If you’ve decided to publish your book through Kindle, you’ve made a step in the right direction. What a lot of people really love about publishing through Kindle is how easy it is to set up your manuscript and then watch it go live as a novel.
The first thing you need to do is to make sure that you have your novel written out in the proper format. This just makes everything go a bit faster if you’ll write your novel in Microsoft Word – because if you use a program with a lot of formatting, it doesn’t upload as easily. You also don’t want to copy from another program and paste because you’ll get those weird symbols in your text.
You’ll need to make sure that you use page breaks as you write. If you don’t use page breaks, it’ll throw off the formatting and you’ll end up with run on chapters. You have to remember that too much text all clumped together makes it harder for readers to read your material.
You can upload visuals with Kindle just by inserting them in your work, but keep in mind that images change the size of the file, making it a lot bigger than plain text. You want to make sure you don’t go over any upload limits.
You’ll lay out your pages in order starting with the title page. Most people make the mistake of putting their book cover as their first page, but that messes up the format, so don’t do that.
Next in order will be the copyright page if you use one. Depending on the use you want allowed for your book, you may or may not use a copyright page. You can dedicate the book if you desire, but put the dedication on a page alone. After that, you’ll need your table of contents page.
Something to remember is that Kindle doesn’t want your book cover with the manuscript upload. You can upload your own image by using something you’ve created or you can use free artwork as long as you check the licensing agreement first.
Some people hire a professional book cover artist. A great thing about Kindle is that as you have information to share with your readers, you can update your already uploaded book.
Once you have the book uploaded and it goes live on Kindle, that’s only 50% of the work. The rest of the work is in the marketing. You have to tell people about the book. You have to promote it. You can promote the book through the use of social media.
Use Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and do a blog tour. On the blog tour, interact with those who leave comments. Announce the release to your email list. Start the buzz a few days early so that on the day the book goes live, you can send out, “It’s live” announcements.
Send out online press releases and put together a street team. A street team is a group of people who help promote your book. They’re going to talk about it on their social media sites, on blogs, etc. And don’t forget to create a book trailer for YouTube for your book!