My Experience with Kindle Direct Publishing

Love them or hate them, Amazon is a powerful online retailer, selling more electronic books than anyone else,. They have earned this with their powerful online presence and low margins. But they also created programs and tools for Indie authors that are easy to use, with lots of features to make uploading your book to their servers very simple; to a point. I'm going to cover my experience with using their Kindle Direct Publishing model for eBooks.

First you need to get your document formatted correctly. There are many books out there that cover this, and even templates you can purchase or a formatting service that will expensively covert your work. I've found with a couple of tweaks I can do this myself to get the document just right for KDP. I use Word, which works fine, but you need to setup the Styles for the document with certain settings, depending on what part of the book you are working on.

• Single spacing should be used
• Don't use tabbing to indent paragraphs or it will indent too far
• Enable Show/Hide Command (Ctrl + *) to see extra spaces, tabbing and other hidden formatting symbols and remove them
• Keep font size to Times New Roman 12 or something similar
• Create and save your own Style pages for Chapter Heading, Main body of text. Title Page and Copy-write page and so on. Format them to what works best.

Body of Text Example:
Right click a current Style page from Home Tab and select modify
Give it a name and then change the font and pt size to what you want
Click Format and Paragraph-Set Paragraph settings for Indents and Spacing:

• General-Alignment left
• Indentation-Special First Line 0.3
• Spacing-Line Spacing Single

Set Paragraph settings for Lines and Page Breaks:

• Remove checkmark on Window/Orphan Control
• Remove checkmark on Keep lines together

You'll then want to create a Chapter Heading Style, just be sure to choose a large font size, center it with no indentation. Then select the Style page you want to use before typing and it will be automatically formatted. Play with it to find the right one for you.

Once you have your document written, save the file as a Web Page Filtered (HTM/HTML) format. Then you can use the Kindle Previewer program Amazon provides to open the HTML file and see how it will look on the variety of Kindle devices Amazon sells. Be sure you still keep the original DOC or DOCX version for editing.

Depending on the version of Word you have, the steps may vary some. I'm using Word 2007, 2010 and 2013, and they are basically all the same. Pre-Ribbon versions of Word maybe different. It may take some time but once you find the right configuration you can carry it over to your next novel. At least until Amazon throws you a curve and changes their conversion techniques.

The novel is written and formatted, so it's now ready to upload to the KDP site. Next posting I'll run through the steps, as there are many of them, so you can publish your eBook.