Help with KDP

[Benjamin]

Hi. My name is Ben, and I'm a little new here. I was wondering if someone could give me a couple pointers on how to use KDP as a format for my writing. I submitted a short story there which has recently gone live, and there are a couple things I'm a bit unclear about. First of all, I worked very hard to format the story in OpenOffice, and yet when I posted it all the headers and footers were removed from the text, and the paragraphs were all given a weird indentation. Also, I'm not sure how best to get my story noticed. Any advice on formatting and promotion would be really appreciated.

[Quantum]

It's been over a year since I converted my book to .mobi as a test, but let me give it a go.

I assume that you have the official guide:

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images...

However, I don't just upload to amazon and have them do the conversion.

First I test it on my local machine. I use Calibre to perform the conversion to .mobi.

http://calibre-ebook.com/download

and then use the kindle previewer to check the formatting.

https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A...

you might also check out these forums:

https://kdp.amazon.com/community/inde...
http://www.kboards.com

[Dave]

Benjamin wrote: "Hi. My name is Ben, and I'm a little new here. I was wondering if someone could give me a couple pointers on how to use KDP as a format for my writing. I submitted a short story there which has rec..."

KDP should convert your doc correctly, but I'm not familiar with OpenOffice--I use Microsoft Word. However, converting your document to PDF format and then uploading the PDF file may solve many problems. Good luck!

[Marie Silk]

Hi Benjamin :) I send my odt documents to formatters who then convert it to epub, then to mobi for Kindle. I think a lot of indies use Calibre to convert but I have never formatted a book myself. I did try to upload a pdf to set up a pre-order on KDP, but they would only accept a .doc so I converted the .odt to .doc.

Here is a thread I made on marketing that might be of interest https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Are you willing to give it away for free? If so, it might be a way to get your short story noticed :). I give away the first book of my series roughly one day a month and this helps with visibility for all of my books. Good luck :).

[Jen Pattison]

I tried to learn about formatting and failed miserably seeing as I'm not a techie at all, so I paid a formatter who formatted it as a Word doc. I had no probs at all in uploading that and the finished product was great.