Kindle for Beginners

The Kindle format is often the stumbling block between publishing your ebook on Kindle and taking advantage of the marketing machine that is Amazon or your ebook remaining just an ebook in PDF form.

Ok, let's get this out in the open, it takes more than just uploading your PDF to get your ebook onto Kindle.

The Kindle reader itself uses a stripped down, naked version of HTML for its formatting. Similar to a web page, they support CSS files, headers, paragraphs, and other tags. But not all HTML is supported. This means tables, margins and images are hard to manage. You need to keep that in mind when you lay out your ebook. If you do, your formatting will be much easier to deal with. In an ideal world you would write your ebook with Kindle in mind and not include the tables and keep the images to a minimum.

Images come through as black and white, remember that when you add the images to your ebook,

Tools to format your ebook for Kindle

Amazon has a variety of tools available for download to help you get the format for your ebook to Kindle transition done correctly. The MobiPocket Creator, for example, will turn your HTML, Word and most PDF documents into a properly formatted 'script for Kindle. For Mac or Linux users, KindleGen is a command line tool that allows you to turn your HTML document into a Kindle ebook. If you are not very good at this aspect then hire in a virtual assistant to complete the technical aspect for you.

Remember the cover

We all know you shouldn't judge the book by the cover but the truth is we still do it. A great cover can boost your Kindle sales and the good news is, Kindle supports .jpeg .tiff and png. file formats, so you can get a cover created and uploaded easily. Remember to test - finds out what kinds of cover work best for you and use Photoshop or other editing software to create different covers.

Confused by it all?

Amazon have a powerful support forum for you to go in and ask questions and peruse some of the solutions to similar issues that you are having. Don't feel nervous about asking for advice, the community are helpful.

Amazon do a terrific marketing job on all their books but you need to help them when it comes to promoting your newly published Kindle book. ]


Link to the book,
Complete you author page
Invite people to post reviews
Share the reviews on Twitter and Facebook

Good luck and enjoy publishing your ebook on Kindle.

Sarah Arrow is author of Easy Kindle Publishing for bloggers where her clear and concise how to guides help businesses make the most of blogging.

Drop by and subscribe for to her newsletter for the free ecourse on better, more effective blogging for business and a free Kindle Publishing checklist.

Article (C) Sarah Arrow 2011