So, you’ve completed your book manuscript – Congratulations! But what happens when book formatting for Kindle is the next step?
All that time, effort and care has gone into writing it, to having it edited and proofread, getting the details just perfect. Such a sense of satisfaction!
Now to e-publish it… on Amazon’s Kindle, of course. Just a couple of questions to start…
Book Formatting for Kindle FAQ
- Have you thought about what page size should you use when preparing for an ePub conversion of your manuscript? Do you know if you will need a classic US Letter size, an A4 page, an A5 page or some other size to work with Kindle…?
- Also, will it be a fixed layout eBook, or a regular eBook, and how will you handle the paragraph breaks and pagination numbers? Fixed layout is basically the digital version of classic typesetting – choose and embed your font typeface(s), add an automatic table of contents, footnotes, bibliographies and other visual elements and choose their exact location on each page. A regular or standard eBook has real-time “flowable” text, with no set pagination and no tables or other non-text elements, as they won’t scale to fit the font styles and screen sizes readers will choose on their devices, which range from PCs and Kindle readers, to Android and iPhones and iPads, just to name a few, which is why proper book formatting for Kindle is so important.
- Aspect ratios and text flow… Do your pages have aspect ratios that you don’t want to change? How would you know? Do you want your text to wrap around images and photos in your book? Do you want your book to have a horizontal orientation? How will you set this up so Kindle will be able to “read” your manuscript and reproduce it faithfully?
- Are you absolutely certain the text of your amazing manuscript is 100% correct? Have you ever started reading a book or other document online, and immediately battled with multiple spelling errors, missing words and bad grammar? It’s very distracting to the reader, and they might just abandon your book before they get through the first chapter! Professional editing will help get you the good reviews your book deserves, rather than you having to fend off the haters out there.
- Metadata, cover design, and getting your book noticed and selling… do you know where to start? What even is metadata and where do you enter or add it? Metadata lists all of the information about your book (almost like a yellow pages ad), including its title, subtitle and genre classification, its storyline or contents description and subject matter, the countries where your book is available, and an image of your book cover. Your metadata is displayed across the web, on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, library catalogs and everywhere online. Of course, your book cover art, typeface and image are absolutely vital to getting sales – you need to stand out from the crowd, but also attract the right type of readers to choose your book in the sea of titles out there…
Let’s face it, getting your book formatting for Kindle is going to take just as much time, effort and expertise as writing it in the first place. Why not get a service like Word-2-Kindle to take the burden off your shoulders and do all of this for you?
Word-2-Kindle employs a team of friendly and highly competent professionals whose sole purpose in life is getting manuscripts to look perfect and getting them ready for publication.
They take all of the 5 points above into consideration and do the necessary tweaks and settings to ensure your book can be published on Kindle without a hitch.
Get your manuscript to the marketplace, and become a published author without the heartburn-inducing stress! Hand your precious manuscript over to the Word-2-Kindle professionals, and see your hard work and dedication transformed into a book that flies off the shelves!
