Believe it or not, probably the best program out there to format your Kindle book and get it ready to upload to the Kindle Direct Publishing platform is Microsoft Word. If you know how to use Microsoft Word to do formatting then there is no need to pay for a premium formatting application, which can be almost as much work as you would spend on Word. Let’s take a look at the step-by-step process of formatting your book with Microsoft Word to get it ready to display properly on Kindle and available on the Amazon site.
Step One: Edit Your Book
The first step is to do any editing that you have to do to make your book perfect for publication. If you need to, hire an editor to come in and fix all the mistakes and make sure that your book flows correctly.
Step Two: Add Front & Back Matter
Now you need to add front and back matter to your book. These are things like the copyright page, the title page, an invitation to review your book, a promotional page showing your other books that are published and available and anything else you feel is necessary to include.
Step Three: Divide Into Chapters & Subchapters
You’ll want to divide your book into chapters and subchapters. Most people do this automatically is the right, but you may want to move these chapters around or change where you ended a subchapter in lieu of any it somewhere else within the chapter.
Step Four: Add Page Breaks
Page breaks are the number one reason why Microsoft Word is such a great program when it comes to self-publishing your book – especially for Amazon Kindle. Page breaks tell the Kindle publishing program where to end the page before moving everything onto the next one. That way you don’t have a chapter heading at the very bottom of the page which looks terrible.
Step Five: Fill Out Your Info & Upload
You’ll fill out a great deal of information when you get ready to publish a book through Amazon Kindle. You will need to fill out things like the author name, the publisher if there is one, the title of the book, the subtitle, a description of the book or a blurb, any keywords that you want your book to be listed for and the categories that you want Amazon to put your book in. Contact IT Support if you need help.
Step Six: Check Your Work with the Kindle Previewer
Use the Kindle previewer to check your work and make sure that your book is displaying properly on Kindle and is ready to publish. The previewer is only available after you upload your cover and your book and it is the last step before you publish.
Step Seven: Publish Your Book
All you have to do is publish your book from this point. You simply click on the publish button, and then wait for Amazon to approve your book. They want to make sure that you are publishing something original and that you are not breaking any of their rules when it comes to publishing such as using a popular author’s name as a keyword.