Amazon Kindle Publishing: How To Properly Format Your KDP Ebook before Publishing
Are you searching for the right format to use on your E-book before publishing it on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing? You’re at the right place.
In this guide, I will show you how to properly format your KDP EBook before publishing it.
What Is Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing?
Kindle Direct Publishing is Amazon.com’s e-book self-publishing platform launched in November 2007, concurrently with the first Amazon Kindle device.
How Much Does It Cost To Publish A Book On Amazon?
It does not cost a dime to publish a book on Amazon. It’s absolutely free.
All you need to do is create a publishing account with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and upload your book.
Once you publish, you are in competition with other authors.
Formatting Your KDP Ebook
There are two ways to format your ebook for publishing on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing website.
The way is to do it using the official KDP EBook formatting software. You can download this on your computer from the KDP website.
The second method is to do everything manually and ensure it meets the KDP professional requirements.
If you follow the instructions below, you will be able to truly format your ebook to meet the KDP standard and earn real money from it.
Here’s A Full Guide On How To Properly Format Your KDP E-book Before Publishing
Overlooked mistakes can change the appearance of a document once it is converted into an ebook format.
It is therefore essential that authors take time to format their manuscripts correctly to guarantee that there are no errors.
Below are some formatting tips you will find very helpful:
- Graphic images sometimes do not survive uploading. Use a tildy (~) or three stars (* * *) to break up text instead of a Wingding.
- First things first, SAVE your manuscript as a new doc so you’ll have a copy of the original. You won’t be able to use the Kindle version for anything else once you’re done.
- Margins should be around 0.5 top and bottom, 0.8 for left and right margins.
- Don’t use more than three or four line spaces to separate text—more than that can cause text to break to a new page on smaller readers such as iPhones.
- Use font sizes of 16pt or smaller—a title with a lot of text can easily run over to a second line.
- Be sure to include a title page and brief copyright notice.
- Marketing tip: If you’ve written other books, you can include them on an “Also by [your name]” page, with clickable links (just make them hyperlinks in your manuscript). Also, put your author bio at the end.
- Option : you can make the chapter titles in the Table of Contents into clickable links by making each chapter title a “Heading 1” (select the title and click on “Heading 1” on the toolbar—modify the style if needed) and then creating the Table of Contents after that (under the “Reference” tab).
- Don’t include page numbers or page breaks—just let the text run on. Otherwise, the finished product will be a mess! You can, however, insert page breaks at the end of chapters.
- Don’t add headers or footers.
- Amazon usually indents paragraphs during formatting, so I suggest not adding any. But they sometimes change their process. If your final uploaded version doesn’t show indents, 0.3 is a good indent for paragraphs.
- Include a line space between each paragraph for a little more “white space.” Also, shorter paragraphs are more visually appealing on a Kindle reader or iPhone than longer ones.
- After formatting and spellchecking, save the file so you have a final copy for Kindle, then save it again TO A DIFFERENT FOLDER as “Web Page, filtered.”
- If you don’t save it to a different folder, Word will automatically transform the document you just worked on into the html file.
- You do this in order to have the original copy of your edited work which you might later use.
- Then page through the html file to make sure it looks okay (use the Paragraph tool on the toolbar to check the number of line breaks between paragraphs).
- Once that is done, go to Amazon’s Bookshelf on the site, click on “Create a New Title,” and follow the instructions to upload the book.
- You can also use the Cover Creator tool to create a cover at that point.
- After you upload the interior of the book, be sure to preview it using the Amazon previewer.
In Conclusion
You can publish your books on amazon for free, but there are certain standards in writing a book.
A properly formatted E-book creates a good reputation for the writer.
You can fix and re-upload your work as many times as you need to in order to make it perfect.
I hope you find this information useful, if yes, feel free to share with your family and friends.
