bhendbks@yahoo.com
February 18th, 2011, 02:56 AM
BACK IN PRINT
Lecture #5: Loading to Kindle
Loading to Kindle. Were those magic words? For some of you, perhaps, since I do know Kindle was one of the draws for this workshop.
Let’s dive right in then.
1. If you already have an Amazon account, you’re one step into the process. If you don’t, now’s the time to get one. Personally, I couldn’t live without mine since the nearest major bookstore is nearly 30 miles away. My choices are the local used books shoppe (yep, that’s how they spell it), the grocery store, the nearly-on-every-corner pharmacies, or online for my book buying.
2. Don’t automatically sign in to your account unless you want information about Kindle or publishing with Kindle, neither of which will get you to where you need to be to load anything into Kindle – at least not that I’ve found. No, when the Amazon home page comes up, scroll down to the very bottom where it says MAKE MONEY WITH US and click on SELF PUBLISH WITH US. When the next screen comes up go to the left hand side and under SELF-PUBLISH WITH US click on Kindle Books. There may be other ways to get in, but this is what worked for me.
3. You’ll be welcomed to the “digital text platform” but you need to scroll way over to the right hand side to find where to log in. Sign in using the e-mail address you used for your account at Amazon to buy things and also your usual password. If you don’t already have an Amazon account, they do have a button that lets you get one now at this point. I have no idea if it makes it easy to return to this page or not as I’ve had my account for years. Sorry about that.
4. As this is your first time to load to Kindle, click on ADD A NEW TITLE, which you’ll find on the left hand side of the screen.
5. Poof! You’re at a new page again. Under BOOK BASICS key in your title. I’ve tried to do so in Capitals on mine, but I don’t always remember. I don’t think there is any guideline on this, so as long as you have upper and lower case or all upper case letters, either works well.
6. If the book isn’t a part of a series nor has edition numbers (these would be updates on a non-fiction book more than anything to do with a fiction title – think of all those text books you ended up purchasing in college because a new edition had come out and you should have the idea down pat), move on to DESCRIPTION. This is where you can put the blurbs about the book, any reviews if it is a reprint. I suppose you could put a bit of bio in but the word Description seems to apply just to the story to me.
7. Now move on to BOOK CONTRIBUTORS. If this is just you, you still need to click on the button to fill in your name and then pull down the menu under “title”. This isn’t the title of the book, it’s who you are in the grand scheme of things. You are AUTHOR. If you co-wrote this book with someone else, you’ll be adding them in here, too, only on a separate line. The elements under “Title” are fairly self explanatory so I won’t go into it here. For most of us, we’re the only author anyway.
8. PUBLISHING DETAILS requires a language. Most of us will simply be clicking on English. If your book was translated into another language can you rekey it from the copy you have and put it up in Kindle as well? No. While you own the rights to the book’s content, you don’t necessarily own the translated version, maybe just the storyline part of it. It would probably take a literary lawyer to tell you more though. For those of you who live in other countries and have had your book published in your native language by a publisher within your country, then you would be choosing whatever language applies. Amazon is international after all. As I’m only working here with Amazon.com there may be some differences…even at Amazon.ca and AmazonUK…but you will need to find or stumble across them yourself unfortunately. Sorry about that.
9. As it shows on the screen, the Publication Date, Publisher and ISBN are all optional. If you want a publication date, click on it – you’ll find a calendar and your publication date will be the date showing there. When I decided to do the independent-publishing route for my reprints, I created a publisher name – 3 Media Press – so that’s what I put in under Publisher. You could also just use your name. Remember, since e-books do not require ISBNs at this time, and the one you might have gotten for a trade paperback version at a POD firm, or purchased separately elsewhere for the paper version, does not apply here, don’t use it. Neither does the original ISBN which identifies the original publisher
10. PUBLISHING RIGHTS. This should be a no-brainer. YOU own the rights as long as you have received a reversal of rights letter from the original publisher if this is a reprint. If it’s never appeared in print, you own the rights flat out. The book isn’t out of copyright if you wrote it. Copyright law keeps your work out of anyone else’s hands but your relatives for years and years after you kick the bucket. It used to be 50 years after your death but I think it is 75 years now unless your family files for another copyright because you wrote the next GONE WITH THE WIND or HARRY POTTER-like blockbuster book.
11. BROWSE AND SEARCH. This is dropping your book into categories. If it’s a non-fiction book, look for the words that apply the most, things like Biography or Autobiography, Business, Cooking, etc. If it’s a work of fiction trawl on down to FICTION and click on it. This will give you sub-categories like Action-Adventure, Fantasy, Historical, Romance. Click on up to five sub-categories under whatever Categories apply. Then move on to feeding in Key Words that will help readers find your title. The Keywords are optional, but it’s a good idea to make use of them. For instance, for SEDUCING SANTA, I used Christmas, Santa Claus, retailing, holidays, small business, romantic comedy.
12. Ahh! We’re up to loading your cover. Remember, it needs to be 72 dpi to stay within the pixel count. You can use the 6x9 cover you developed for the POD book without resizing it other than for the scan to 72 dpi. Click on Browse for Image, find it among the files on your PC or laptop’s hard drive, and click Open. Once your PC’s “open file” box disappears, and the file name shows up, click on Upload Image and sit back while it does its thing. When the cover appears in the thumbnail box, you can move on down the loading page.
13. BOOK CONTENT. I’ve seen people asking in the online RWA chapter loops which they should choose here. To me it’s a no brainer. I want my content protected, so I click on “Enable Digital Rights”. It’s up to you though. There is a “what’s this” that you can click on for more details on what is entailed.
14. Once you make the decision about digital rights, you’re ready to load your recently prepared manuscript file. Click on BROWSE FOR BOOK, find it on your hard drive, do the same things you did in regards to the cover and sit back and wait a bit. It doesn’t take nearly as long as loading at Lulu…at least it doesn’t for me. Load time no doubt has a direct correlation to the type of Internet connection type you have. I use a DSL since it works fine if slower than something like Road Runner might.
15. Not only will you be waiting for your manuscript file to load, you’ll wait a couple minutes for it to convert to the Kindle system. When you see the message that you can view the newly formatted version, settle in. You need to go through it page by page to see how it looks.
Now, Kindle does warn that this is an approximation of what the text will look like on the page. I have only had one title that didn’t cause me some hair tearing time. Why? Because where I had but a single blank line between text for either scene or POV breaks, or before and after “Chapter” whatever number, the proof copy showed a wider space. Remember, I mentioned some swearing had been involved. I have gone back to my original, deleted and refed in the event there was a hidden formatting icon causing the problem, but it doesn’t always help. A few times I found that the line above “Chapter” had ended up being in the larger type size rather than 11pt and that had made the gap larger. Most of the time, I’m clueless as to why it does it. If your master copy doesn’t show the problem, how the heck can you fix it, right? My only hope has been that in the REAL Kindle download, this wouldn’t surface. It just might take purchasing and going through each title page by page to find out. I haven’t done that though, just sufficed with the “proof”. But when I do get back to checking the published copies, if I don’t like it, I’ll reformatting my original and giving it another shot.
I have caught some weird problems though: a) lines that somehow broke apart as if I’d hit Enter to break them up, when I hadn’t – at least going back and finding that in the original and fixing it worked; b) there was one manuscript that ended up with some odd spacing that didn’t clear up easily but did get fixed when I highlighted and deleted from the paragraph before through the paragraph after the section and then rekeyed it; c) paragraphs that didn’t indent in Kindle but were clearly showing they were indented in my master copy ended up being my major problem – spent lots of time swearing over this, constantly clearing all the formatting and starting over again. In the end the solution was to act as though there was no tab over indent (which I had on the automatic feature in Format anyway) and request in Format for the automatic feature to indent next paragraphs by 0.2 (which made my master copy look like I had a 0.7 tab). Voila! The next time I loaded it to Kindle, the necessary .02 paragraph indents were in place.
THIS IS WHY YOU NEED TO GO PAGE BY PAGE OVER THE “PROOF” COPY AFTER LOADING IT. You want a clean looking “book” – it takes work. Sometimes more than you thought it would.
Because of the problems that kept cropping up, this was the most time consuming feature of the load to Kindle, but hopefully my Troubleshooting discoveries will help it go faster for you. Okay, let’s return to our numbered list.
16. Once you are happy with the way the “draft” copy looks you can click on SAVE AND CONTINUE. If you aren’t happy with it (and, by the way, it won’t be showing margins around the text in the proof copy but they will show up in Kindle itself – a fact I base on what the “sample” downloads show), click SAVE AS DRAFT. This will allow you to go back and rework things if necessary. And to return another day, or later in the day after logging out, return to numbers 2, 3, and 4 on the list here, but rather than click on “add a new title”, scroll far, far over to the right. There is a box called “actions”, I believe, or something like that. Click on it and you’ll have an option to get in to continue working on the title in question.
17. Once you SAVE AND CONTINUE you move on to the next page in the system. Here’s were you’ll do things like decide on a price, on distribution, and finally click on the box that says you have the rights to publish the content of this book. Because this is all fairly self explanatory, I haven’t done a step-by-step on it – figured you were getting tired of the numbers. However, I will point out that to get 70% royalty you need to price this between $2.99 to $9.99. Anything over $10 qualifies only for the 30% royalty. I decided that $2.99 was a novella price, $4.99 was anything 60,000 to 75,000 words long, and $6.99 was the longer historicals, which tend to be 90,000 words or better. You might decide to have everything at the same price. If you have loaded a non-fiction title, you might look at what similar books are going for in your pricing.
18. Click the final button now! It will take the Kindle system a couple days to get your title up and available. They also sent me a message on a couple of mine, pointing out that the same title was available in a Lulu edition and asking if I had the right to load a Kindle edition, who I was, etc. A simple reply and the book showed up as a Kindle edition within 24 to 48 hours.
In the event you are wondering about when you get paid, well, for the titles I finally got up and running in October, if there are more than $10 in royalties at the close of the month, it would be another 60 days before the amount would be automatically sent to my checking account, which is what I told them to do in opening my account at Amazon (I’ve also sold used research books as an Amazon merchant, so I know the money transfer system works well). And even without advertising or having things up on my website, there were Kindle sales registering. I have a feeling that it was students in my various online workshops who availed themselves of one of my titles from Kindle, so keep in mind that you will need to do some promotion. It’s still on my To Do list.
If you’d like to see how my formatting looks in a Kindle edition, you don’t have to actually purchase an entire book. Kindle lets you get a sample downloaded. Just go into the regular Amazon system and click on Books, then on Kindle, and feed Beth Henderson in the search section. They always have books listed by people with similar names, but mine are DESPERATE MEASURES, ARDEN’S TOUCH, NIKROVA’S PASSION, RING IN THE NEW, MR. ANGEL, MR. FAR FROM PERFECT, SEDUCING SANTA, LUCKY, AT TWILIGHT, and PARAMOUR. If you don’t have a Kindle yourself, no problem. I don’t have one either. I use Kindle for PC, which was a simple download. Amazon sends anything I purchase (or get for free) in the Kindle network straight to my computer. There’s an icon that showed up on my screen that I can double click on to see the covers of all the titles I have in Kindle versions now.
Hopefully you won’t have as much mental (and verbally snarled under your breath) swearing involved in getting your home system and the Kindle system speaking the same language for the upload, and you’ll be ready to take the leap into Barnes and Noble’s Pubit! system for Nook next time.
I have my fingers crossed for you. I did do a lot of trouble shooting along the way that you can benefit from though. The result for me was that the last two titles I loaded, went up much, much more smoothly than that first one did.
Back tomorrow for a look and a snarl at PubIt! for Nook.
Beth
Lecture #5: Loading to Kindle
Loading to Kindle. Were those magic words? For some of you, perhaps, since I do know Kindle was one of the draws for this workshop.
Let’s dive right in then.
1. If you already have an Amazon account, you’re one step into the process. If you don’t, now’s the time to get one. Personally, I couldn’t live without mine since the nearest major bookstore is nearly 30 miles away. My choices are the local used books shoppe (yep, that’s how they spell it), the grocery store, the nearly-on-every-corner pharmacies, or online for my book buying.
2. Don’t automatically sign in to your account unless you want information about Kindle or publishing with Kindle, neither of which will get you to where you need to be to load anything into Kindle – at least not that I’ve found. No, when the Amazon home page comes up, scroll down to the very bottom where it says MAKE MONEY WITH US and click on SELF PUBLISH WITH US. When the next screen comes up go to the left hand side and under SELF-PUBLISH WITH US click on Kindle Books. There may be other ways to get in, but this is what worked for me.
3. You’ll be welcomed to the “digital text platform” but you need to scroll way over to the right hand side to find where to log in. Sign in using the e-mail address you used for your account at Amazon to buy things and also your usual password. If you don’t already have an Amazon account, they do have a button that lets you get one now at this point. I have no idea if it makes it easy to return to this page or not as I’ve had my account for years. Sorry about that.
4. As this is your first time to load to Kindle, click on ADD A NEW TITLE, which you’ll find on the left hand side of the screen.
5. Poof! You’re at a new page again. Under BOOK BASICS key in your title. I’ve tried to do so in Capitals on mine, but I don’t always remember. I don’t think there is any guideline on this, so as long as you have upper and lower case or all upper case letters, either works well.
6. If the book isn’t a part of a series nor has edition numbers (these would be updates on a non-fiction book more than anything to do with a fiction title – think of all those text books you ended up purchasing in college because a new edition had come out and you should have the idea down pat), move on to DESCRIPTION. This is where you can put the blurbs about the book, any reviews if it is a reprint. I suppose you could put a bit of bio in but the word Description seems to apply just to the story to me.
7. Now move on to BOOK CONTRIBUTORS. If this is just you, you still need to click on the button to fill in your name and then pull down the menu under “title”. This isn’t the title of the book, it’s who you are in the grand scheme of things. You are AUTHOR. If you co-wrote this book with someone else, you’ll be adding them in here, too, only on a separate line. The elements under “Title” are fairly self explanatory so I won’t go into it here. For most of us, we’re the only author anyway.
8. PUBLISHING DETAILS requires a language. Most of us will simply be clicking on English. If your book was translated into another language can you rekey it from the copy you have and put it up in Kindle as well? No. While you own the rights to the book’s content, you don’t necessarily own the translated version, maybe just the storyline part of it. It would probably take a literary lawyer to tell you more though. For those of you who live in other countries and have had your book published in your native language by a publisher within your country, then you would be choosing whatever language applies. Amazon is international after all. As I’m only working here with Amazon.com there may be some differences…even at Amazon.ca and AmazonUK…but you will need to find or stumble across them yourself unfortunately. Sorry about that.
9. As it shows on the screen, the Publication Date, Publisher and ISBN are all optional. If you want a publication date, click on it – you’ll find a calendar and your publication date will be the date showing there. When I decided to do the independent-publishing route for my reprints, I created a publisher name – 3 Media Press – so that’s what I put in under Publisher. You could also just use your name. Remember, since e-books do not require ISBNs at this time, and the one you might have gotten for a trade paperback version at a POD firm, or purchased separately elsewhere for the paper version, does not apply here, don’t use it. Neither does the original ISBN which identifies the original publisher
10. PUBLISHING RIGHTS. This should be a no-brainer. YOU own the rights as long as you have received a reversal of rights letter from the original publisher if this is a reprint. If it’s never appeared in print, you own the rights flat out. The book isn’t out of copyright if you wrote it. Copyright law keeps your work out of anyone else’s hands but your relatives for years and years after you kick the bucket. It used to be 50 years after your death but I think it is 75 years now unless your family files for another copyright because you wrote the next GONE WITH THE WIND or HARRY POTTER-like blockbuster book.
11. BROWSE AND SEARCH. This is dropping your book into categories. If it’s a non-fiction book, look for the words that apply the most, things like Biography or Autobiography, Business, Cooking, etc. If it’s a work of fiction trawl on down to FICTION and click on it. This will give you sub-categories like Action-Adventure, Fantasy, Historical, Romance. Click on up to five sub-categories under whatever Categories apply. Then move on to feeding in Key Words that will help readers find your title. The Keywords are optional, but it’s a good idea to make use of them. For instance, for SEDUCING SANTA, I used Christmas, Santa Claus, retailing, holidays, small business, romantic comedy.
12. Ahh! We’re up to loading your cover. Remember, it needs to be 72 dpi to stay within the pixel count. You can use the 6x9 cover you developed for the POD book without resizing it other than for the scan to 72 dpi. Click on Browse for Image, find it among the files on your PC or laptop’s hard drive, and click Open. Once your PC’s “open file” box disappears, and the file name shows up, click on Upload Image and sit back while it does its thing. When the cover appears in the thumbnail box, you can move on down the loading page.
13. BOOK CONTENT. I’ve seen people asking in the online RWA chapter loops which they should choose here. To me it’s a no brainer. I want my content protected, so I click on “Enable Digital Rights”. It’s up to you though. There is a “what’s this” that you can click on for more details on what is entailed.
14. Once you make the decision about digital rights, you’re ready to load your recently prepared manuscript file. Click on BROWSE FOR BOOK, find it on your hard drive, do the same things you did in regards to the cover and sit back and wait a bit. It doesn’t take nearly as long as loading at Lulu…at least it doesn’t for me. Load time no doubt has a direct correlation to the type of Internet connection type you have. I use a DSL since it works fine if slower than something like Road Runner might.
15. Not only will you be waiting for your manuscript file to load, you’ll wait a couple minutes for it to convert to the Kindle system. When you see the message that you can view the newly formatted version, settle in. You need to go through it page by page to see how it looks.
Now, Kindle does warn that this is an approximation of what the text will look like on the page. I have only had one title that didn’t cause me some hair tearing time. Why? Because where I had but a single blank line between text for either scene or POV breaks, or before and after “Chapter” whatever number, the proof copy showed a wider space. Remember, I mentioned some swearing had been involved. I have gone back to my original, deleted and refed in the event there was a hidden formatting icon causing the problem, but it doesn’t always help. A few times I found that the line above “Chapter” had ended up being in the larger type size rather than 11pt and that had made the gap larger. Most of the time, I’m clueless as to why it does it. If your master copy doesn’t show the problem, how the heck can you fix it, right? My only hope has been that in the REAL Kindle download, this wouldn’t surface. It just might take purchasing and going through each title page by page to find out. I haven’t done that though, just sufficed with the “proof”. But when I do get back to checking the published copies, if I don’t like it, I’ll reformatting my original and giving it another shot.
I have caught some weird problems though: a) lines that somehow broke apart as if I’d hit Enter to break them up, when I hadn’t – at least going back and finding that in the original and fixing it worked; b) there was one manuscript that ended up with some odd spacing that didn’t clear up easily but did get fixed when I highlighted and deleted from the paragraph before through the paragraph after the section and then rekeyed it; c) paragraphs that didn’t indent in Kindle but were clearly showing they were indented in my master copy ended up being my major problem – spent lots of time swearing over this, constantly clearing all the formatting and starting over again. In the end the solution was to act as though there was no tab over indent (which I had on the automatic feature in Format anyway) and request in Format for the automatic feature to indent next paragraphs by 0.2 (which made my master copy look like I had a 0.7 tab). Voila! The next time I loaded it to Kindle, the necessary .02 paragraph indents were in place.
THIS IS WHY YOU NEED TO GO PAGE BY PAGE OVER THE “PROOF” COPY AFTER LOADING IT. You want a clean looking “book” – it takes work. Sometimes more than you thought it would.
Because of the problems that kept cropping up, this was the most time consuming feature of the load to Kindle, but hopefully my Troubleshooting discoveries will help it go faster for you. Okay, let’s return to our numbered list.
16. Once you are happy with the way the “draft” copy looks you can click on SAVE AND CONTINUE. If you aren’t happy with it (and, by the way, it won’t be showing margins around the text in the proof copy but they will show up in Kindle itself – a fact I base on what the “sample” downloads show), click SAVE AS DRAFT. This will allow you to go back and rework things if necessary. And to return another day, or later in the day after logging out, return to numbers 2, 3, and 4 on the list here, but rather than click on “add a new title”, scroll far, far over to the right. There is a box called “actions”, I believe, or something like that. Click on it and you’ll have an option to get in to continue working on the title in question.
17. Once you SAVE AND CONTINUE you move on to the next page in the system. Here’s were you’ll do things like decide on a price, on distribution, and finally click on the box that says you have the rights to publish the content of this book. Because this is all fairly self explanatory, I haven’t done a step-by-step on it – figured you were getting tired of the numbers. However, I will point out that to get 70% royalty you need to price this between $2.99 to $9.99. Anything over $10 qualifies only for the 30% royalty. I decided that $2.99 was a novella price, $4.99 was anything 60,000 to 75,000 words long, and $6.99 was the longer historicals, which tend to be 90,000 words or better. You might decide to have everything at the same price. If you have loaded a non-fiction title, you might look at what similar books are going for in your pricing.
18. Click the final button now! It will take the Kindle system a couple days to get your title up and available. They also sent me a message on a couple of mine, pointing out that the same title was available in a Lulu edition and asking if I had the right to load a Kindle edition, who I was, etc. A simple reply and the book showed up as a Kindle edition within 24 to 48 hours.
In the event you are wondering about when you get paid, well, for the titles I finally got up and running in October, if there are more than $10 in royalties at the close of the month, it would be another 60 days before the amount would be automatically sent to my checking account, which is what I told them to do in opening my account at Amazon (I’ve also sold used research books as an Amazon merchant, so I know the money transfer system works well). And even without advertising or having things up on my website, there were Kindle sales registering. I have a feeling that it was students in my various online workshops who availed themselves of one of my titles from Kindle, so keep in mind that you will need to do some promotion. It’s still on my To Do list.
If you’d like to see how my formatting looks in a Kindle edition, you don’t have to actually purchase an entire book. Kindle lets you get a sample downloaded. Just go into the regular Amazon system and click on Books, then on Kindle, and feed Beth Henderson in the search section. They always have books listed by people with similar names, but mine are DESPERATE MEASURES, ARDEN’S TOUCH, NIKROVA’S PASSION, RING IN THE NEW, MR. ANGEL, MR. FAR FROM PERFECT, SEDUCING SANTA, LUCKY, AT TWILIGHT, and PARAMOUR. If you don’t have a Kindle yourself, no problem. I don’t have one either. I use Kindle for PC, which was a simple download. Amazon sends anything I purchase (or get for free) in the Kindle network straight to my computer. There’s an icon that showed up on my screen that I can double click on to see the covers of all the titles I have in Kindle versions now.
Hopefully you won’t have as much mental (and verbally snarled under your breath) swearing involved in getting your home system and the Kindle system speaking the same language for the upload, and you’ll be ready to take the leap into Barnes and Noble’s Pubit! system for Nook next time.
I have my fingers crossed for you. I did do a lot of trouble shooting along the way that you can benefit from though. The result for me was that the last two titles I loaded, went up much, much more smoothly than that first one did.
Back tomorrow for a look and a snarl at PubIt! for Nook.
Beth