I need help getting my book on to Amazon

Kindle. I wouldn't mind having it as a physical book maybe in future if it goes well. But it's quite short. 10,000 words.

Thank you kindly, madam. Or should I say Kindle-y.

Diana, I'm looking at the first part on the link that you gave me and you talk about formatting an MS Word document for Kindle. I don't have Word, I've been using Libreoffice. Does it make a difference?

And if the op had just googled he would have missed out on a whole lot of help from a lot of people on the forum.

1) Use any of the formatting guides (Di gave you a good link, and Amazon offers a free download. The KDP help forums also work.

2) Save your formatted document as filtered html.

3) Upload that file to KDP.

Works like a charm.

Google is your friend. Search for "boilerplate front matter" AND "public domain".

Either that or hire someone (Di offers this service, if I recall correctly).

It's not rocket science, and even if you FUBAR it, just unpublish and start over.

Filtered html and "web page, filtered" are the same thing. In Word, it means that all the extra mumbo jumbo MS adds to make the Office Suite programs 'talk' to each other are stripped out.

LibreOffice Writer puts out clean code already, so yes, that's the correct option.

About pricing your book...

The best price range for Kindle books is between $2.99 and $9.99, and probably the lower part of that. That's because you'll earn 70% commission instead of 30% for books priced above or below that range.

If you have an intriguing title and good content, I'd go with something like $2.99 and see how that goes.

Good luck!

Thanks for that advice.

I think you're right. I've already contacted someone on fiverr about formatting it for me. It's just too complicated, and life is too short. I'll just think of it as a tiny overhead.

I live in the UK, so I guess I'll be needing an EIN number, of which I know nothing. How would I do this, and what about the Inland Revenue (HMRC, the equivalent of the IRS), when would I need to contact them? Could I just start selling books and take care of that a bit further down the road?




Just some general questions for anyone who can help :

* If I wanted to get reader's email addresses, how would I do that? Is it even necessary seeing as this is my first book? Should I bother or shall I forget about it for now?

* Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk does it make a difference?

* I'd like to use a pen name, but I'm confused.

The name that I sign with is my first and second (middle) name, and it's also my Amazon account name.

The name on my bank account is my first, second and third (last) name.

That's in itself is confusing enough, and so I don't know what would happen in terms of payment. But if I start using pen names for different genres, it's going to be even more confusing.

And what about copyright? What if I ever need to prove that I'm the author, but I'm writing with pen names?


* What about setting up a company name?

* I'm thinking of setting aside 30% of all earnings for tax / nat. insurance. Is this enough?

* Offensive content. Amazon is very vague as to what's allowed and what isn't. In my book I make observations that some might consider sexist (it's not really though). Would this be a problem?

* What is author central? I've looked into it and I'm still confused. Is it anything to do with your KDP account?

Hi Johnny,

You're worrying far too much.

KDP will accept word documents and pdfs as well as cleaned up HTML. I've published 6 short books so far and had no problems. Format your paper size to 4 x 6 inches portrait and see how it looks.

Amazon lets you have up to 5 pen names attached to your account, so no problems there.

Your book will appear on as many national Amazon sites as you choose. Go for all of them. I've even sold books in India & Japan.

If you're a UK basic rate tax payer, get the requisite forms from Amazon and claim your USA tax back, then declare your earnings to the UK tax man where the rate is 20%. If you're in the higher rate (40% or 50%), accept the USA tax (This is my option).

There is an author central for each region. Fill in the .com one and it will be the same for all. This is the book equivalent of an 'About Me' page on the web. It's useful for back-story stuff and future plans if you want to keep updating it. Fill it in and include a picture. Makes you more trustworthy.

Use Word (or Libre Office - which I also use) styles. You only need 2 or 3. Heading 1 for the chapter titles and Normal for the body. You might want to do dialogue in a third style.

When you create the table of contents, don't include page numbers (they will be different depending on user selectable font size) and don't use headers and footers.

Don't worry about sleazy content. There is all sorts on the Kindle store and although you're bound to offend someone (that's too easy), there's probably worse already there.

Consider taking your manuscript to CreateSpace.com which is the print on demand arm of Kindle publishing. This puts your book into physical print and is another option for sales and as KDP, it's free. You can link the physical and electronic publications so they appear on the same page and give buyers an option.

The only criteria there is that it must run to more than 20 pages, sized 6 x 9 inches. The cover dimensions are different too but as with Kindle there is an easy to follow, on the spot cover designer. It won't be artistic but it will be acceptable.

You can have page numbers, headers, footers and footnotes for the print version. You can choose your own price, so long as it is over the basic cost which will be shown to you near the end of the creation process. You don't have to order any yourself, but you will get them for the base cost plus postage.

In short with both publishing methods, GO THROUGH THE PROCESS. If you don't like the result, start again with the same manuscript. Learn by doing. It really isn't difficult. Don't over think things.

Amazon has a forum too with specialised areas for KDP & CreateSpace and there's tons of advice there too.

And above all, HAVE FUN. If it ain't fun, it ain't worth doing.

Regards,

Steven Lucas (search for me on Amazon)

Thanks.

Some questions...

I just looked up pilcrow so I know what it means now. But do you mean remove them from my word processor first? That would cause the title to be right at the top of the page. I do like the idea of having it in the middle but as you say, what the middle? The other option is to just put it down the page by a few spaces, but then again, depending on the device, it would look different. So, do you think it's ok on an ebook to just have all that stuff (title, copyright info, etc) at the top? Is that considered acceptable on an ebook?

I don't know how I would create a zip file. What I did was format in sigil, then export to calibre and convert to mobi. I see that there's an option to convert to zip. So you mean that if I do that, it will create a zip folder with a doc file in it, and then I upload the doc to amazon?

The TOC does appear at the start of the book, and I only managed to find out how to do that after a lot of googling. But it's right at the start, meaning before the title page and copyright page, which doesn't look professional at all. So how would I manually create a TOC? And what do I do it on? Sigil or calibre?

What do you mean by using styles and not direct formatting? How would I do that and is it on sigil or calibre?

Yep, I'm that clueless. I'm learning, but I'm still quite unsure.

And yes I'd like to have a look at your book, thanks. Pm me. Thanks for your help.

It's late and I'll be going to bed in a minute but yes, I'll take you up on that next time I'm here. Thanks. I'm really grateful because I'm so eager to get my book out there, even though I still need to edit and tweak it, but the formatting is the trickiest bit.

Help!!!

I've finished my book and now I'm stuck. All I need to do is format it and convert it and then upload it.

I'm using Libreoffice.

In terms of formatting, all I need is this :

* A table of contents, NOT generated. I want to do it myself, using hyperlinks and bookmarks.

* I don't know how to do styles in Libreoffice. What I do know is that I want it all to be in Georgia, and small enough that it will show about 25 lines of text on an iphone.

* I don't know how much spacing I should have between lines, or between paragraphs.

* I don't know how much indenting I should use for paragraphs. I don't actually want indenting, and I know that I have to set it very close to 0. But what exactly?

* 3 heading styles. One for chapter titles, one for chapter subtitles, and one for different sections within a chapter.

I've been looking into this all day long. Everything is in chinese because I don't get it. I just don't get it. It's taking all the fun out of it. So much terminology, so many incomplete explanations. I've downloaded sigil, calibre, kindlegen, alkinea, and I don't know what's going on.

I just need someone to talk to me like a baby and tell me what to do.

The starter version of Word was fine but you can't do bookmarks and hyperlinks on it. And I really need those to build my own TOC. In fact it doesn't even have a way of generating an automatic TOC, even if I wanted to.

If I copy and paste the whole text of the book into openoffice, will it be easy to follow your instructions, or is everything laid out differently (I mean options and functions)?