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I agree that you should understand your tools before starting your manuscript. Just recently I realized I should translate some work (perhaps a short story) just to gain experience on how the tools work.
However, and I could be wrong, but I think Amazon charges a one-time fee for access.
Even more important, I think you should have a marketing plan in place, considering you are probably not with a brick and mortar publisher who does such things.
I have some good marketing ideas but not sufficient that I don't worry about it.
One thing I've wondered, their most basic instruction is to use only bold, underline, and italics. When you save to HTML and mark up your chapters, how do the chapter numbers get bigger? CSS? And authors often add some subtext to their chapters, a saying, or an introduction to the chapter maybe?
And what about the oft used drop letter beginning a chapter? Or sometimes a partial or first sentence is bolded.
You can do nearly anything in Kindle that you can do in HTML - but of course their "for dummies" instructions tell said dummies to keep it simple, lest they end up with a broken mess and give up or something. It's not a process for those who have never written a simple web page; you have to be able to parse HTML and understand at least the basic set of CSS commands.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Deelighted
There's a book on Amazon "Building your book for Kindle" that I'm currently perusing. Wish I'd read it before I started writing my novel. lol
Reformatting something as simple as fiction to comply with the basic standards is pretty easy. It helps if you understand and use Word styles and can do complex search and replace operations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lovehound
However, and I could be wrong, but I think Amazon charges a one-time fee for access.
Not as far as I know (or have encountered), but then, Amazon has changed the selling rules about every three days since 1998.
Well this old gal learned a new trick from that book. Now I've been around computers since the 1980s but I had no idea that you could self-propagate the Table of Contents from your chapter headings. That was really simple and easy to do
I am so glad I read this thread. After finally retiring and aspiring to write and self-publish several books on Amazon, I can now lay that idea aside.
If I am lucky I may have 20 years max of good health left and I don't want to waste them messing with all this.
I will just continue to enjoy writing and posting photos on my blog which no one reads anyway!
Not a dime in it but lots of creative pleasure.
It's not that hard to publish on Kindle. The problem is that there's an "easy" way heavily promoted by Amazon, and a correct way that isn't much harder but is not as well promoted and followed. (And then there are successively more complex pro ways to get increasingly sophisticated books into the system. Few of which apply to novelists, short-story writers and essayists.)
Marketing is the same problem it's always been. Without an established publisher to carry the load, it's either be satisfied with word of mouth sales, hope for lightning to strike or work fairly hard promoting and publicizing the book.
Noting also that writing is a great retirement job pursuit, citing Stephen Hawking as an example that health or physical fitness is not required!
Also, great for relaxed travel. Some time back me and then GF spent a week in Puerto Vallarta (MX). She was always a night person, me morning. All week I worked on a magazine article while she slept in. I got in a few hours each morning writing as she slept. She appreciated that I sipped coffee and wrote, didn't disturb her sleep.
Writing is a great occupation as a second or retired career. If my novel succeeds I plan on spending the proceeds on travel. And I'll take my laptop or notebook with me. (Cloud storage is a good idea.)
Many writers do this, and use "on location" to research backgrounds for their novels. Get paid to travel.
One of the final steps in processing a Kindle manuscript is to save your MS as HTML, then edit the HTML to add chapter links, images, etc. CSS is not generally used in Kindle processing, the only three effects used being bold, italic, and underline.
And yes there can be exceptions, particularly if not using Amazon's platform.
There is professional publishing software available that will enable you to do it all- justified type, optical letter kerning, drop caps, inserted graphics, pagination, chapter breaks and heads, etc.
The grand-daddy of them all is Quark Express. It is the standard publishing software for print ever since the early 1990s, and the latest versions will format for e-readers.
It's not cheap, and it's fully professional, so if one is serious about book design, it will take some time to learn its extensive capabilities, but it's pretty easy to learn the basics.
It's sort of a combination of several products Adobe offers; Quark allows some design/graphic work to be done like Illustrator, can adjust photos like Photoshop, and is a better multi-page layout tool than InDesign.
Adobe is the other big dog in this stuff but Quark came first.
While I've used both the Adobe stuff and Quark, I think Quark is the better for self-publishing a fully professional looking product.
Unlike Adobe, when you buy the package, it's yours. It isn't in the cloud, and you don't have to buy a subscription to use it or install it on a second computer.
There is professional publishing software available that will enable you to do it all- justified type, optical letter kerning, drop caps, inserted graphics, pagination, chapter breaks and heads, etc.
That's why I should use Amazon's process on a test sample. Some of the above is required!
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