Introduction

This online manual is designed to teach you everything you need to know about publishing your book to Kindle. Amazon is world’s largest retailer for ebooks and other goods and services; it makes great sense if you are an author or publisher to get your content available on the site. But it’s also important that the content you do post there is available in a format that readers will enjoy; hang-ups due to improper formatting or bad editing can lead to negative reviews on Amazon and cloud the overall success of your titles. By following the simple instructions in this ebook, you will be able to assure that your content reads exactly as it should on Kindle readers.

One of the easiest ways to design an ebook is by using Microsoft Word. Chances are you used Microsoft Word or a similar word processing program to compose your manuscript. We’re going to familiarize you with some of the features of the program that will create flawless ebook titles.

The Differences between Print Books and eBooks

There are many differences between print books and ebooks. If you have tried to publish a print version of your book through CreateSpace, LightningSource/Ingram Spark, or any other print-on-demand publisher, you may have learned a thing or two about formatting text, images, and other content within a book for printing. Many of you may have even read my how-to books on print book design. We are going to be following some of the same procedures for this book, but we will be using Microsoft Word instead of Adobe InDesign.

With print books, each page is assigned a page number and, oftentimes, you have titles that go above each page. This is possible in ebooks, but we won’t be formatting for these initially (Amazon actually takes care of this during publishing). For now, you have to imagine your ebook like a web page. For those who know a little about web code, you create a code that will pull up certain files when a certain location is selected. If you were to publish a website and had a homepage, you could imagine this is the contents page of your book. Then, if you had all the chapters listed as a hyperlinked group, you could click on one link that would lead you to a chapter.

Ebooks are handled the same way. Each chapter will be its own file that it attached to a main file. This means there are no page numbers in the document. The organization really comes from organizing your chapters properly.

Create an Ebook in Minutes

Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, creating ebooks is actually pretty easy. We’re going to set up our Microsoft Word manuscript document to behave like a webpage. Once you’re able to see things from this perspective, it just becomes a matter of formatting all of the material properly and proofing for any errors before sending it out into the world.

Chapter 1: Microsoft Word's Formatting Features

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