How to publish for Kindle on Amazon

To anyone who hasn't done it, publishing for the Kindle on Amazon can seem a formidable task, so this post is to share my tips on how I published Remix. There are other ways - and you can always pay someone else to do it. JA Konrath recommends the person he uses. Allow about a day to do it my way.Prepare your book as a Word document. Remove page numbers and headers. Make a title page; I'd advise condensing the usual front matter to one page. Put the indents to three characters, and start each chapter on a new page using Ctl and Enter. I used a tilde (~) between scenes, as the conversion process can remove line spaces, even though they show on the Preview. Consider if you should put a bit about another of your books, or a link to your website, at the end.Download Mobipocket Creator (free) and from the home page, import your Word document.Click on Metadata to the left of the page you are now on, and fill in your book's details and cover. You will need to use Ctl and V to paste.Click File and Save As, and the document will be saved in HTML form where you choose on your computer.Go to Amazon's Digital Text Platform. Register, go to your Bookshelf and click Add a New Title. Follow the instructions carefully.Once your HTML file is loaded, you get to the most important part of the process, Preview. Preview gives you an approximation of what your text will look like on a Kindle. At this stage, go through every single page looking for formatting flaws which have popped up, such as passages in bold or italic or incorrect indents. Put these right on the HTML document as you find them. You don't need any knowledge of HTML to do this; it's easy to work out which bit of code is wrong, and replace it with a sound bit of code from a correct passage. Remember to change the code at the end as well as the beginning of a paragraph. Warning: this painstaking process may take hours, depending how much extraneous concealed formatting your original Word document had. But it's essential. Reload the improved text, and check again.Repeat until your book looks the way you intended.Fill in the rest of the details.Publish! If you have a Kindle, download a copy to check; if you don't, download Kindle for PC and check on that.Sell lots of copies.