eBook Formatting For Amazon Kindle and Epub Kobo Writing Life – A Step by Step Guide For Beginners

Get Your Novel Selling On Amazon Kindle

First you’re going to transfer the words you’ve been slaving over, correcting, deleting, etc to PLAIN TEXT. This will get rid of any hidden formatting glitches that suddenly make your words appear in places on the page where you don’t want them.

BEFORE you transfer your text to this document, make a SAFE COPY so that you can’t lose all your work.

To make a SAFE COPY:

FILE > SAVE AS > In ‘Save As’ line write SAFETYnameofdocument. In WHERE – select somewhere you’ll find it easily like ‘Desktop’.

Click > SAVE

CLOSE that document.

Now return to your original final document.

Transfer all your text to TEXT EDIT/NOTEPAD:

OPEN a blank TEXT EDIT/NOTEPAD document:

MAC: Find the TEXT EDIT Application. Click FINDER (funny blue face at the absolute bottom left of screen). Click the APPLICATIONS folder. Scroll down till you see Text Edit and double click on it. This opens the Application Icon (A piece of paper and a pen) in your control board running across the bottom of the screen. Click on the Icon to open a fresh Text Edit Document.

On very old Macs this App is called Simple Text

PC: On PCs this App is called NOTEPAD.

Highlight all of your text:

Return to your original Master doc. Click EDIT (right at top of screen) > SELECT ALL

A shadow runs across all of the text.

Now transfer it:

Click APPLE + C (CONTROL + C on PC) which copies the text somewhere deep inside your computer

Move cursor to your blank Text Edit/Notepad page

Click CONTROL/APPLE + V

Your text is now on the page.

Click FORMAT (right at top of screen) > Make Plain Text.

All your fonts and formats will disappear, leaving just the writing.

OPEN A FRESH NEW WORD DOCUMENT don’t worry about the page sizes or anything like that, you don’t need to bother with that as long as it’s a basic, standard kind of a page layout.

Now cut and paste your plain text back onto this fresh Word document.

The text will appear in the font you have set in Word. Use a basic, standard font like Times New Roman.

This is now, technically, a clean copy ready to be transferred to Kindle. Save it and name it KINDLE-booktitle.

Now, before transferring to Amazon KDP, the Kindle sales platform, you’ll need to:

a) Go through the text and re-insert any text formatting that’s been lost like itallics/bold. Don’t mess with the spacings yet, leave them completely alone.

b) Justify the margins. Remember, this document will not appear on Kindle as you see it written on the page. The machinery transfers your text in its own way, so only do the basics and you’ll be less likely to screw up.

Kindle automatically indents the first line of every paragraph. To keep it simple, therefore, justify your margins to the left. In your Toolbar look for the rows of parallel lines, they’re called Align Left, Centred, Align Right, Justified.

Highlight all your text EDIT > Select All.

Then Click the first on L parallel lines icon Align Left.

c)Now add your front matter, title, copyright etc. You don’t need a picture cover inside your document. See Amazon Kindle’s Simplified Formatting Guide.

d) Now for the spacings. This is where it’s a bit weird. Have your text run continuously between each chapter, if a heading within a chapter is at the bottom of the page don’t move it to the next page because once it transfers to Kindle the text will keep on running consecutively. Keep sub-headings close together, don’t space things out or huge gaps will appear in the kindle doc. What you do need to do is space between the front pages and between the chapters. So when you want a new page click PAGE BREAK at the top of your screen (Sometimes found at INSERT > Break > Page Break).

e) Check your spacings by hitting the Backward P in your Word toolbar (CTRL+8/APPLE+8). You will then be able to see where the page breaks are and make sure they’re all there.

Don’t worry about hyperlinking chapter headings. It’s necessary for non-fiction so that readers can jump to the required chapters, but not absolutely needed for fiction. Don’t put page numbers in either, ebook Masters don’t need page numbers.

Save Word to HTML Web page (if you have pictures, you can skip this and load in Word, spacings may be less accurate & need more adjusting. If you have “HTML Filtered” option, choose this, pictures sometimes load well with this, sometimes not at all.):

Click FILE > where it says Save As > scroll down to “Save As Web Page”.

You’ll now have 2 files, your Master and your HTML Web Page Master. The latter is the one you load to KDP. But first load to your Kindle (or Calibre see below) read through to check for formatting and spacing issues.

LOAD TO AMAZON

First, if you have any problems, Amazon digital email help:

kdp-support/at/amazon.com are helpful and usually quick to respond.

Now go to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform, KDP https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin.

If you don’t have a reader account with Amazon, create one.

SIGN IN

Click GETTING STARTED & FAQs. Under the GETTING STARTED GUIDE > Publish Your Content

Scroll down to START HERE TO PUBLISH YOUR CONTENT > Enter Your Product Details

And you arrive at the first page of your dashboard.

Bookmark it so that you can find it easily whenever you need to:

Click BOOKMARK at top of screen > Bookmark this Page

Enter Details

The dashboard is your control panel.

Add:

The title of your book

Add Contributors:

Put your author name in.

Language etc are self-explanatory.

Ignore ISBN, you don’t need that.

As long as all the work is your own, click ‘This is not a public domain work’.

Target Your Book to Customers comes next. Choose two categories that most closely fit your title.

Search keywords: enter up to 7 key words that relate to your book. Separate each one by a comma. Think carefully as keywords really are key to bringing readers to your book sales page.

Upload Your Book Cover. Have it ready and waiting on your Desktop – click Browse for image and select the file name.

Enable DRM – click “Do not enable digital rights management” (see main book for details).

Upload Your Book File. Hit Browse and select the HTML file you made earlier. When you get the green tick and ‘Upload and conversion successful, click PREVIEW BOOK.

A little screen will open with your Kindle book on it. Now go through the preview window and see how it looks. To correct any spacings, put your original Word Master MS up on the screen, click on the backward P thing to bring up the tab marks and other indent marks and go through your Kindle Preview and your MS together.

Retransfer your new Word Master to HTML, marked 2-titleoffile so you don’t get it confused with your earlier draft. Browse and upload. Correct again until your satisfied. Keep words and headings close together for best results.

Click SAVE AND CONTINUE

Verify Your Publishing Territories

Click Worldwide rights, assuming nobody holds rights in any other country.

Choose Your Royalty. For a 70% Royalty charge $2.99 or above. For anything lower you’ll need to go for the 35% royalty.

Kindle Book Lending. Tick Allow.

Tick Accept Terms and conditions.

Tick Save And Publish.

You’re on.

It takes anything from a couple of hours to 48 hours for your book to appear. When it does, buy it and read it through again. If anything’s not right, go to your bookmarked dashboard page and upload a corrected version. You can change your book as often as you like. You can change your price as often as you like. See what other books in your category are charging and take it from there.

Step by Step Guide To Making A Basic Epub Master for Direct Loading To Kobo Writing Life (Plus Other Epub Sales Platforms – iBooks, NOOK Etc.)

Make a new copy of your Kindle Word document and label it TitleofBook-KOBO.doc.

Go through the text and take out any references that you may have in your front and back idents which refer to Amazon. You may be asking readers to kindly think about reviewing your book on Amazon, for example. Delete, or change ‘Amazon’ to ‘Kobo’.

Make sure your chapter listings are listed straight through from beginning to end with no breaks. How To Publish An Ebook On A Budget – An Author’s Guide, for example, (from which this guide is extracted) is divided into four parts. My original index was divided by these part separations. This threw up an almighty storm when it came to the ePub reader trying to decipher chapter separation in its Table of Contents and the whole thing crashed. So it’s chapter listing, if you have them, at the front of your document reading simply all the way through: 1,2,3 etc.

Save as HTML (“Web Page”) (“filtered” if you have that option).

Now to download the free ebook reading and creation tool Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/. If you’re using an older version of Calibre on an old Mac this might not work. You’ll have to beg or borrow a PC or modern Mac that will download the latest version of Calibre which is a breeze, formatting-wise, compared to the older versions. Watch the simple tutorial video which shows you what all the basic buttons do.

First make a new file on your desktop to store Calibre ebooks. Open the list of computer files and folders at your computer START or Apple Finder button. The list will be something like ComputerUser’sName/Documents/Music/Games/Computer/Control Panel. You need to click the Computer User’s Name, which will probably be your login name at the top of the list. Then go to > New Folder and label it CALIBRE. You will now have a Calibre Folder on your desktop.

Open the Calibre Dashboard. Click “ADD BOOKS” top Left. > Look for your ComputerUsersName label > from there you can get to your documents. Select your Kobo HTML file.

It will be added to your Calibre library.

On the Calibre Dashboard, select little arrow next to Blue EDIT METADATA icon, top row left.

Select “Edit Metadata Individually”.

Check title and author are filled in correctly. If your ebook is already online, go to bottom and click “Download Metadata” and Calibre will automatically fill in description, cover etc.

If the ebook and/or cover isn’t online click “Change Cover” “Browse” to find your cover to add.

Now click the brown “convert books” icon at the top next to Metadata icon.

A window will open. On the left near the bottom you’ll see the blue EPUB OUTPUT arrow. Click.

A wheel will spin on the bottom right. When this has stopped. You’ll see, on the right just below the cover image, that EPUB has been added to the formats.

Now get rid of the ZIP format. Right click the ZIP ident and hit delete.

Click on the title in your Calibre listing. A window will open, select the 3rd option down “SAVE TO DISC” > then 4th option “Save only Epub Format to Disc In Single Directory”.

Click “Desktop” > highlight “Calibre Books” and click “Select Folder”.

You are now done with Calibre. Don’t forget to Donate if you can afford to give the Calibre people anything for providing this service free of charge.

Now go to Kobo Writing Life. Scroll down to bottom of page and click START PUBLISHING.

The interface is very simple to follow. Fill in the title, author details and book description.

When you’re prompted to upload your Epub book, you’ll see that Calibre has exported 3 files to the folder on your desktop. Select the top “EPUB” file, not the jpeg image or the OPF File (idents are on the far right of the line).

When it has uploaded you’re invited to preview your Kobo ebook.

Look through – checking especially for spacings and that the chapter listings on the left hand side have come out OK.

If you’re happy with the content, continue. If not, delete the file from Calibre, re-edit your master, retransfer to HTML and load to Calibre again.

Next you’re asked to apply Digital Rights Management, which is set to default at YES. And then Geographic Rights, default set to YES.

My query to Kindleboards on DRM resulted in the advice not to apply DRM, so I choose not to do this and select NO. As I hold world rights on my title I keep the YES there.

Set the price and hit PUBLISH.

Don’t forget to fill out your account details so that royalties can be paid directly into your bank account every month.

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CONCLUSION

Keywords are important. In order to make your book stand out from the crowd, you must learn how to strategically choose them and ethically harness their power.

There’s a difference between Amazon Keywords and SEO Keywords. I’ve shown you how to choose and use them both to increase your ebook sales.

The right keyword combinations can open up new markets for you.

Strategic keyword selection will drive more viewers to your book. You can use keywords to gain more viewers and ultimately, make more sales.
Find the right keywords one of two ways: either use my free methods, or pay once for Keyword Samurai and have all the dirty work done for you.

With Keyword Samurai, you will have instant access to loads of incredibly valuable information at your fingertips.

http://kindlesamurai.net/

Cheers,

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CONCLUSION Keywords are important. In order to make your book stand out from the crowd, you must learn how to strategically choose them and ethically harness their power. There’s a difference between Amazon Keywords and SEO Keywords. I’ve shown you how to choose and use them both to increase your ebook sales. The right keyword combinations can open up new markets for you. Strategic keyword selection will drive more viewers to your book. You can use keywords to gain more viewers and ultimately, make more sales. Find the right keywords one of two ways: either use my free methods, or pay once for Keyword Samurai and have all the dirty work done for you. With Keyword Samurai, you will have instant access to loads of incredibly valuable information at your fingertips. http://kindlesamurai.net/ Cheers,