For some reason I have been receiving requests to review Kindle books. I like the Kindle and this is a way to get free books, so I’m all for it. There is only one thing wrong with this concept and that is, the books are pretty bad.<\/p>\n
Aside from the bad writing, though, the books are badly formatted.<\/p>\n
If you are going to spend the time getting a book out on Kindle, it is best to make sure that you do it right.<\/p>\n
1) Format paragraphs with indents and maybe even spaces between paragraphs. The books that I have inconsistent formatting. Sometimes there is an indent, sometimes not. There are large sections of one book that look like 20 page paragraphs, making it hard to read, because the paragarphs have no special formatting.
\n2) Use the simplest formatting possible. Some books have indented text with outdented titles. This looks cool in a print book, but wastes real estate on the small screen. It puts fewer words on the screen and makes paging more tedious. Use default fonts and let the kindle revert to Roman. I find Arial hard to read.
\n3) Make a TOC and chapters. Some books are one long chapter, and although there are chapter headings, there are no links, and pressing the right and left buttons goes nowhere.
\n4) Use new pages for chapters, sections, dedication, TOC, copyright, etc. Starting these at the top of a page adds to readability.
\n5) Make the start of book tag be the TOC or the very first page of the book. When I opened one book, it insisted on moving me to the first chapter so I could not read the introductory material without paging back to the beginning.
\n6) Include a cover image at the beginning of the book, scaled down for the kindle. A book’s cover is a cool thing that you don’t want to give up.
\n7) Put the advertising at the end. Include links to related books. Don’t put too many dedications, intros and prefaces in the book, if you can help it. People want to get to the good stuff.<\/p>\n
Doing all this is not trivial. You have to convert the book to html and get rid of all the MS Word crap. You must use very simple markup like <H> tags instead of styles. Don’t style Paragraphs at all. Use links to named anchors int he TOC and “back to top” links. Insert the MOBI page break tags – don’t use the css “pagebreak:after” style.<\/p>\n
You have to get rid of tables and divs tags. The Kindle will screw them up.<\/p>\n
You then create a MOBI version of your book using the free MobiPocket Creator software. This software is a little frustrating, but it works and gives you the best version of the book possible.<\/p>\n
This is about 4 hours work or more. It takes time, especially on a long book. Even my short stories took more than an hour for each one. I think it is worth it. The user experience with books is pretty much standard, but a badly formatted eBook can really detract from the user appreciation of the book.<\/p>\n
After finishing the formatting, upload it to Amazon, bit don’t publish it. Wait until it converts and then preview it. The Amazon preview is not perfect, but it should give you a good idea what the book will look like. When you are satisfied that things are right, then you can publish.<\/p>\n
Next is Smashwords.<\/p>\n
Next you have to open the book as MS Word and save it as a DOC file. You may have to go through and redo the TOC links and manually insert the page breaks.<\/p>\n
The copyright has to be the first non-blank line after the author and must be in the Smashwords format. You have to modify the body text style so there is no line space between paragraphs. Smashwords doesn’t like these, although they look great on a Kindle.<\/p>\n
Smashwords can’t handle PNG images, it seems, so convert everything to JPG. Get rid of all DIV tags and tables.<\/p>\n
Upload the doc file to Smashwords and see if converts well. If there are no mistakes then try to get it approved for the their Premium program. Then get the free ISBN number and let them publish it to B&N, iTunes, Sony, etc.<\/p>\n
I have another book that I’d like to do and then I’d like to go and collect some of my old blog posts and make a series of chapbooks to publish. I have written lots of articles about beekeeping, playing harmonica, writing Science Fiction, and restoring old tub amplifiers. These would all sell moderately well, I believe. I just need to find the hours and hours necessary to set up the books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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