I have been a conversation today with some friends of mine on resources for publishing Kindle and print-on-demand books using services like Kindle/Amazon, CreateSpace/Amazon and Lulu.com. I thought I would start pulling some of this together in a post so others can access this info.
Kindle Book Resources
Amazon has a number of their own resources for pulling together your Kindle book, I found them quite useful along with some other sources. I found I need to read these books several times to get it to really stick. My books have a lot of images in them and it became very difficult to get the pictures to act and look the way I wanted.
- Building Your Book for Kindle, from Amazon/Kindle, free download from Amazon, very useful, for the PC users
- Building Your Book for Kindle for Mac, from Amazon/Kindle, free download from Amazon, for the Mac users, MS Word works differently on a Mac than a PC, you need this info especially for building your Table of Contents. Building the clickable TOC can drive you nuts
Aaron Shepard’s Books, excellent
- From Word to Kindle: Self Publishing Your Kindle Book with Microsoft Word, or Tips for Designing and Formatting Your Text So Your Ebook Doesn’t Look Horrible, by Aaron Shepard, An excellent resource
- Pictures on Kindle: Self Publishing Your Kindle Book with Photos, Drawings, and Other Graphics, or Tips for Formatting Your Images So Your Ebook Doesn’t Look Horrible, by Aaron Shepard, this guy is good, this is his newest book. I am going to assume this book is also good, I just bought it and will read it. Images can be a struggle. Update from the first read, a ton of information in this book, I need to re-read it and take notes, almost to much to digest. goes into a lot of detail. But I did learn about Kindle Comic Creator.
Other Books
- From InDesign CS 5.5 to EPUB and Kindle, by Elizabeth Castro, this book was also good for dealing with InDesign. Castro is a recognized source in making ebooks.
- EPUB Straight to the Point: Creating ebooks for the Apple iPad and other ereaders, by Elizabeth Castro, This is for more for EPub books, You can also see Elizabeth Castro other info at her site elizabethcastro.com.
InDesign has Kindle and epub plugins for making ebooks, I started working down this path as I am an huge InDesign user but eventually went back to MS Word. A lot of people use InDesign to make their books, I just got frustrated mostly because of the heavy picture needs that I had and couldn’t figure it all out. If you are mostly text then life will be easier.
Youtube Resources/Playlist for ebook publishing
In my search for Kindle and epub knowledge I put together a YouTube Playlist called Kindle and Self Publishing
CreateSpace/Amazon Print-on-Demand Publishing Tips
I have another blog called How to Make and Sell Your Book and I did a long post on Using CreateSpace and Print-on-Demand called Publish Your Book Using Print On Demand with CreateSpace.com and Amazon.com, clever right. This article has a ton of info, including some guidance on building your cover. CreateSpace has upgrade the cover process some since this was written but it is still pretty helpful. There is also lots of other ebook publishing info on this site. How to Make and Sell Your Book
Other ebook and Print-on-Demand Links
- Kindle Direct Publishing has a ton of tips on their site that are very helpful. Take a look at Preparing Your Book and Publishing Your Book
- CreateSpace/Amazon, CreateSpace is the print-on-demand side of Amazon, it is where you upload and manage your books. Just paperback books, but you are on Amazon. I have over 20 books through these guys. They are excellent, great service.
- Lulu.com, another print-on-demand book site, Lulu has more options for your books, including hard cover and spiral binding. Excellent quality
Kindle Direct Publishing has released an amazing tool for creating fixed formatted books for the Kindle called Kindle Comic Creator. This tool can also be used for creating picture books. I have just started to mess around with it but one of the things it can do is convert pdf files. It is free and works with both Mac and PC. I make a lot of image based books, music books, maps, and coloring books. My initial test is that it converts these book really well. It seems adding a TOC is a bit of an effort and maybe beyond me at the moment, but all the positives look really cool. Here are some of the things it can do:
- Create a guided navigation experience with Kindle Panel View
- Create books with double page spreads or facing pages
- Import artwork from jpg, pdf, tiff, png and ppm formats
- Preview content across Kindle devices before publishing
