Can you relate to the Facebook conversation above? Perhaps you’ve tried a Kindle converter tool and ended up with weird spacing and formatting yourself.

Believe me from personal experience, trying to do it yourself is a pain in the you-know-what and will end up costing you hours of valuable time. That’s why I added an eBook programmer to my team – to do my own books!

So how long should your Kindle book be? And how do you make it look pretty?

If the content is step-by-step and high quality, 15 pages is enough for a 99 cent Kindle book or a freebie used for lead generation. Fifteen pages of text at normal PDF page size is about 30+ pages of text on the standard Kindle. Add screenshots or other graphics and you’ve got a nice-sized eBook. But especially when you start adding graphics, the formatting can get tricky.

So how do you avoid this?

The image on the left is a PDF uploaded through Amazon’s Direct to Kindle “meatgrinder.” As you can see, it’s anything but readable. The one in the middle is formatted through a free PDF to Kindle converter program (there are dozens of these available, pretty much all of them are the same). A little better, but still fairly unreadable. The one on the right was sent to my personal eBook programmer. The graphics appear in the right places, bullets are lined up, spacing is great and capital letters are all in their right spots.

One thing Loretta didn’t understand is Amazon makes it super easy to upload something, but they don’t seem to care if it looks good or not. Because all they see is the bottom line. They don’t care that the negative reviews will kill an author’s reputation, and they don’t care what it looks like if the author will make it sell a few copies (non-returnable, of course) netting them a few dollars. Makes my job that much harder when people think they can do it better alone, then their credibility is shot and that bad reputation can’t easily be undone.

If formatting for Kindle can be so much trouble, why publish on Kindle at all?

Kindle books outrank almost any other website’s SEO for keywords, so they’re quite valuable in small doses. Imagine transcribing an interview you had with a popular name – someone who’s regularly searched for on Google. Because Google loves Amazon.com so much, Amazon’s book and eBook rankings outrank any other websites. This means if you sell a 99-cent transcribed interview on Kindle, when someone searches for that person’s name your eBook will come up first. You have just done two things: 1) Associated yourself with that popular person and 2) Beat their website’s SEO, putting your name up at the top.

No one should publish on Kindle just for the money, though there will be some. Most importantly is the credibility, SEO and lead generation it will bring to your business. One new client will more than instantly triple the average eBook investment.

So now’s the time to ask yourself… Is investing in an eBook programmer worth keeping your reputation clean? Is it worth putting out something of quality that will not only generate income, but quality leads for your business?

Kristen Joy

Kristen Joy

Kristen Joy Laidig is the founder of The Book Ninja. She has authored over 40 books, started over 50 publishing companies, trained over 10,000 authors worldwide, has her black belt in karate, and eats way too much chocolate. She currently changes lives through her students… one published message at a time, manages her two retail stores Toy Box Gifts & Wonder® and Nerdvana Outpost in the heart of her newfound hometown, Chambersburg, PA, is in the start-up phase of at least three new businesses at any given time, and generally causes anyone reading this bio to be out of breath. On her “off” time (what’s that?) she brainstorms business ideas with her awesome husband, the great Public Domain Expert himself, Tony Laidig, and hangs out with her two ragdoll kitties. She’s even been known to sleep... occasionally.

3 Comments

Leave a Reply