Many authors have found solace in the self-publishing industry mainly because they do not feel the harsh rejections being thrown to them by traditional publishers. For the past six years, the publication and production of books have evolved completely from the formats to the market itself. 2013 is another year to watch out for. As a self-published author, how will you survive the outrageous competition in this growing market?

1. Know your market really well.
Most authors do not realize how essential it is for them to have an ample knowledge on their market. Self-publishing is 85% advertising and selling. Being a good writer is not just enough if you want your book to reach the bookshelves of your readers. You have to know whom you are going to sell your books to. The moment you realize that self-publishing is not just purely having great stuff put inside your book, you have to find out what tickles your audience. How do you captivate their attentions amid the millions of other competitors? How do you fight to get their interest? The trick is to spend a significant amount of time promoting your book. Build a marketing platform which fits the taste of this generation. The social media is a powerful tool which enables you to go beyond horizons. They make you meet a lot of other people who also take interests in your own craft. Utilize them to advertise your works.

2. Always write something which was never written before.
This is the challenge about being a writer. You have to accept it, nonetheless. You know a book is terrible when it just would not sell even if how well-advertised it was. If you have written a masterpiece, something which is really worth reading by the whole world, the demands for copies will keep on coming. Why would you want to write about clichéd topics with clichéd plots when you can rise above those? Read books, familiarize yourself with the latest ones and work on genres which you think you can do great with. The important thing in writing a book, especially a novel, is that you can send your message right across to your audience. What is your advocacy in writing your material? Make certain that it is clear to them.

3. Build an SSS- Strong Support System!
Even right before getting your books out in the bookstores or online shops, make your book’s presence felt by a specific group which can serve as your pillar of strength and support. Ask for your family, friends, and relatives’ full support because they are needed in crowdsourcing. They can also be of great help to you when it comes to editing and reviewing your work. You need those constructive criticisms in order for you to improve your craft. Remember this: you are not your best editor. Somebody has to do the job for you because you want someone to be objective an unbiased.

Know more about Kindle Direct Publishing at The Fast Fingers and know you way around the self-publishing industry now!

Amazon Kindle is by far one of the most expensive eBook readers on the market today. However, if you overlooked the price, maybe you could see the benefits you could accrue from using it. Self publishers have used a lot of money trying to make it in the publishing world, so here is something they can use to their advantage. Sometimes all that money may or may not translate into profits for you, so why don’t you try something that can give you some certainty in terms of profits like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing?

Kindle Direct Publishing has actually transformed the lives of many self-publishers. Now, authors can create a free Kindle eBook and market it. Your eBook gets listed in the Amazon Market place immediately and it can be found from search results in the official website. Now self publishers can market their books at very cheap costs which are guaranteed profits. Once the eBook is already on the Amazon website you other people can download it into their eReaders in whatever formats they prefer.

So, the million dollar question is, do the costs of using Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing actually outweigh the benefits resulting from the use? Well, the answer is Yes. Now self-publishing authors don’t have to waste lots of money publishing books which they may never get profits from. Kindle has a guaranteed profit stream since once the book is marketed on Amazon, customers can buy it and you get your returns after that. With Amazon Kindle, self-published authors can now have a guaranteed income stream. Note that, though there are some marketing costs associated with posting your eBook on Amazon, the returns are much more than the initial costs.

Visit The Fast Fingers for more information on how to use Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Self- publishers can also use our book formatting services which are available at cheap and affordable prices.

The updated specs for a book’s cover file should fall within the 1500-2400 pixels range, with a 1.6 ratio to the width. Kindle offers sample dimensions as follows:

(452 x 600) pixels for children books

(600 x 800) pixels for KF8

(900 x 1100) pixels for comics

However, most authors may prefer to stick to the 6 x 9 size of the standard book.

Cover design that meets acceptable thresholds for quality may call for the help of professional book formatting services. Ensure the images you use for cover design are 300 dpi or above to ensure optimal quality when published or printed.

You will need at least two kinds of covers to submit to the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing System (KDP): the product cover and the internal eBook cover. JPG image format will suffice for both product cover and internal eBook cover.

Formatting the Internal book cover

The kindle eBook cover should be a JPG or GIF image at 300 dpi for best resolution and quality. You do well to keep the image size at the recommended 127 kb size. These specs ensure large images or content with gradient patterns displays at optimum clarity. You also want to keep the overall file size of your eBook to a minimum.

Generally, images take up more digital space than text files and Kindle eBooks are no exception to this reality. For this reason, Amazon recommends you upload GIF or JPG images of not more than 127 kb. If you happen to have images of formats such as BMP or PNG and wish to upload to KDP, the conversion process will recompress those into JPEGS. Meeting the specs recommendations in the aspects of image size and resolution before uploading to KDP minimizes possible complications during the conversion process.

Processing of the image

Images are processed individually, separately from the content they may be embedded in. Thus, if you submit a text file with embedded images, KDP extracts the images from the file and replaces them with an HTML tag.

The product display Cover

The product display cover for your eBook stays on the virtual bookshelf in the Kindle store. The image must be 72 dpi to save on storage space. It has to be crisp, sharp and 127 kb or lower. Formats accepted are JPEG and TIFF. The recommended size for this is (600 x 800) pixel. This image is just for marketing purposes (not printing or publishing) and thus does not have to be 300 dpi.

Use color for cover art

Wise use of color will enhance your book’s attractiveness on virtual bookshelves. Take advantage of color capacity Kindle Fire offers and use it on fonts and images.

At this stage, you should be ready to upload your cover to KDP for processing and publishing. You will need to have a KDP account to publish and distribute with Amazon online store.

The Fast Fingers have been in the business of eBook formatting for long enough to know what needs to be done to get things right for your cover design.

If you work in the publishing industry, you would most certainly know about the latest advancements brought about by internet technology. But if you are a newcomer in this business, it is very important for you to keep abreast with the latest methods to publish your book in order to reach a wider audience.

One very useful tool for both writers and publishers is Kindle Direct Publishing. A good number of successful writers have made their works available to the public through this Kindle service. It is a fast and easy way to get your books published. What’s more, you can avail of the service anytime because it is for free.

Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP offers three different ways to prepare books.

Do It Yourself

A writer or publisher may choose the “Do it Yourself Option” which also comes with a guide for building your book for Kindle. It features a step-by-step tutorial for designing, formatting and creating your book to make it available for Kindle users.

Print and Digital

Authors also have the option of using print and digital media for their book. This service is available through CreateSpace which is an Amazon.com Company. With CreateSpace, you may choose to start with the free services or you may also explore the paid publishing services offered on the site. Independent publishers would indubitably appreciate the higher royalties, comprehensive book services, free and easy tools and the wide distribution options.

Use a Conversion Service

Many different services that specialize in eBook conversion are available to authors and publishers.  Those who need the help of experts in terms of adjusting and integration to come up with a good eBook may try Booknook, Datamatics, CreateSpace and Smart Site, just to name a few.

 Another noteworthy characteristic of Kindle Direct Publishing is the fact that it allows you to publish your book in many different languages like English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. And on top of that, you may also indicate the pricing of the book in terms of US Dollars, Euros, Sterling and Pounds.

If you have already published your book and you want to make some changes with the converted text, the cover image or the book details, you may also consider Kindle Direct Publishing for these needs. The service also has a new feature which allows the author or publisher to notify customers in the event of content updates.

You can join the community forum or send an email anytime you need assistance regarding the services offered by Kindle Direct Publishing.

If you have concerns or questions about the technical aspects of book publishing, you may contact the experts at The Fast Fingers to get the answers you need.

An ebook is the electronic or digitized version that is highly portable and could be stored in any media. We could store any number of ebooks in our desktop or laptop, ebook reader device, mobile and smart phones. While there are plenty of ebooks available in the internet in variety of formats, initially one has to have a good knowledge of the different formats and its supported devices. There are several formats to create an ebook and one of the most widely accepted format is the Adobe PDF as it is very compatible with any kind of devices. All that it requires is a small piece of pdf reader software which is freely available in the internet. One disadvantage with the PDF file type is that sometimes the text does not fit in appropriately in devices that has smaller screens and may require zooming and navigation.  

Apart from the PDF, there is Mobipocket, Kindle, Epub, Ereader, Microsoft etc. There are innumerable ebook creation and conversion softwares that you could try it yourself downloading and installing them on your PC. If your plan is just to have your text converted as an ebook for personal use it is well and good to try it out yourself. But, if you are planning to publish your manuscript as an ebook, then it is vital that you ought to depend on any professional ebook creation services. Because, when it comes to creating or converting your manuscript as an ebook there are lots of guidelines that you must follow to make your book highly readable and attractive.

Services like Kindle conversion are very popular and if you have a plan to make your book available in the Kindle store, then you may have to follow the rules of formatting for Kindle version and these books could only be read on Kindle devices. As a writer, it is obvious that you cannot spare much time for all such activities. The best option would be to leave it to some dependable and affordable ebook creation and conversion agency to take care of your manuscript. That’s the only way to get started with a highly professionally designed work. But, there are numerous people out there in the internet who promise to make your ebook great and do nothing more than creating an unstructured product.

It is important for you to carefully consider before choosing an ebook specialist. You have to verify their credentials and portfolios of their services before you could assign them yours. The style of the ebook varies according to the content and genre. You have to be very careful in providing them your ideas and expectations and discussing things clearly. All these would make the conversion process easier and enable to have a very organised and quality product. The Fast Fingers is an inexpensive typesetting and formatting service assisting you to publish your work easily. They are highly-experienced in formatting your works to the standards of CreateSpace, Lulu, Lightning Source etc. They also specialised in ebook conversion, cover design and audio/video transcription. You have all your publishing needs under one roof that makes their service great. 

The traditional way to publish a book is to write a book and then look for an agent who is ready to work for you and has got contact with relevant publishers. This method has got high chances of failure as the publisher or the agent may reject whole of your work or ask you to do changes to the story which may eat the soul of your story. The whole of your labor goes in vain because of interruption of the publisher.

eBooks have changed the whole scenario for the writers. It has come as an escape from all these publisher’s issues and get your book published at no cost. You don’t need a publisher or an agent for this.There are a lot of eBook readers but Kindle is the most popular one. It is the most selling product on Amazon. It seems it will keep dominating the market.

Now the question is how to write and sell a book using Kindle? It is no different than writing for paper form. You just have to take care of few things regarding formatting mentioned below.

Put all the material together in eBook format

You should use Microsoft Word while typing the text as converting into Kindle format is very easy from it. You can also use other writing software as well. But you should always keep in mind that it is a good word processor. If you don’t have one, you should be downloading one before you start writing.

Designing your cover page

In a traditional form, the publisher gets the cover page designed for you but as you are your own publisher here, you will have to do it on your own. You can go for free images that match with your content or you can use Microsoft Paint, Adobe Photoshop or any similar drawing software for creating your own image. The image should be 600 wide by 900 high.  Finally you need to put your title and other details required on front and back cover.

Plotting the story and managing your table of content

As the first 10% of the book can be viewed by the readers on Amazon, you should be careful about this part. It should be interesting and engaging and should have a mystery in it. Plotting the story in this way will bring you lots of readers. So, make sure to include interesting topic in introduction and also keep your title of contents very interesting so that your readers get tempted to buy the book.

Managing your product description

You need to give the best product description as this is what brings the customers for your book. It is the material that goes on the back cover. It is nearly about 100 to 140 words. It should be neither too short nor too long so that the readers must feel he knows enough of the story to buy the book but doesn’t feel bored.

Publishing your eBook

You should get an account on Amazon on Kindle Direct Publishing. Then you need to start uploading your product description, title of content and the main content. Finally you need to click “save and publish” and your book is on sale on Kindle.

So, this is how to write and sell an eBook with Kindle Direct Publishing.

Self-publishing is becoming a trend for a lot of aspiring writers. Instead of going through an agent to get a publisher, more writers are opting to publish their own books on their own. The technology we have right now makes it even easier as there are different software and programs that can help in creating books. 

The MobiPocket Creator is a tool that is used to create electronic books or eBooks that are in the MOBI format. This allows you to make your own eBooks without a sweat since there are wizards that help you in setting up your table of contents and your cover page. There are also built-in templates that can help you in making your documents or databases, be it for a photo album, a personal travel guide or a wine database. It’s also fairly easy to use as the working environment is powerful and simple. Navigation though the software is similar to that of websites. You can also personalize your documents easily with the Creator. There is an option that allows you to send your eBook directly to your PDA. There are also security options for your files like password-protected, encrypted and no encryption. You can protect the distribution of your work through the Digital Rights Management (DRM).

The MobiPocket Creator has two editions: the home and the publisher. You may have to use the Publisher version, especially when you are building eBooks for commercial purposes. This allows you to customize your files and create a suitable output for distribution. The publisher version also has other features like PDF import, encryption level, metadata editor, and integrated deploy feature. There are also certain file formats that you can import like PDF, OEB, XSL or XML, RTF, HTML or XHTML, and Microsoft Word documents. It can also support certain image file formats like PNG, JPEG, BMP, and GIF. If you want to review the output and results of your work, you may also consider getting a MobiPocket Reader. 

This tool can only be used by those who are using Microsoft Windows. The good thing is that, there is a MobiPocket Creator free download in its official website. This makes it advantageous for you, especially if you are starting out as an author and you don’t have extra money for purchasing eBook creating software. Aside from this software, there are also other book formatting programs, tools, and software that you may want to check out. These can definitely help you in creating the great books that you want.

To a number of aspiring writers, getting published is one of their major goals. It feels great just to have a printed copy of your book sold at bookstores. But as we all know, the process can be really long. This is why a lot of the new writers prefer using self-publishing platforms. The Kindle Direct Publishing is one of the many platforms that you can use. This is an easy way to publish your own book without having to wait or to face rejection. This platform will aid you in creating eBooks and Kindle eBooks.

To start using the Kindle Direct Publishing, you must finish your manuscript first. This means completing every component of your book from the cover page to the back page. You must also have proofread your work and edited it. Ensure that there are no grammatical or spelling errors in your book. Have it checked by two or more people to ensure quality. You can save your files even in MS Word formats. Just make sure that you have saved it in compatible file formats. One more thing, make sure that you wrote the manuscript yourself. Never have the urge to publish what is not yours or you may have problems.

After guaranteeing that your manuscript is error free, you can now set up your own account. Go to the website and register. It’s fairly simple, you just have to provide all the necessary information required. You may also be required to provide your social security number including a method where you want to get paid, for royalties. After creating your account, you can now start the publishing process.

In Kindle formatting, start by putting your title. You can click the Bookshelf tab in your dashboard and add a new title. This is just easy. You are just required to fill in the fields that would ask for the details of the book, its description, and contributors if any. You also have to provide the categories of the book, the publisher, date of publication and ISBN if you have one.

After you have set up the details of your book, you can go ahead and start uploading it. The first thing to upload is the cover. Having a product image will allow customers to see what your book looks like. It will also help in selling your book. Have an image that is in .jpg or .tiff file. The contents of the book come next. But before you upload them, you might want to think over the digital rights management option. This will control on how the book is distributed digitally. Once you’ve picked an option, start uploading. You have an option to preview the book to see how it looks like after rendering. You can save the files if you’re satisfied.

Before you get to publish it, you will have to choose on the royalty and the price of your book. You can choose either the 35% royalty or the 70% royalty. When you’re done with this tough ordeal, you can now save your book and publish it. Your book will already show up in the Kindle store in a day or two.

Kindle Format 8 (KF8) is Amazon’s next generation file format offering more than 150 new features and enhancements that includes HTML5 and CSS3 support that publishers can use to create all types of books. KF8 powers the book reader Kindle Fire and it replaces the Mobi format. Included in the 150 new formatting capabilities are embedded fonts, drop caps and CSS selectors such as line spacing, alignment, justification, margin, color, style and border. Kindle Direct Publishing supports KF8 so books created using the new Kindle Publishing Guidelines can be published via KDP.

Kindle Fire is the first to support the Kindle Fire 8. Mobi format ebook will still work with e-ink devices and apps though, they just need to be updated. Just read the Kindle Publishing Guidelines to learn the update process.

via Amazon.com

Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is a self-publishing platform provided by Amazon, of course. This provides an outlet to a lot of independent writers to create and format their own books for free.

Setting up your own account in KDP is easy. You just need to sign in your Amazon account. If you don’t have an account with Amazon, you can just make your own since it’s fast and easy. When you’re done, you just have to log into your account and start with your publishing.

The process is easy and basic. Click the Bookshelf menu found on the upper part of the page. This will lead you to a page that will allow you to enter the title of your book and other important details about your book like the description, language and others. You can also put in search tags to make your book easier to locate for shoppers. After this, you can already upload your manuscript along with the cover.

You can use different file formats when uploading your book. You can use Microsoft Word (.doc), ePub (.epub), Adobe PDF (.pdf), MobiPocket (.prc and .mobi), and Text (.txt). After you upload the files, you’ll be directed to the pricing tab where you get to set a price for your book and get your royalties. You can choose two options for your royalties, either the 70 or 35 percent royalties. Each of these royalties has its own advantages and disadvantages. It has its own different features that you’ll have to read about so that you can decide which one is for you.

With KDP, you are not just provided the means of publishing you are also provided with tools and resources that can help you in formatting and converting your work. You can also post questions and look for tips at the community page of KDP. You can find that there a lot of independent authors that are helping out others by sharing their experiences and giving answers to questions posted by other writers.

KDP can help you in selling your work through the different Amazon websites. It will also be able for purchase for the different Kindle users and Kindle app users. This makes your book available to a large number of consumers and active e-reader user. Aside from using KDP to publish your ebook for free, you may also want to expand your reach by printing paper books through CreateSpace. By using a number of channels for selling, you are increasing your chances of selling your work to a larger market.