they are
incompatible with earlier versions of Microsoft Word -- whose .doc
files KDP can handle. Sort of. Sometimes. (I tried submitting a
Word file with an embedded image, which showed up on the Kindle
"previewer" as a blank square space, instead of the image I had
included.)
Images or complex formatting in either Word (.doc) or .pdf
files apparently do not convert well into the Kindle format
and KDP recommends NOT submitting .doc or .pdf files.
You can also submit a plain, unformatted text (.txt) file,
which KDP will format for you in VERY basic HTML, just
enough to make it fly, and inserting breaks between
paragraphs, but apparently does not do much more.
2. Create a cover image file that will appear on your ebook's
web page in the Kindle Store. (And you can also use it at the
beginning of your book, by linking to it from the HTML file.)
The cover image MUST BE A JPEG FILE (.JPG FILE). Images linked
to from your book (the HTML file) can be in .jpg, .gif, .png,
or .bmp formats.
3. Add HTML tags to your text. (See basics of HTML coding below in
Part IV). The end result will be a text file full of funny tags
like , , , , xxxx,
that either format your text in various ways or else are hypertext
"jumps" to another part of your book, or links that insert an
image file at a particular spot. For example, Kindle books should
not have page numbers and you should use special fonts or font
sizes, boldface style or italics, etc., only sparingly, such as
in chapter titles or headings, or to highlight a word or phrase,
since pages get resized when the Kindle user changes the font
size. Your "ordinary" text should be the default, and thus
left undefined as to font style, size, color, or font name.
Instead of using page numbers, if you have a table of contents,
you will insert Chapter 3 hyper links to
"anchors" where each chapter begins, like ,
so the user can "jump" immediately to Chapter Three from the table
of contents.
4. Once the book is readied as an HTML file, put it and any image files
that are to appear in the ebook, as well as the cover image (if you
wish to include it at the start of the ebook), all in a single directory
on your Windows PC and use a ZIP utility program to archive all of
those files in a single compressed .zip file.
5. Next, go to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) on the Internet,
at http://kdp.amazon.com and sign up for a self-publishing
account. It's FREE. Once you have signed up and have a
username and password (if you don't already have an Amazon
account), log in to your KDP self-publishing site and go to
your BookShelf (which will be empty at this point). Enter your
book information there, and upload (separately) your cover
image .jpg file and your .zip file (which may also contain
a copy of your cover image). See Part V below for details
on setting up your Kindle self-publishing account (for all
your books) and for setting up one specific book on the KDP
site for Kindle publication.
II. RECOMMENDED FORMAT:
The recommended format for submitting files for Kindle publication
is to make your book into a single HTML (hypertext, or web page)
file, with a file name suffix of either .htm or .html, like
mybook.htm.
IMPORTANT: All the file names you submit must be in
lower case letters, or KDP's processing software will
instantly reject it.
However, you don't directly upload the HTML file itself; you
must "wrap" it in a ZIP wrapper and upload the .zip file, such
as mybook.zip. If you have any images in your book, they must
also have lower case file names and must also be wrapped in the
same .zip file. (See Part III to learn how to enter HTML tags at
appropriate places in your text that will link to the image files,
and cause the image to be displayed where you want it.) Image files
included in your text can be .jpg, .gif, .png, or .bmp files.
An example of the files you would "wrap" into your single ZIP file,
mybook.zip, using a ZIP utility program, might be as follows:
-- mybook.htm (the book, in HTML format)
-- mycover.jpg (your cover art, if you want to include it at the
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start of your ebook; you will have uploaded
this image separately in the setup process)
-- image01.jpg (a photo, drawing, graph, or other kind of image)
-- image02.gif (ditto)
-- image03.png
-- image04.bmp
The preferred format for Kindle is a .HTM or .HTML file and
any included image files that your HTML file links to, all
"wrapped" in the single .zip file which you can upload to
KDP. But be aware that even HTML files cannot use complex
coding when submitting them for Kindle. Kindle can't handle
HTML coding for things like tables, margins, or fixed font
layouts. There is a short list on the KDP site of the only
HTML tags Kindle does support, so if you are an expert in HTML,
you will have to curb your enthusiasm and stick to using a
relatively few basic formatting and hypertext tags that are
supported by Kindle. See Part IV below, the segment on CODING
IN HTML for more details.
REPEAT: ALL FILE NAMES MUST BE IN lower CASE, INCLUDING THE .zip
FILE AND ALL THE files IN IT. For some reason, the KDP system
won't recognize any files with upper case characters in the
file name, as I found out the hard way -- a limitation they
don't warn you about.
Apparently, you may also submit a book as a plain text (.txt)
file with no formatting, if your book contains no images and
you are willing to go without any kind of formatting like
different type sizes, font styles, bold, italics, indentations,
etc. Boring, but a very simple approach if you don't want to
hassle with HTML coding and don't care about the way the plain
text looks. (KDP supposedly converts plain text files to very
plain HTML, so that paragraphs don't all run together.) Obviously,
you can't have any images in a plain text file.
As noted above in Part I, it is also possible to submit a Word .doc
file or an Adobe .pdf file but apparently NOT a .pdf file created by
anything but Adobe Acrobat -- I read on one of the KDP forums that
.pdf files created by Open Office won't convert to Kindle. None of
those alternative formats -- Word, Adobe .pdf, or plain text -- have
to be submitted in a ZIP wrapper. But apparently none of those
formats convert very well into Kindle books, which is why I have
focused on doing as KDP recommends -- uploading the book as an HTML
file, plus any image files, all in a compressed .zip wrapper file.
III. GRAPHIC IMAGES:
The only part of this self-publishing process that may cost you some
money, unless you have some artistic ability and can do it yourself,
is possibly paying someone to create your cover art image. This cover
image is what will appear on your Kindle Store web page for your book
when it is published on Amazon.com.
You will be uploading it separately from your book file when you make
your ebook submission on the KDP website, but during the same "interview"
on the Amazon (KDP) site in which you enter information about your book
and upload it and your cover.
(Or, if you don't want to incur the expense of creating a cover image,
you don't have to do so, as it is optional. If you choose not to,
Amazon will substitute a "placeholder image" that will appear in search
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results and on your product detail page on Amazon.com. However, it will
definitely give a more professional impression if you have a cover
image, but it is apparently not required.) (Apparently.)
The cover image can (and probably should) be in color, but must be in
JPEG (.jpg) file format. It must have a minimum width of 500 pixels,
and a maximum height of 1280 pixels. The resolution should be 72 DPI
(dots per inch). If you have a cover image, but don't know its size,
or if you need to change its size, Google the word "Irfan" and download
the excellent free graphics viewer program called Irfan View (or go
directly to their home page at www.irfanview.com). Irfan will let you
view your cover image, will tell you its size, and lets you resize
it, if necessary, and save it as a .jpg file. It will also show you
the DPI resolution number and let you change it to 72 DPI, if necessary.
You may also want to include the cover image at the top of your
HTML file, although it will show up in black and white when the
book is opened on a Kindle device (but the color is displayed in
Kindle apps for the PC or iPhone, and possibly by other device
apps, but not on the Kindle unit itself.).
Your book may include images at various places, as well. Those can
be, but need not be, .jpg files, as .gif, .png, and .bmp files are
also acceptable (up to 127kb file size for any one image file). If
you are adhering to KDP's preferred format -- HTML -- your HTML
file will have hyperlinks at appropriate places to each of the
images you want to include. You will wrap the HTML file (a .htm
or .html suffix file) and all the image files, including your
cover image if you want to display it at the start of your book)
in a .zip file, created with a ZIP utility like the excellent
free jZIP program, which you can download from
http://download.cnet.com/windows/ (Note: No "www" in this URL)
To insert an image file (let's call it image01.gif) at a particular
point in your text, centered on the page, you might use the
following tag:
can also be RIGHT or LEFT, if you prefer.
The default placement is LEFT-aligned if you leave off
or use its short form, which also starts
a new paragraph, . Using either the long or short
tags with an img src="________" tag merely creates a bit of
extra space between the last text before the image and the
image, when it is displayed. The is essentially the
same as and will create extra space between the image
and the text below it.
Remember that the file names of your .zip file, your HTML file,
and all your image files must be in lower case letters, or you
will be unable to upload the file successfully. Thus, once you
have completed your HTML files and the images are done, and
they are all "wrapped" in a .zip file, be sure to unZIP your
ZIPped archive file once, to make sure your files’ names were
not converted to upper case letters in the ZIP, as some of the
old ZIP programs like the original PKZIP will do. (jZIP will
NOT change the case of your file names, which is why I use it.)
When you have your images all set, you are ready to learn a
bit of the basics of HTML coding of your text. It's not that
difficult, definitely not rocket science.
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IV. CODING IN HTML:
A good place to start, for advice on some basics of HTML
coding and a few special "custom" tags that Kindle requires
you to use in your HTML file, is this site:
http://shala.addr.com/kindle/#table
To start the coding, your book needs to be saved in
plain text, from Word or whatever word processor you
used to write it. I suggest loading it into Wordpad or
Notepad (if you use Windows), and then begin the task
of inserting HTML tags in the text to format it.
Let's start with the basic structure of an ebook file in
HTML. Every HTML file MUST begin with the tag and
should end with the tag . Everything else has to
fit between those two tags. The tag tells your
browser (or a Kindle) that this is an HTML file, like a
web page.
Notice that HTML tags are always enclosed between
angle brackets. For example, or (which
are interchangeable) tags mean that all the text that
follows either such tag is to be shown in boldface,
until you enter a tag to stop the boldface, which
would be (or if you used the
tag). Note that when the tag name is
preceded by the "/" character, as in , it
means to stop that particular bit of formatting. Use
to turn off , etc.
OK, so next, after the command, you should
have the following short segment, which contains
the title of your soon-to-be-best-selling book:
Chicken Soup for Dummies in the Coming Jihad
Note that the title shown above will not be visible, but
your web browser, when it loads the HTML file, will
show that title at the bottom of your computer screen,
and Kindle has uses for it as well.
So far, so good. So now our ebook file looks like this:
Chicken Soup for Dummies in the Coming Jihad
[...The table of contents and all the as yet unformatted text
goes here...]
Next, we need to enclose everything between the tag
and the end-of-the-file tag between the ...
tags, which signify that everything between them consists of
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the body of the book (including, possibly, a link to a cover
image at the beginning, plus the table of contents, any
preface or foreword, and the actual meat of the book).
So now our skeletal outline looks like this:
Chicken Soup for Dummies in the Coming Jihad
[...The table of contents and all the as yet unformatted text
goes here...]
Right after the tag, you might want to insert the
following "anchor" tag that indicates
the start of the book, and which Kindle requires:
....
....
(I've been putting it before the cover image and Table of
Contents, since that is where I want the reader to open
the ebook to. However, you may want to place it at the
beginning of, for example, Chapter 1, in a fiction book
where you want the reader to get right into the text
when he or she opens the book on Kindle.)
Since I like displaying my cover image first, before the
Table of Contents, I like placing the
tag immediately after the tag, followed by
displaying the book title in a large, bold font, and
then followed by the copyright information, followed
by the Table of Contents. There is a Kindle button that
takes the reader instantly to an ebook’s Table of
Contents, so Kindle also requires you to place the
following anchor tag where the Table of Contents begins:
The third mandatory "customized" tag Kindle requires
you to use (at the end of each chapter or segment of
the book), is their special "page break" tag (which
is not regular HTML and will be ignored by your
browser when you view your file with Internet Explorer
or any other browser):
KDP wants you to use this page break tag to end
a chapter or segment, rather than inserting a lot
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of blank lines with the or tags. Note that
if you simply do a bunch of carriage returns when
doing HTML formatting, like this,
...the browser will ignore it, and all that white
space between the words " like this," and this
paragraph will simply disappear. If you want
to add some extra space between paragraphs or
between images and text, insert the tag
for each blank line you want the browser to insert.
But use the pagebreak tag, not the tag, to
end chapters or other segments of your book.
Here is how our skeletal outline might look, before
we begin formatting the Table of Contents and
the individual chapters of text:
Chicken Soup for Dummies in the Coming Jihad
CHICKEN SOUP FOR DUMMIES IN THE COMING JIHAD
Copyright © 2011 Joan Q. Author – All Rights Reserved
[...The table of contents starts here, followed by another pagebreak]
[...and the as yet unformatted Chapter 1 goes here...]
[...and Chapter 2, etc. starts here...]
[...and Chapter 3, etc. starts here...]
...etc. ....
When creating a web page in HTML, you would ordinarily specify
a number of things at the beginning of the file, like the font
face and font size that will be used throughout the file, except
where a specific tag indicates otherwise, such as I've
done for the Arial Black font style above. However, for Kindle
that is not permitted -- you are required to use the "default"
font type and font size by NOT defining a "standard" font for
your regular text. You are also NOT to define a background
color or make your "regular" text any color other than black
(the default) or make it all bold, underlined, or italics.
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Of course, you can use tags to use a
different font face and/or size and/or color for chapter
or section headings, or you can underline, boldface, or
italicize some words in your regular text, to improve
readability. Just don't do the whole book in some odd
font or in italics. (Kindle devices and apps let the
reader choose the font size for the regular text, so
you don't have to, and aren't allowed to. However, you
can make some text, such as headings, larger or smaller
than the “regular” text, regardless of what size text
the reader selects, as we will see in the formatting
discussion below.)
Now that we have got the general layout of your HTML
file set up, let's get into the basic HTML hypertext
and formatting tags, the two main kinds of tags you
will be using throughout the rest of the book.
HYPERTEXT LINKING TAGS:
Let's start with hypertext. You know from your web
surfing activities that when you click on highlighted
underlined text in a web page that doing so will
usually enable you to jump to another page in that
document, or perhaps even to some other web site.
Coding your text to do that is not rocket science,
and you will need to know how to do this in order
to have each item in your Table of Contents link
to the beginning of each chapter, appendix, etc.,
of your book.
To "jump" from the table of contents to a particular
chapter, or jump from some other location in the
text to another location as a cross-reference, you
need only two things: an "anchor" tag and an
tag that points to it. Here's how the two would
work, linking from your Table of Contents to Chapter
2 of your book:
The item in your Table of Contents would look like this:
Chapter Two – Storing Food for the Coming Jihad
To format your table of contents item to look like that, you
would use the following hypertext formatting tags:
Chapter Two -- Storing Food for
the Coming Jihad
Only the words "Chapter Two" would be highlighted and
underlined when viewed -- and clickable. The marks
the end of the "clickable" text. The "#" character in the
tag means that the link is to a location in the
same document, not to another HTML file or to a web site.
The angle brackets () and everything between them will
be invisible to the reader, of course.
In order for the hypertext "jump" to work, you would have
to place the following "anchor" (or target tag) at the
beginning of Chapter Two:
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Notice that there is no "#" character at the start of
the anchor name, unlike where the anchor name appears
in the (hypertext reference) tag.
That's all there is to hypertext within a single document,
such as your book, which must all be in one large HTML file.
Linking to a web site on the Internet is similar, except that
you won't need to point the tag at an anchor –
you just "point" it at the URL of the web site. You also don't
need the "#" before the targeted URL (web address). For example,
if you wanted to have a clickable link to KDP at Amazon.com,
your text could read like this:
To sign up at Kindle Direct Publishing, just click here.
(With only the words "click here" underlined and highlighted
as hypertext.) Formatting that sentence in HTML, to make it
look like it does above, would be done like this:
To sign up at Kindle Direct Publishing, just
click here.
Or, you might word that sentence differently, like this, so
that the reader could see the web address (URL):
To sign up at Kindle Direct Publishing, go to
http://kdp.amazon.com
on the Web.
TEXT FORMATTING TAGS:
Now that we have mastered hypertext linking, we are
finally ready to learn a few of the basic HTML tags for
formatting text.
- This is the tag you are likely to use most often. It
should be placed at the beginning of every new paragraph.
The tag can be used to end a paragraph, but actually
works just like the tag. You don't need to end one
paragraph with a tag if the next paragraph begins
with the usual tag. Doing so will only add another
blank line between the two paragraphs.
left-justifies all the text that follows it in that
paragraph. If you want to center text or an image, use
the extended form of this tag, . Everything
(text or images) after it will be centered until the next
or tag is encountered, after which the ensuing
text or images will revert to the default left-justification.
- This tag signifies that the text that follows it is
all to be displayed in boldface, until the tag appears.
(Or, you can use and , which do the same
thing. I prefer and , as it means less typing.)
- This tag signifies that the text that follows it is
all to be displayed in italics, until the tag appears.
(Or, you can use and , which do the same thing.)
- This signifies that the text that follows it is
all to be underlined until the is encountered.
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- Any text following this tag is reduced in size
to one point smaller than the current or default font
size, until the tag is encountered.
- Displays text as a subscript and in a smaller font,
until a tag is encountered.
superscript
- Displays text as a (such as for a footnote23
number like 23) and in a smaller font until is encountered.
You can mix and match any combination of the above style
tags. For example, if you wanted the phrase "my dog has
fleas" to be bold, italicized, and underlined like this,
you would format it as follows:
my dog has fleas
- Begin displaying items in a bulleted list. Each
bulleted item is preceded by a tag. The list ends
when a tag is encountered. For example:
According to Conan the Librarian, the three best
things in life are:
To crush your enemy;
To see him driven before you; and
To hear the lamentation of his women.
(If you wanted the list to automatically be numbered,
1., 2., and 3., you would instead enclose the list items
between and tags, instead of and .)
- This tag simply inserts a horizontal line across
the page and is often used to divide sections of text.
- This tag ends a line of text, so that whatever
text follows appears on the next line. Inserting two
of these tags () will have the same effect as
a (new paragraph) tag, generally. But see
description below!
- Use this tag to indent one or more paragraphs
of text, until the tag appears. NOTE: If you
have more than one paragraph in a ...
segment of text, do NOT start the second, third, etc. paragraphs
with a tag, as this will not format properly for Kindle,
though it may look fine when you view the file with your web
browser. Instead, use two tags (see above) in place of
a tag to start new paragraphs within the blockquote.
- Use this tag to link to an image file you
have included in your ZIP file, so it will be displayed
where you place this tag in your text. Examples:
(Image will be left-aligned)
(Image is centered)
(Image aligned to the right)
- This tag is a bit more complicated, but
is very handy for creating text with a different font
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face, or different size or color, or any combination
of those three attributes. The tag begins with .
To specify a face: ....
To specify a color: ....
To specify a larger font size: ...
(Two points larger font size)
To specify all 3 attributes:
....
(Note the use of quotation marks around the name of a type
face or a color, but not for the increased or decreased
font size number.)
- Remember to put this special Kindle
"custom tag" at the end of each chapter or section of
your book, such as after the Table of Contents.
The foregoing should be all the formatting tags you
will need to know about to "prettify" your text and
insert images. Kindle only supports a few more HTML
tags than the ones listed in this section. To see
the complete list, sign into your account and click
on "Community." When that page opens, look under
"Browse the Knowledge Base" for a clickable item,
"Formatting for Advanced Users," and then click on
"HTML Tags Supported" for the complete list of
tags Kindle allows you to use.
Note that you can use your web browser to view
the HTML file you are formatting, to see how
it looks as you go along!
ONE LAST IMPORTANT POINT: Kindle only supports
the Western European alphabet, also known as the
'Latin-1' (ISO-8859-1) format and all characters in
that character set. Once you have finished creating
your .HTM or .HTML file, open it with NotePad (if
using Windows) and do a "Save As" in which you
choose "Text Documents" as the File Type and "ANSI"
as the Encoding. On non-Windows platforms, make
sure to save the file as ANSI or ASCII, avoiding
“UTF-8” or “Unicode” as the encoding type.
If you should happen to have Russian, Japanese,
or Eastern European (Cyrillic) characters in your text,
KDP won't catch the error, and those characters will
not display correctly on a Kindle, but will instead
be garbled gibberish. So stick to the Western
alphabet.
V. SETTING UP YOUR ACCOUNT ON http://kdp.amazon.com:
First you will have to register as an author and provide
various items of information about yourself, like name,
rank and serial number, address, and so forth, which is
pretty simple.
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IMPORTANT NOTE AS TO PAYMENT OF ROYALTIES: I don't recall if
your choice of form of payment appears when you apply for a
KDP account, or during the submission process of your first
book. However, you are given a choice of receiving payments
by check or direct deposit to your bank account. There is
a fairly hefty charge ($5 or $10, I don't recall exactly) for
each check they mail you, so I chose direct deposit and gave
them my bank routing number and account number.
Once you are registered and are ready to turn your files
into a Kindle book, log in to your account and go to
"BookShelf." Notice, once you are logged in, that you can
also click on "Reports" (this is only to see how many
ebooks you have sold or how much in the way of royalties
you have earned) or click on "Community" for help with
formatting and otherwise getting your ebook ready for
publication on Kindle.
a. Once at BookShelf, click on "Add a New Title" to start
the process of entering information about the book,
royalties, pricing, etc., and uploading your files.
Note, while filling in all the items KDP wants from
you, that you can save your work as a draft (scroll
down and click on "Save as Draft") at any time, and
you can come back to work on it or finish it up later.
All the entries listed below in paragraphs b. through t.
are mandatory, except where I've indicated they are
optional.
b. First, enter the title of the book where indicated.
c. Check the box if it is part of a series. If it is,
also enter the name of the series and the Volume.
d. Enter an edition number, if any (optional).
e. Enter a description of your book, which can be fairly
lengthy. This will appear on your Kindle Store web
page, so this should be your best sales pitch.
f. Add contributors: Click on this button to enter the
names of author(s), illustrators, photographers,
editors or other contributors in various categories.
g. Select the language the book is in (English, most likely).
h. Enter the publication date (optional).
i. Enter the publisher's name (optional). This may be you,
if self-publishing.
j. Enter your book's ISBN number (optional, but great if
you have an ISBN).
k. Under "Publishing Rights," indicate whether this is
public domain material, or if not, that you hold the
necessary publishing rights.
l. Click on "Add Categories" to select the subject categories
(only 2 allowed) in which your book should be placed,
such as fiction, and click on "Save" when you've made
your selection. (You can come back and make changes if
you wish.)
m. Enter "Search keywords" (optional). You can enter 5 to 7
key words, separated by commas, such as "baseball, income
taxes, witchcraft, frog worship, etc...." Key words will help
people searching subjects on Amazon (and possibly on Google)
to find your book, so choose your key words carefully.
n. Upload your cover image file. Click on "Browse" to find
the directory where the .jpg file is located on your computer
and click on the file name to select it. Then click the
"Upload" button.
o. Upload your .zip file (the book), after using "Browse" to
find it on your computer. Once it is uploaded, it may take
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a minute or two for Amazon to process it. If successful,
click on "Save and Continue" to go to the next page, to set
the book price, royalty structure, etc. Or, before you do
so, you can click on the "Preview Book" button to see a rough
approximation of how the book will appear on Kindle. Images
will appear in black and white. Kindle doesn't do colors yet.
However, it's OK to submit color images, since Kindle apps
for other devices like the iPhone or PC will display color,
and future versions of Kindle devices may also do so, some day.
p. Once you proceed to the next page, you will first need
to indicate your "content rights." That is, whether you
hold the worldwide rights, or only for the U.S. or other
specific territories.
q. Next, choose your royalty option -- 35% or 70%. If you
choose 70% (nice!), you must price your book at under
$10.00, and you also automatically grant "lending
privileges" (explained in the sidebar on that page).
r. Then enter your U.S. dollar price ($9.99 probably), and
in most cases you will want to check the box for the
U.K. price to be automatically based on the U.S. price.
(Kindle has to charge European VAT taxes on sales in
Britain and most other European countries, which don't
exempt digital books from the VAT.)
s. If you chose the 70% royalty, you will see the box for
"Kindle Book Lending" is already checked, and you can't
uncheck it unless you choose the 35% royalty. This is
a nice feature that readers will appreciate, anyway.
t. Finally, check the box that indicates you confirm that
you have all the rights necessary to publish the book
as you have indicated above and that you are in compliance
with KDP's terms and conditions.
VI. AFTER YOU’VE UPLOADED EVERYTHING, AWAIT ACCEPTANCE:
Once you have successfully uploaded your book, it will usually
take about two days before it goes "live" on Amazon.com's
Kindle Store (a department of Amazon.com's web site). You
can log in to your account and check your "BookShelf" at any
time to see its status ("In Review", "Publishing", or "Live").
Amazon reserves the right to reject any publication for any
reason (porn, hate literature, or if it's just so badly written
or incoherent that they don't want to inflict it on anyone).
VII. CONGRATS! YOUR BOOK HAS BEEN PUBLISHED ON KINDLE!
After your book goes "live," you can easily find it on either
the Kindle U.S. or U.K. store. Log in to your account, go to
your "BookShelf" and on the line where your book title appears,
click on the "Actions" button (you may have to scroll over to
the right to see it) to either edit the book details, edit the
rights, royalty terms, or pricing, or to go directly to its page
in the Kindle U.S. or U.K. Store. You can copy the URL from that
Amazon web page and send it to all your friends, enemies, potential
customers, or whomever, so they can easily find your book on Amazon
(and maybe buy it or write rave reviews about it). You can also use
the URL to link to your book's Kindle page if you have a web site
or web page and want to point people to your book. Here is a sample
link, to my Starting and Operating a Business in Utah book.
About the author of this guide:
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Michael D. Jenkins, who wrote this article in connection with a talk he gave to the Utah Writers
Group on April 16, 2011, is the author of the “Starting and Operating a Business in _____ (State)”
book series for each of the 50 states. This series sold over 1 million copies from the early 1980s
until 2005 in looseleaf binder and trade paperback formats, published by two different publishers.
Since 2005, Jenkins has self-published the series in software/ebook versions (see
http://www.roninsoft.com/advisor.htm or http://www.roninsoft.com/kindle.htm).
Jenkins is a graduate of Louisiana State University (B.A.) and Harvard Law School (J.D.), and has
had multiple careers as a tax attorney with a major San Francisco law firm and as a CPA with Peat,
Marwick & Mitchell in Los Angeles, after a brief stint of two years as an economics and financial
consultant with Economics Research Associates in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. In 1986, he
retired from law and CPA practice and has since made a living as a writer of books and software,
including the Wall Street Raider simulation, and (mainly) as an investor.
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