The Kindle is a handy, lightweight, incredibly slim, paperback-sized electronic device on which you can store and read thousands of books which you download electronically from Amazon.
But the great thing about Kindle is its benefit to authors.
What Amazon have done is to take the publishing industry by storm because anyone who has a computer with a word processor - and a story to tell - can become an author. Amazon may not quite have sounded the death knell for the publisher's rejection letter, but they've certainly put a big dent in the bell.
Amazon have placed the decision about whether or not a book is worth publishing exactly where it should be - in the hands of the readers. Anyone now has the ability to write their book and see it sell, or not sell, purely on merit. Certainly authors who have suffered rejection after rejection (and I've had a few of those letters myself) at the hands of publishers are now earning significant sums of money from sales of their books on Amazon's Kindle platform.
What Kindle doesn't do is allow you to have a paper version of your book proudly displayed on your bookshelf, but it does allow you tell your friends, acquaintances and business associates that you are a published author. All you need is a manuscript and a cover to display on Amazon's sales pages.
The actual process of turning your word processor document into a Kindle formatted file is not overly straight forward. The problem is that you have to download a couple of pieces of software and follow Amazon's detailed instructions. What I discovered when I was doing this was that Amazon seem to have two levels of instructions - basic and detailed. The basic ones are not too difficult to follow, but when you follow them and find your file isn't formatted correctly and you burrow deeper, you discover that the more detailed instructions appear to have been written for an earlier submission system.
It took me forever to get my first book formatted correctly for Kindle. But if you are reasonably technically competent with computers and don't mind instructions not working when you follow them and are happy to Google away to find the answers then all it takes is time and eventually you are the proud possessor of a published book listed on Amazon's pages.
It is a very rewarding feeling seeing your name up there. Amazon also give you the option of completing an author page where you can tell your readers a little bit about yourself and list all of your books. That way if they liked one, they have an easy route to purchase all of the others.
So if you have a book inside you wanting to get out; get writing, sign up to Amazon's Kindle publishing service, and become a published author.
Michael Hadfield, author of several Kindle books can help you with converting your manuscript to a Kindle readable format. Visit the link now http://www.hypnosisiseasy.com/convert-to-kindle-format.htm to find out more.
A really quick read is Cory Doctorow’s version of I, Robot which was written as an homage to Isaac Asimov’s original series of short stories of the same name. Doctorow’s version is part of a series of short stories called Overclocked
stories as I was always a fan of him in my younger days.