Books, Productivity, and Design
In this article, I’m going to show you how to format eBook for Kindle using Microsoft Word.
Learning these techniques will just take two minutes, but applying them will take more than that. So please follow along slowly to master this craft.
[Read more…] about How to Format eBook for Kindle (5 simple DIY tips)This is a living article which means I will keep updating this page for new and fresh content often.
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Alright, now let’s get right into the business of publishing public domain eBooks that gets loved by people:
Public Domain is a platform on which any articles, books, images, media, or any content that are made freely accessible to the general public to consume, edit, or make commercial usage possible.
Amazon KDP has been allowing and regularizing the publishing of Public Domain books on its Kindle platform, to allow creators to add-value to the existing old classics, and also make some money on the side doing it.
Google is arguably the top most used search engine that provides quality results. If you are looking to find good public domain books that are eligible to be republished without much fuss, then in this short video I explain some techniques you could use to find good quality public domain books that could be re-published on Kindle.
Choosing a public domain book determines its success and more downloads and thus more sales and profits.
Not just that, adding more value to it is what makes it stand out from the competition, as there are so many books by the same title on Amazon Kindle eBooks’ store.
The following video takes a stab at that, so your readers can get more out of the old classics. There is also a checklist given in the video description, when you watch it directly on YouTube (see for the link in the video description).
In this video we will see some key insights and tips on how to annotate, illustrate public domain books. Make sure you watch it till the end because we go over starting from basics of what these really mean and how to get them done for your Kindle eBooks so that they sell well for you.
Finally, here are some best practices you can follow to ensure your book is accepted by the Amazon KDP team. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below.
Also, if you haven’t already, don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Nothing is more pathetic than working hard on your book and publishing it only to find out that no one is interested in it.
In this article, we will see 7 important mindset shifts to help you sell more books and earn better from your writing. Although these are best principles for Authors who write their own books, some concepts can also help if you are re-publishing a public domain book.
If you want to sell books, then we need to understand from the very beginning that sales is directly proportional to the number of people who will be interested in whatever you want to write.
Studying the market even before you write, and doing some research on keywords, surveying what people in your field really want – will all go a long way when you finish writing and start selling. In fact, these could pave the way to sell your books even before you start writing. KDP also has ‘pre-order’ sales options available to its authors.
This way, we can distinctly divide the entire process into three parts:
All these three steps are important and go hand-in-hand to ensure you sell more books.
Tools such as Publisher Rocket help in finding approximately how many people have bought similar titles in your genre, what is the typical download count per a period, and more such useful metrics for you to decide.
Another treasure trove is the book reviews, ratings, and comments section for similar titles that others have written. – You can easily find what your potential audience have loved and hated from their comments and then use that intel to enhance your writing exponentially.
If you are interested in learning more tactics, I highly recommend reading Pat Flynn’s ‘Will it fly‘ book – I will provide the link below so you can give it a shot.
Download a mind map version of this article.
Having different versions of the books you’ve written is great, but if you are just starting out, focus only on your Kindle version.
More books are sold on Kindle than in print!
This way you can first focus on establishing a place for yourself in the world of writing. After you see some traction in your ebook sales, you can move on to publishing them in print editions.
Not just that, there are more avenues in the eBook world and Kindle is not the end – we have leanpub, Kobo, Google Play Books, Smashwords, iBooks and so on so you can cater to different types of people.
They are all people reading ebooks but the devices they carry in their hands are different and you are losing out on lot of money if you don’t tap into that diversity.
That’s why it’s all the more important to be platform aware and start focusing on the eBook market in your first month of selling eBooks before you exhaust all the options and then step into the print versions.
A simple shift in the mindset regarding the technologies we use to self-publish takes you really far in making the work you do to stand out from your competition.
An eBook is really just a web page, written in HTML. Learning some basics of HTML and CSS can really help in formatting the ebooks the way you want. If not nothing, consider using the services offered by professionals who charge very less in platforms like upwork or fiverr. They are experts in using HTML, CSS who can format your ebook the way you want with all the designs and formatting specifics.
Your first published book is no-doubt a bestseller in your family circles, but it will not be a super-hit out in the world from day one onward.
There are exceptions and I will consider myself lucky if it happens to me. If you are just beginning to write and sell books as an author, then try writing something short but valuable for your target audience and learn all the technicalities involved in self-publishing your first book.
Publish more often applying the knowledge you’ve gained from the first book. Unlike olden days where people used typewriters to type their manuscript, and publishers who used big printing press machines, writing books need not take years with hand-held gadgets, cloud based apps, and self-publishing resources available for free these days.
Learn this business, forget the expectations, gain the experience and eventually you will ride on easily with increased revenue because this is all just science and the process works the same way for everyone.
Some authors just share their ideas in their books and leave it at that. The book stands in isolation without any action items for the readers, so they just move on after reading and you have lost a potential fan because there is no way to connect with you for them.
As an author, connecting to your readers is an important opportunity to ensure they also read your next book. CTAs or Call to action inside your books are vital to building a following for your works.
Turning that into a loyal following group depends on your consistency in engaging the audience with what they ask for. Here are some ideas that could bring your readers to know you better and get closer to you.
Size of the eBook increases delivery costs from Amazon, thus leading to lesser royalties.
This is something that all the authors who are self-publishing using Amazon to be aware of.
I created a dedicated video to address this issue and how you can resolve it. The primary culprit is the images you use in the eBook and in this other video, you’ll learn how to compress them effectively without losing the quality. Links are provided in the description below.
The core principle here is repurposing the content you’ve already written. Almost every book you write can take another birth of its own as a podcast, blog article, video, a slideshow, a course, a checklist (for non-fiction works), an infographic, or any other mini PDF that can be created out of the original work you wrote first.
No book should be left in isolation and must be reborn in one or many of these forms.
For all those of you who are still reading, I have a bonus tip. Well, it’s actually a no-brainer but not EVERYONE realizes it. So, I thought I will share it, anyway.
In case your books don’t have this, it’s time you edit and re upload your eBooks after creating a table of contents – and if you already have the TOC on your eBooks, then pat yourself on your back. This is because TOC section provides a great reader’s experience on eBooks. Some don’t use it and some misuse it by placing it at the end of their eBooks – this not only is a poor reading experience but also makes Amazon think that you are cheating its algorithm by letting the system think that the reader has fully read your book by reaching the end of the eBook. This is usually manipulated to tap into the KENP page read count related royalties. So, use the TOC within the starting sections only and use it to link to your main chapter and sub-chapter headings. Again, I have another video which talks about creating Table of Contents.
So, those were some pointers to keep in mind on your writing journey. I hope this was useful and let me know if you have any problems or questions on Amazon KDP below.
Cheers and good luck!
Arun
You could be a magazine editor, copy writer, blogger, author, poet, song-writer, self-publisher or a creative writer of any kind.
All the tools we’ll now see are going to benefit you in many ways!
The first one we’re going to see is called Yarny which is an ideal software for fiction-authors.
We can start writing our chapters on the left side of its screen, and those are called as snippets in Yarny. These snippets could then be reordered if you decide to change the order of your writings by dragging and dropping.
You could also create a group and combine a set of snippets by clicking at the icon given in the bottom left corner of the tool. The ideas for people, places, and things can all be stored on the right panel, and organized by tags.
This tool also saves different versions if you decide to discard and revert to older plots. Once done, download your work by clicking on icon given at the bottom by choosing the format you want. It also offers different themes to suit your mood.
Did I tell you that Yarny is totally free!
iAWriter promises a distraction-free interface to let our thoughts flow on to the screen. It supports Markdown formatting, and we can choose to gray out all the words except the sentence that we are currently writing. They call it the ‘Focus mode’.
This software also highlights different parts of speech in different colors.
While this offers a paid version, there is a trial that you definitely want to try and even buy this which comes only for $19.99 for its Windows version and $29.99 for the Mac version.
This is basically an online community for writers to help fellow writers to become better by providing feedback on their writing. Not just that, it provides feedback at all levels of the writing journey – be it writing, editing, formatting, or publishing – but that’s part of the paid version.
The free version of Wordslingr’s interface is similar to Yarny in terms of setting writing goals. You can change the default goal of 750 words and also change the word count to any number you want.
Create a new file by clicking on this button, and choose a template if you want to. There are multiple templates available to choose from, in case you run out of ideas. It’s editor is quite simple in its interface, with the regular formatting tools.
(Psst… please remember to check some free guides available on my Gumroad page as well)
One key feature is the in-built Thesaurus, and dictionary. The real fun begins while writing the story where you could activate the navigation from the view menu and create your characters, outline, note down your researches.
Wavemaker is a totally free tool!
With Wavemaker, you could easily write a whole novel!
It provides options to structure your draft novel manuscript into chapters, scenes, and notes – which can all be shuffled around in the order you want.
This virtually runs on any device, and the writings can be synced using Google Drive. This also works offline, so you could write from within a train or in your next flight to that city.
It provides planning boards to move around your plot ideas.
Sigil is a free and open source software available for windows, mac, and Linux OS, that you can use to self-publish your next book.
This is an amazing piece of software to create deeply customized ePub files that can be used for submitting to many online publishing vendors, including Amazon KDP, Nook, iBooks, etc.
It comes loaded with a plenty of features, so much so that, it might take a while for us to get used to its interface. If you know HTML, CSS, then you can create a custom css file to easily decorate any part of your eBook. Although, Sigil could seem intimidating when you use it for the first time, it is a highly flexible tool with an in-built editor to directly edit the parts of your manuscript.
The only downside is that you cannot import Word document files – it supports only HTML and epub files. Not to forget that Sigil’s functionalities can be infinitely expanded with its plugins that are available from this mobileread forum page.
This is a software from Amazon. It’s a fantastic tool for those who are into Kindle ebook self-publishing on Amazon KDP – the Kindle Direct Publishing.
With this tool, you can easily format your ebook manuscript, and export to a KPF file to upload to KDP. This is also a free software available for Windows and Mac.
If you would like to know how to get started with Kindle create, I made a walk-through video that you can watch it right here:
Speaking of Kindle create, another offering from Amazon’s KDP is Kindle add-in for MS Word.
For those who use Microsoft Word, this is a simple add-in that sits right inside your Word document which can be used to format your eBook while writing it.
This even has an inbuilt previewer that comes along with it. I have a separate video on how to install and use Kindle add-in that you can watch and learn right here:
Calibre is a powerful and easy to use e-book manager which is fully free to use. It’ll allow you to do nearly everything around maintaining your ebooks and it takes things a step beyond normal e-book software. It’s basically an ebook storage and management tool but it also allows to edit ebook content and metadata, change eBook’s cover, create ePub files or, convert to many different formats, to publish on Kindle, Nook, iBooks, etc. If you want to learn how to change ebook’s cover, I made a video on that one – which is available on this notification or watch it later by clicking on the link given in the description.
This is an online tool but a great one to help authors. Especially for writing books with distraction free environment and bringing out all your creative juices without letting the left brain react to all the errors and formatting mistakes you make while writing. This often interrupts your creative flow, as you might have encountered while writing. That’s when this Ilys tool helps to first get the writing done, and save all the editing and formatting work for later when there is no creativity happening in our brains. This tool comes in very handy if you are into participating in NaNoWriMo or any other writing competitions because the main aim of this tool is to let you write first without the luxury to hit on backspace or delete keys or even see what you’ve written so far, and that means we cannot take breaks until we have written a lot in a single streak.
Let’s take a break and recap for a minute. We’ve seen 9 tools so far and here’s a list of what’s free, and what’s paid so you can choose which ones to give a try based on your budget. And just keep watching because we have more tools to come.
This is a Songwriting, Lyric Writing, Poetry and Creative Writing Software. Whether you’re writing a song, a poem, a novel, a script, a blog, or whatever your written or verbal communication happens to be, MasterWriter will unlock all that the English language has to offer. The unique tools and reference dictionaries contained in MasterWriter will help you to express yourself in a unique and more meaningful way. This software comes with more than a hundred thousand rhyming words and 36,000 rhymed phrases. Filters allow you to search on perfect, close and wide rhymes which gives you more choices and helps you to express yourself in a more creative way. You can also search by syllable and on phrases that rhyme.
In case you are not in to song writing but say fiction writing, then you may not want to use the same words over and over while writing dialogues. Instead of saying “she was angry…” you could find the word families for the word ‘Angry’ and instead say ‘fuming’, or ‘seething’… you get the idea. So, why struggle to find the right word when you can have all the possibilities in an instant? Free your mind to create and let MasterWriter do the rest.
This is a tool for self-publishing enthusiasts. They offer some really good tools on their website with which you could create ‘No content’ books such as Diaries, Journals, Music sheet books, by using their templates, and upload to KDP and start earning some neat commission on the side.
If you are interested in learning further about this world of ‘no content’ publishing, then let me know in the comments below and I might do a different video for you explaining how this is done.
The links are given in the description below if you want to give BookBolt a try. https://bookbolt.io/interior-wizard/ (give aff link).
Now if you are more into writing blogs or articles with fancy titles for sharing on social media with or without the intent to make them viral, then this resource is just for you. This tool creates viral-worthy headlines created from the subject or keywords you input here. Then all you have to do is to simply click to find amusing and surprisingly good title ideas.
Reedsy is a British online author services firm based in London which serves as a bridge uniting authors and publishing freelancers in the self publishing industry. They offer a bunch of tools as well, such as book title generator, character name generator, epub to mobi converter, pen name generator, short story ideas, book editor, formatting options, and even publishing your manuscripts into pre-formatted PDF or ePub files that can be used to self-publish on amazon or any book publishing websites.
The editor interface is rich with features, and is easy to follow. One key feature that stood out for me is their pre-formatted sections that we can add as Front matter to our books by properly separating them in order and different pages before our actual chapters begin.
If you are writing something in collaboration with someone else, then Draft is for you. When you share your document using Draft, any changes your collaborator makes are on their own copy of the document, and you get to accept or ignore each individual change they make. When you want to compare your old drafts, you have a powerful view to see how your document changed over time by using version control. You can also import your documents from cloud services like Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive. They provide markdown formatting and also comes with the Hemingway mode where editing is not an option and you could just keep writing using their minimalist interface. There are plenty of other options that you might want to give a shot using draftin.
A straight-forward ‘let’s cut to the chase’ tool that offers synonyms for any word you want to use while you are writing. This gets us out in the open by saving us from using the same words repeatedly, thus breaking the patterns and helping your readers get some fresh air from reading what you write. Well, not just synonyms but antonyms, sentence examples, and their definitions too.
This product offers some soothing background noises like the sound of rain, wind, forest, leaves, and many other ambient sounds. They are free to use if you are using the web version, and have paid options if you are looking for the mobile apps.
Noisli also comes in the form of a handy Google Chrome Extension. They offer a distraction-free text editor once you sign up.
This editor offers markdown and an option to save either to your Google Drive or Dropbox, or even just download it to your local as a text file.
This has a free version which comes as a portable software. When I used this, I always felt that it was actually productive to write and just keep writing. No bells and whistles, whatsoever – I mean, no formatting, no themes, no sounds, just a full screen writing experience with a couple of options. It keeps automatically saving until we save it manually.
They have both Windows and Mac versions.
This software allows us to block everything until a certain number of words are typed or when a specific minutes are passed. You can also choose to do any of these and just proceed with writing.
I really liked that they offer a free stand-alone, portable version to just use, instead of bloating a setup file and forcing installations to use their software. Pretty neat work. Worth a try if you want a distraction-free writing where all other apps are blocked until you reach a timed goal or word count. Of course, they do have a paid version in case you want to get the sound tracks, themes, and formatting.
If writing is an object, grammar mistakes are its shadow – it never leaves us. With a good writing flow, making spelling grammar mistakes are inevitable. That’s when Grammarly can help us because writing is writing, but without editing, there is no good writing.
This comes as a standalone Desktop software, or as Word add-in, or just use it on the Web with its browser extension which is free. It has got some pretty neat features to edit on the go and make the sentences look great.
I have created a detailed review of this software which you can watch by clicking on this notification card. To use this tool, you can create a free account from here (aff link) – which is also provided in the description below.
If Grammarly doesn’t satisfy you, don’t worry, our next software in the list might make your life even better by becoming your Grammar guru. This is another in-depth online grammar checker and is slightly tailored towards authors.
If you want to change your writing in leaps and bounds and make editing better, give this tool a try. Although this is a paid software, it has a free browser extension that you can use. All said and done, it’s only a matter of choice between this and Grammarly on which one you would want to use.
This is a web based app that provides a writing AND editing environment. Not just that, they also make helpful suggestions to make our writing better by color-coding and highlighting their suggestions and our possible mistakes while writing, when we are in the editing mode. Just one word of caution that the paid version is better instead of the free one because the free web version of HemingwayApp doesn’t offer saving or exporting, and you might just have to copy and paste it to take it forward. If you want a desktop offline app, then go for the paid version – it comes for both Windows and Mac, and it’s current version, which is version 3 comes with a one-time payment of $19.99 for lifetime access, at the time of making this video. The price is the same for both the Windows and Mac versions of Hemingway. This app actually beats many other tools we saw in this video and will be a great investment if you choose to go for the Desktop offline app.
If you are a professional writer who writes for a livelihood, then Scrivener is one of the best investment you may want to make in.
This is a boon for authors who are into fiction-writing because this tool helps with plot creation, character name generation, map characters to different scenes, keep research and writing together on a comparable interface, and many such features to help authors of all kind.
They offer a 30-day trial and comes in Windows and Mac versions. They have a bundle purchase option too if you are into using both the Windows and Mac computers.
Their iOS version for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch comes in at $19.99 if you are into writing on-the-go using your mobile phones.
From Literature and Latte.com, again. This one is again for fiction writers who want to map the characters visually and plot scenes.
They too have a one time fee and available for both mac and windows. They offer a free 30-day trial for you to check and see if it’s worth your shot.
This tool comes with a beautiful, simple, sharp, and well-designed interface, something that offers the perfect screen for focusing your mind.
They come in Day, Evening, and Night mode to choose from depending on your mood. Writing style suggestions, Grammar enhancements, Spell check, Syncing to Google Drive or Dropbox, all of these and more are all part of the package.
So, start using Novlr and join over 40,000 writers in 125 countries today.
This works both offline and online with an assurance to constantly save your work and thus secure your writing without the need to create manual backups. Their focus mode is something you must give a try to keep your creative juices flowing. They also offer importing options if you have to import your work from elsewhere in the .txt .rtf .docx .odt formats, along with an option to publish the work as an eBook!
This is a great tool for books that are worked on by two or more authors. With an in-built chat feature, this comes for free with upto 5 users’ personal use to create a maximum of 5 storms – which means 5 book ideas. They also provide various templates to choose from – a business model canvas template, agile scrum kanban board template, retrospective basic type template and much more, depending on a framework you like to implement in your planning and execution.
This is a Online Portfolio for Journalists, Bloggers and Writers. By joining them for free, you could add your best work, customize your page and then share your online portfolio with the world – without a single line of code. Thousands of writers trust them with their work, and building your free online portfolio takes just minutes. Join 100,000+ Clippings.me users free today and start showcasing your portfolio for free.
And here’s an extra bonus entry into the list:
When writing, it is important to avoid overused single words, phrases, and expressions in order to develop a well-written piece. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to conduct all on your own, hence the importance of a cliché finder tool. With Cliché finder, you can eliminate Clichés & enhance communication skills like a pro.
Language – select your book’s primary language – it’s the language in which your book was written.
The book’s title, subtitle information you specify on your book’s cover / interior files such as the Front Matter, MUST match the fields you fill up while setting up the book on KDP.
If your book is in a series, like the The Shiva Trilogy – enter a suitable name such as that.
A series number, is optional. It shows the readers which part of the book the reader is looking at (either to purchase, or just browsing on Amazon) – Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3 / Book 1, 2, 3 and so on. This helps your readers to read your books in a certain and specific order. Or else, they could pick up the wrong order, thus confusing the scenes or the flow in your story or sequence.
Design Tip: Also, as much as you can, try to keep your book series’ cover design themes similar – so they are “visually together” when people search for it.
Again, to reiterate, the above information must match on both places – inside your book/ on your book’s cover AND the metadata fields in the eBook Details page while setting up your eBook/PaperBack in KDP account.
Edition Number tells the readers which version your book is in – if you have updated your already published book, then enter your updated edition number. If you are publishing for the first time (your book), then it will become your Edition one. This is an optional field.
Primary Author or Contributor: if you are the original author who wrote the book, enter your name (or Pen name). Ensure not to mislead people by entering famous names, unless you share the same name as them. Primary Author name field is mandatory, while the Contributors names are optional. You could enter an additional Author name, Translator name, Editor name, etc. And just so you know – if you are the one who did all of that, there is no need to enter your name multiple times. The Primary Author name will suffice 🙂
(Psst… check more guides on my Gumroad page here – opens in a new tab)
Description. This field is a free ticket to your book’s success. A large share of your book’s success depends on how well you describe what your book is all about in this field. Use HTML if you like, but provide a great summary, a cliffhanger type description (for novels), bulleted list of contents, an elevator pitch to your readers for them to be enticed enough to purchase your book.
Publishing rights: Unless you are publishing a public domain book, you can select that you own the copyrights to the book you are uploading.
Keywords: Going by the face value of what they suggest, many people only enter key ‘words’, while forgetting that we can actually enter key ‘phrases’ in those 7 goldmine fields. These keywords/key phrases will determine many factors for your sales, next to the description field. These could also decide which additional categories your book might fall under. So use them wisely – make use of tools like Rocket, or even Amazon’s own search field suggestions.
Categories: this looks simple. But not easy – just choose two categories that best describes your book’s subject. It’s quite a relief to know that we can always test this by changing after a week or so by doing some A/B testing on which category has more reach, or which works best overall. But don’t deviate or mislead by categorizing your book into totally vague categories. Be relevant.
Age and Grade Range: Be your own best judge by choosing this field appropriately. It’s an optional field, but if you have written an adult or erotica novel then be kind in choosing an appropriate age limit in this field – you will save a family’s upbringing culture by doing that!
Finally, Pre-order: this field is active only during the first time you publish a book and when your book is in draft status. After publishing, it shows day and date of when your first edition got published. Also, this field is not available for Public domain books nor paperbacks – only new eBooks.
That’s all there is about the Kindle eBook Details section of the eBook setup process. I will write on the eBook Content setup and eBook Pricing setup pages on another detailed blog post.
Till then, you take care!