Formatting For Kindle! Read online

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Why Should You Format your eBooks To Kindle? 3

  Chapter 2: What are and how do Kindle eBooks look like? 7

  Chapter 3: How to create your First Kindle eBook From Scratch! 20

  Chapter 4: How to format your eBook to Kindle! 51

  Chapter 5: Invaluable Resources at Your Disposal! 57

  Chapter 1: Why Should You Format your eBooks To Kindle?

  Hello there!

  I want to personally thank you very much for taking your time to read what I am about to tell you!

  Let me first just ask you a few quick questions:

  1. Have you ever written a book (or an eBook) or are you interested in doing so for the very first time?

  2. Have you ever wondered where you should publish your written books in order to profit the most from it?

  3. Have you ever wondered how you actually go about writing a book from scratch so you can publish it where you will be able to sell the most copies of it?

  If you answered “yes” to at least one of these questions then this book will be one of the most important books you will ever read and use!

  When I first got into the whole thing, a few years ago, of turning my ideas into books, because I knew I had a lot of great knowledge some people in the world probably wanted from me, I had no clue at all where to start.

  I did what most beginners would do; I wrote a book as good as I could, without considering how I wrote it.

  I went to dozens of publishers and asked if they wanted to publish my book and they denied it, either because of the content (I chose to write about something no one wanted to read about it) or how I wrote it (it was formatted the WRONG way).

  This left me really angry because of all the struggled effort and long hours of time I had put into it, and for what?

  For nothing, that’s at least how I felt after all that drama!

  I got really mad and told myself that I would never get into the business of writing books that I could sell and make a fortune of!

  Then as time passed by, I was still a reader and I loved to read lots of different things, whether it was in the library or on the Internet.

  One day as I was surfing the web, reading the common news, I stumbled across a strange banner saying something about “Kindle eBooks”.

  First I thought this must be something strange or a new hoax.

  But it turned out to be a banner from the very prestigious company Amazon.

  When I realized this I thought to myself, “Okay, I’ll give it a try! It couldn’t be that bad!”

  I clicked on the banner and it took me to something known as “KindleStore” where books were sold as eBooks.

  In other words, books were sold electronically through the Internet!

  Today, of course, this is just “common sense” and a part of our everyday life, but back then it was something very new and I had really no clue that it would become such a hit in our modern era.

  After I had clicked through the KindleStore, looking through the few thousands of available eBooks that were available at that time, I decided for myself to observe how this would develop the six coming months.

  To my huge astonishment, the eBooks library of KindleStore seemed to never get fully saturated.

  There were always the new big best sellers of their day, week and month.

  It seemed as if, when used correctly, the KindleStore could be used as an endless goldmine!

  A matter of fact, as I am writing this, there is currently more than 1,000,000 eBooks available for sample reading and purchasing from the KindleStore.

  Most eBooks in most topics are available for the one with a computer with Internet connection, so to speak.

  Thus, after my six months of carefully following the development of the KindleStore I chose to give my dream one more shot:

  I decided to write a book that I would publish online in the KindleStore in order to make some profits from it.

  Luckily for me, Amazon had just released great information, when I decided to give writing one more shot again, in how you write eBooks to publish it online.

  It took me a few weeks to get my first book done and I then uploaded it to Kindle, it got converted, I “enrolled” it and suddenly my book that I had put so much effort and time into were online for the whole world to see, read samples from and purchase!

  I did not have to go to a physical publisher asking for permission publishing my book and waiting for weeks or maybe even months before getting an undeserved reply yelling “No!”

  My own hard-worked written book was published in eyes of dozens of millions of Internet users that could see its cover, read its sample and even purchase it if it seemed to be something that they were interested in.

  I had now suddenly achieved one of my dreams that I thought could never have been fulfilled because of the world we lived in back then.

  I had successfully published a book that any modern human being could get access to and I would get all the credit for it!

  This short story is why I chose to write this book.

  I wanted to help out other people that are slightly curious, or even deeply passionate about writing their own books and then publish it in such ways that it gets out to the huge mass audience out there in the realm of Internet, but don’t know how to go about it.

  I wrote this book to help YOU get your very first book out there (if it is your first book that is) on the Internet so you can see it being available for the mass audience and you getting all the credit for doing so.

  So, if you have a huge passion for something or great knowledge about something that you would like to share written with the rest of the world, then this will be the very best guide of them all to get you started on the right track!

  In the upcoming chapters I will be showing you how Kindle eBooks look like and how you create your very own from scratch.

  I will also, in one special chapter, show you how to turn your already written book into a Kindle-friendly version that you can as fast as humanly possible upload immediately to KindleStore without getting any rejections.

  Let me begin first off to briefly tell you what Kindle eBooks are all about and how they look
like so you know how your one should look like when it’s finished for the very first time!

  Chapter 2: What are and how do Kindle eBooks look like?

  In simple plain English, Kindle eBooks are electronic books that are available on for sample reading and purchasing from the Amazon KindleStore.

  They are optimized and adapted for being read by so called Kindle devices.

  As I am writing this book, there are six different Kindle devices available from Amazon:

  * Kindle

  * Kindle Touch

  * Kindle Touch 3G

  * Kindle Keyboard 3G

  * Kindle DX

  * Kindle Fire

  Below you will find the most common Kindle device, simply named Kindle:

  As you can see it has about 9 buttons where 4 are used for navigations and as you can also see as well, although not so clear, the text is purely in only black and white.

  Of all Kindle devices, currently as this book is being written, only the Kindle Fire (also the most expensive one) supports color and advanced text formatted books.

  Because of this you want to always write your books so they always look good using the most common Kindle device available, since Kindle Fire is backward-compatible.

  Otherwise you might be losing out on thousands of potential customers buying and reading your great written work!

  In other words, if you use a lot of advanced text formatting when writing your book and you use many different colors, it may look very bad in the majority of Kindle devices which can make many people not wanting to read (and thus not buy) your book.

  Therefore, make sure your book always look great in the simplest Kindle device since you can then be positively sure that it will look just as great on all the other Kindle devices too!

  Speaking of other Kindle devices, here is the second Kindle device from the list, namely, the Kindle Touch device:

  The main important difference from the first Kindle device is that this one, as the name implies, uses only a touch screen for navigation when reading.

  Exception is the button for turning off and on the device (the black lines at the bottom of the Kindle Touch device).

  This Kindle device has also text-to-speech function so the Kindle Touch device reads for you like Microsoft Sam does in Windows (but sounds more real).

  The Kindle Touch device also supports audiobooks and MP3-files.

  The third Kindle device from the list is the Kindle Touch 3G device:

  It looks pretty much the same as the second one above with the most important difference for its 3G support and in America it allows for free 3G wireless making it 100 % free to buy and borrow eBooks from the library of KindleStore.

  As the name and picture implies in this one as well, it is fully navigated by the touch screen and the black-lined button at the bottom of the device for turning it off and on.

  The fourth Kindle device is the Kindle Keyboard 3G device, which you probably guessed, must then look like something like this:

  Instead of a touch screen it uses a keyboard very typical to your ordinary computer keyboard you usually use.

  The fifth Kindle device is the Kindle DX device which looks like this:

  This Kindle device is a few inch bigger than Kindle Keyboard 3G and its 3G is globally available than just in America.

  Finally, we have the last and most recent Kindle device available on the market today, namely, the Kindle Fire, and it looks like this:

  This latest Kindle device, available today as I am writing this book, has many functions similar to the iPad.

  For example, it supports watching movies, listening to music and surfing (as you can see in the picture above).

  It is also the only Kindle device, currently today April 2012 that supports more than the three colors black, white and grey.

  Because as you saw in the Kindle DX picture, its viewed picture were displayed in black, white and grey which is how most pictures will look like viewed on the most common Kindle devices.

  As said before, since most people do not own a Kindle Fire, it is always a good idea, once again, to make sure your upcoming written eBook looks professionally great even on the most common Kindle device such as the two first ones!

  Now when we know how the different Kindle devices look like, let us take a more careful look at how the text looks like when displayed on the Kindle device.

  Here, I will use how the text would look like on the most common Kindle devices.

  This is equally important otherwise the next chapters will not make sense for you at all and you will be wondering why should do certain things when writing your Kindle from scratch or formatting a current book to a Kindle-ready eBook!

  In the picture below you will see how a chapter header (“Introduction” in this example) and paragraphs below it would look like on the most common Kindle device when the font size is at 1:

  (By the way, this is picture is taken from “6. Preview Your Book” when you upload your eBook to KindleStore and this is a great tool to see so you eBook looks great in all different font sizes and that you can navigate correctly; using the Menu so to speak!)

  As you can see on the next picture below, the font size is changed from 1 to 2:

  This time the chapter header “Introduction” stays the same but the text is bigger making us only see the two paragraphs instead of all three paragraphs as in the previous picture!

  It is important for you to understand that every Kindle-reader has the choice to change their font size for their convenience and that you make sure that your eBook does not get messed up when you format it for KindleStore.

  For instance, if your reader uses the smallest font size they may be seeing two different chapter headers on the same page when each chapter actually should always start on a new page no matter how the reader chooses to resize while reading.

  When you do not follow proper formatting instructions, as laid out in this book, you will end up with bad, unprofessional looking eBooks looking something like this one:

  What you can see is the first chapter header (“Introduction”) and the second chapter header (“Chapter1”) being included in the same viewing page on the Kindle device.

  This does NOT look professional and should be avoided at all cost.

  It is a typical beginner mistake if you are trying to figure out Kindle eBook formatting on your own instead of following a guide like this one.

  So, how do you avoid this common beginner mistake so your written eBook looks more professional and more like this?

  The picture above here has the exact same font size as the previous ones (and no, I did not just simply delete the Chapter1-header).

  But in this one we do not see the Chapter1-header even though it should fit using the font size 1.

  What has been done so the Chapter1-header always begins on a new page?

  You will find out this answer in the next coming chapters!

  I just wanted to show you what can happen without you first realizing it, when you do not follow all the instructions you should be following for a successful Microsoft Word to Kindle formatting step-by-step guide guarantee.

  Now, you may have figured out what must have happened with the Chapter1-header.

  And you are completely right if you guessed that it must now appear on the next page when the user presses on the next page button.

  That is completely right as the picture below undoubtedly proves:

  Above we can see that the header CHAPTER1 begins on a complete new page even though it would have fit on the same page as the INTRODUCTION-header because of the chosen font size.

  If you want your eBook to look professional and beautiful (as much as it can in terms of Kindle limited color viewing and design) you must aim for consistency.

  One way to aim for consistency is making sure your chapters always start on a new page and with the same line and paragraph spacing.

  For instance, one thing you might have noticed if you look back on the very first pictu
re with clear text viewed was that the spacing before the INTRODUCTION-header is actually completely gone.

  Don’t believe me?

  Well, take a look again and now by comparing both of them together:

  Clearly, in the left picture, the INTRODUCTION-header has no space above it while the INTRODUCTION-header in the right picture does.