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?
[…] believe, for now, it means authors should keep formatting for Kindle using the tried and true standard MOBI format. Once the market has flooded with Kindle Fires, maybe then will be the time for authors to offer […]
I think its all about the quality and not quantity. I wrote one about a month ago and it has already been downloaded 600,000 times. It’s called “KINDLE YOUR ASPIRATIONS” on self help. Some write huge books and price them fairly low.
This is a great resource to have. I will consider you soon. Thanks