How to Create a Cover for Your Finished Kindle eBook

Well, they say that you can't judge a book by its cover however we know that everyone does it anyway. Indeed, I think this is something that I have recently relearned. You see, as an online article author with a number of articles posted online, I thought I would take my writing skills and put together some e-books and offer them to Kindle users. Indeed, at first it was slow going, and I could understand why, but it gets right back to the fact that people do judge a book by its cover even an electronic book. Okay so, let's talk about this for a second shall we?

You see, if you have Microsoft Word creating a cover for your Kindle e-book may not be as hard as you think. That's because your Microsoft program also has a component program called; Microsoft Paint. Did you know that you can take the first page of your e-book along with any pictures on that page, and copy that onto your clipboard, and paste it into Microsoft Paint? It's true, and it is really easy to do. That is once you have the perfect cover created in word, which is already part of your completed e-book.

Once you have copied and then pasted it into Microsoft Paint, then you should press; Control A, which will expand the borders to all edges of your Microsoft Paint file. Next, you should close that out and save it to the same folder where you have your e-book. Once you have that saved, then you can re-open it as a picture, or a JPEG. This is the file type that is required when posting an e-book cover into Kindle or Amazon. Once you open it you can then modify this picture by pressing; "FIX" and then reformatting the picture to your liking.

You will be able to modify the borders, change the contrast and brightness, and play around with the color a little bit. Best of all, you can do this without buying any more software programs to load on your computer. Why not try this right now, while you are still reading this article?

Take the first page of your e-book, and copy that single page into your "paint program" on Microsoft. And then go ahead and save it to whichever folder you wish. Now go open it again and play around with it, making slight modifications. Do you see how easy this is? I'm glad I was able to learn this the hard way so I could bring it to your attention.

Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative eBooks on E-Books. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net/

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How To Easily Use A Very Low Priced Kindle Book To Bring In Customers

Step by step selling is a concept that many successful internet entrepreneurs use very effectively. In fact some will set up an eight, nine, ten or even twelve step process to sell to customers. The reasons are quite simple when you think about it. The customer becomes ever more familiar with you and your services or products and you build up a trust based relationship that results in a sale.

Kindle now offers an extraordinarily easy way. That is simply publishing a mini book at a very low price which gives people great value for money. When potential customers see a product published at a price of under a pound sterling or just two dollars, their natural reaction is usually "What do I have to lose?" This is also very appropriate nowadays as for whatever reason many people want to gain access to information in "sound bites" and either do not want to or do not have the time to read a lot. Therefore a well written book of say one hundred or so pages can do a number of things that raise your profile in your client's eyes. It can establish you as an expert, It can educate your client (every business needs to educate their clients in some way, even if it only to their own philosophy and way of working) Above all it gives you a chance to provide links to more information or your website or a squeeze page. In many ways it is advertising that pays for itself.

So how can you go about setting yourself up as an author. The first step of course is to write your mini book. The way many people recommend this be done is to think of your area of expertise or interest and then consider and write down the ten main problems people experience in your area. You may well say that if you are for instance selling anything to do with wedding or your site sells kitchen gifts that you are not in the business of problem solving. However a book entitled "The ten things to be aware of to make your perfect day just that" in the case of weddings or "Ten simple kitchen arrangement plans that can save you loads of space" would be entirely relevant in these cases. Some people like to write, some don't.If you fall into the latter category, simply record your thoughts in an MP3 file and use one of the very good outsourcing services like Fiverr to have them transcribed. You can also use Fiverr to find someone to produce a great graphic design for your cover.

Next you need to learn how to format and publish your book. Just using a simple search on the search engines will give you a very good start and if this is not enough, there are plenty of books in your local library on the subject. Bear in mind that it has to be done properly or it will not be accepted. However like all things practice makes perfect. Worried about your book being ranked well enough for people to find it? Why not use your Twitter, FB or YouTube accounts to spread the word. In addition go to Fiverr again and find people who will broadcast your book for you to tens of thousands of others.

Peter Robson has over 30 years experience in business and with his business partner Debbie Crossley runs a company helping people set up and run niched e-commerce businesses. for more information go to http://www.yournichebusiness.co.uk/

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Kindle eBook Formatting for Quality and Saving Time

Over the past few months, I have been putting together e-books to share my information with the world, and keeping the price rather low so that people will download this information to their e-readers. Although the type of niches and esoteric information that I specialize in is not commonly sought after, there are enough people to make it worth my while. Perhaps you have information you'd like to share with the world, but you have hesitated because it is a time-consuming process to put together an e-book. Let me explain some simple techniques which will help you save time in this process.

First, I recommend that you download some of the Microsoft Templates which are free online, for all of those that have Microsoft Word. If you will look on the "Templates Page" on the Microsoft website, you will see one of the categories is books. If you click on that you will see that people have submitted as part of the Microsoft template community several variations of tables of contents, and templates for e-books. You should download the ones that you feel comfortable in using, and are closest to the format which you hope to use.

If you are putting together many e-books, it makes sense to create a cover page, a title page, and introduction. Also, a table of contents and for the back of your e-book a section about you the author. In doing this you can create a 5 to 8 page template, allowing you to merely place your literary work in the middle once completed. Once you do this and make the cover page you can post it on Kindle or Amazon and sell your e-book for a low-cost so that you can distribute your story, novel, or nonfiction work to the world.

Perhaps you have several short stories; in that case you can list them all on the table of contents and create separate sections for each story in the middle. Having the template in advance will help you save time in putting it together in a professional fashion. You see, there is no reason for you to hesitate putting together your e-book any longer. Over 1 million e-books have already been posted to Kindle and their library is growing. Best of all each month more and more people are buying Kindle e-readers. That means there is more likelihood of your future e-book being picked up by readers of all ages and walks of life. Why not start today? Please consider all this and think on it.

Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative eBook on eBooks. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net/

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Kindle Fire Product Review

I recently purchased a Kindle Fire, replacing my original Kindle, which had seen increasing use over the last few years. Ironically, the Kindle Fire was purchased at a traditional brick and mortar establishment, as I wanted to check out the size and weight of the device prior to purchase. I use the term ironic, as these types of devices may represent another building block in the future demise of the brick and mortar operations selling them. My decision would be Kindle versus Apple iPad, with size, weight and interface key factors.

My immediate take on the Kindle Fire was very positive. It was larger than my original Kindle, but small enough to be considered a book substitute. I found the screen much easier to read than my original Kindle, and it offered all the advantages of a color display. Two major enhancements included the ability to browse the web and to download apps, including very important and useful apps, such as Angry Birds. The web browser works wherever one can find Wi-Fi access, including HotSpots. The Apple iPad was also very impressive, offering greater functionality albeit at a larger size and weight, at about 21 ounces compared to the 14 ounces of the Kindle.

I purchased the Kindle Fire for, selling for $199 as of that time, and was on my way. The Kindle Fire is almost like having your own personal public library in the palm of your hand. Many classics are free, or very inexpensive eliminating the need to drive to a bookstore or local library. The Kindle Fire, and perhaps eReaders in general, offer an expansive personal library, allowing users to specifically (or randomly) choose almost any new book sample or classic. Striving to mix in some of the classics with my recent business selections (Blink and Steve Jobs) I also downloaded: Mountain Interval (Robert Frost), Prufrock and Other Observations (T.S. Eliot), Walking (Thoreau) and The Wreck of the Hesperus (Longfellow). These are not entirely random as the appearance of several characters in Woody Allen's movie, Midnight in Paris, provided the catalyst to review some of these works. And that's one of the great advantages of the Kindle, within seconds of hearing about, or thinking about a book or an author, you can be reading a favorite classic or contemporary work.

Amazon also offers a Kindle Owners' Lending Library program ($79 per year) which provides a free library of books (currently about 5,000) and access to a free video streaming service with over 10,000 movies and television episodes. It also provides free shipping on Amazon purchases and is essentially a "no brainer" if you purchase a book or more per month, as the estimated costs would be over $100 per year to do so.

The Kindle Fire supports web surfing and downloading and streaming of video. I use the former often, but have not yet used the latter. The Kindle Fire, eReaders and tablet type solutions will change future consumption of content. I've seen friends who I would consider "technology laggards" rapidly adopting eReaders and tablets. The convenience of being able to transport a dozen or more books on any vacation or business trip, sample any book before purchasing, changing font size and brightness to accommodate personal preferences and access to a growing online library are just a few of the catalysts driving behavioral changes. Though not all books are yet available on the Kindle, I've seen estimates of 650,000+ and I'm sure this will grow rapidly to accommodate consumer purchasing habits as more people move to eReaders. Bottom line, as of this writing, I think the Kindle Fire is a great solution for almost anyone who likes to read.

Alan Blume is the founder and CEO of StartUpSelling, Inc., a digital marketing agency, and the author of two Kindle books: Sell More & Work Less, Web Selling Techniques Everyone Should Use Sell More & Work Less and Your Virtual Success Your Virtual Success.

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Formatting Secrets for Kindle and Nook EBooks

Formatting an eBook for use on a web site or for sending by email using the PDF file format is relatively easy. Most popular word processors and page design programs can export to the PDF file format and those exports usually accurately render the PDF to match the original created in Word, InDesign, or whatever. Formatting for the Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Nook is a completely different proposition. Some programs like InDesign have plug-ins that supposedly save to the eBook format, but these are notoriously inaccurate. So exactly how do you properly, and easily, format a file for Kindle or Nook?

The Kindle format and also the Nook format are based on HTML, so the obvious answer to the previous question is to do your formatting in HTML. Most word processors and page layout programs can save to HTML, so that is the first step. Then open the file in your favorite HTML editor, I like using Dreamweaver but all of these techniques are done at the code view so any standard HTML editor will work. You can even use a plain text editor like Windows Notepad if you like. The Kindle Fire can take some HTML 5 coding with CSS3, but we will be sticking with more basic formatting in this discussion.

What we want is basic HTML, with all excessive formatting removed. If you are formatting for the Kindle and there is a cover image, remove it. Kindle works best if you upload the cover image separately from the eBook file. In the Nook you can leave it attached. For a professional look you want to start the actual eBook with a Title Page, followed by a Copyright Page. You only need basic information on the Title Page, first of course the title of the eBook as text, don't use a picture for the title, keep it text. You can follow this by a smaller picture similar to the cover of the book if you like, but don't put a small image of the cover here. That just looks unprofessional. What I frequently do is to use the same art as the cover if it is interesting enough but without the text.

The copyright page can contain a lot of information but the most important part is a properly formatted copyright. This is in the form of "copyright date name", here is an example: copyright 2012 George Peirson. You can replace copyright with the copyright symbol if you like. One more thing the copyright holder has to be either an individual or corporation (which are individuals as far as the US Government is concerned). Aside from corporations, companies cannot own copyrights. So either a person's name, or a corporation name, no business names, no doing business as, no partnerships, etc.

Next you will have your table of contents, followed by the rest of the book. We will now look at more specific HTML level formatting techniques.

Start by cleaning out all of the extraneous coding, span tags, any font tags or CSS styling, etc. Leave in paragraph tags or div tags as needed, but pretty much take everything else out. We basically want to start from scratch and keep the formatting to a minimum for the widest compatibility. If you use a program like Dreamweaver you can use the Find and Replace function to speed up this task. Lets say that you have paragraph tags with some formatting in them like this [p class="bodytext"], instead of looking through all of your code and removing each instance of [class="bodytext"], instead do a search for [p class="bodytext"] and replace with [p]. Also remove any span tags and don't forget to remove the closing tags as well, [/span]

We will next put in page breaks as needed, normally you would want each new chapter to start at the top of its own page, and of course the Title Page should be on one page and the Copyright Page should have its own page as well. To start a page at the top of the page on Kindle put in a page break in the code. Make sure you use a page break after the Title Page, after the Copyright page, after the Table of Contents, to give the eBook a professional look. The page break tag goes at the top of the new page in the code view, for instance at the beginning of each chapter before you start any text on that page. Here is the tag to use, this is a special tag that you will not find in normal HTML: [mbp:pagebreak /]. Just put it on its own line inside of tag symbols in the code at the beginning of each new chapter.

Now for some basic paragraph formatting. Of course you will be putting your paragraphs in paragraph tags, [p] paragraph text goes here [/p]. You can put in basic paragraph attributes into the opening paragraph tag, the most commonly used one is the align attribute. Simple to use, it goes like this:

[p align="left"] for left alignment,

[p align="center"] for center alignment

[p align="right"] for right alignment

Another attribute is align="justify" to force full justification, but eBooks fully justify by default so you can ignore this one.

The paragraph tag will leave a blank line between paragraphs, if you want your paragraphs to be continuous without blank lines then use a break tag instead, [br /]. Put one of these at the end of each paragraph break in your text and then begin the next line (no opening paragraph tag). To put a space between paragraphs use multiple break tags.

When you bump paragraphs together like this you will need a larger indent on the first line to easily spot the beginning of each paragraph, you can create the indent by using non-breaking spaces, here is the code "&" followed by "nbsp", you can put as many as you need, each one is a single space. I have found that 5-9 of these at the beginning of a paragraph gives a nice looking indent. You can use spacing attributes in the opening paragraph tag for indenting the first line, but it is not as reliable as the non-breaking space, so I stick with that in most cases.

You can indent the text on the left and right by using Block Quotes, basically adding margins to the page. Be aware though that on the earlier Black & White Kindles the right margin may be ignored.

[blockquote] text [/blockquote]

You can put several paragraphs between one set of block quotes, and you can double up or triple up on the blockquotes to add larger margins, useful for poems and such.

Put in Bold and Italics as needed using standard tags, b for bold and i for italics

You can also use the different H tags for sizing your text, although I have found that only the larger H tag numbers work reliably. [h1] title text [/h1], [h2] not as large [/h2], etc. The H tags go from 1 to 6 but I have found that only h1 through h3 work reliably on all devices. So these are good for titles, page headings, and such.

Use H tags to size title and other large text like this:

[h1] title of eBook [/h1]

[h2] subtitle of eBook [/h2]

[h2] chapter titles [/h2]

You can put in alignment attributes into H tags, like this: [h1 align="center"].

Next position and format your images. I recommend sticking with left, right, or center alignment and keep your images on the smaller size. If the image is too large it will be resized by the eBook reader to fit the page and you will have one big image with no text. This is one spot where you may want to do some testing to get just the right size depending on your needs.

Once the basic formatting is in place you can set up the Table of Contents. Use anchor tags to create links for a Table of Contents. If you do this right after the title page and name it Table of Contents Kindle will know what it is and use this list for the Kindle TOC at the end of the book.

An Anchor tag looks like this: [a name="11" id="11"] (inside of tag symbols of course)

Place this at the top of each chapter, after the page break tag we included previously. You can name the anchor tags anything you want, but I find it easy to just number them. The example above is for chapter 11.

Now go up to your Table of Contents page and use standard links on that text to link back to your anchor tags. Here is how the link for chapter 11 looks in the TOC.

[a href="#11"] Chapter 11[/a] (again with the correct tag symbols surrounding the tag)

You can name your chapter anchor tags anything you like, maybe you have a collection of short stories and your Table of Contents lists the story titles instead of chapters, this is fine. But if you use the word Chapter in the Table of Contents Kindle will ignore any other links on that page when making the Kindle Table of Contents (in the Kindle controls and at the end of the eBook). So if you have this:

Forward

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Epilogue

The Kindle will only use:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

In your eBook's Table of Contents, of course your TOC with all of your anchor tags will work correctly, but if someone uses the TOC control in Kindle they will not see the Forward or Epilogue links in this example. This does not happen if you don't use the word Chapter. I am not sure why this is so and I discovered this by accident, but after a lot of testing it seems to be consistent. So either use all Chapters (chapter 1 - Forward, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4 - Epilogue) or don't use the word Chapter in the TOC.

You can use standard links in the text and at the end of the book for links to web pages, etc. These will work fine, but to be safe keep any external links off of the Table of Contents page. If you want a list of links at the front of the book put them on their own page after the TOC.

One more tip on designing your book, make sure you have a good Forward or First Chapter. Amazon previews the first 10% of the book in their Look Inside tool in their Kindle Store, so you want the first 10% to grab the attention of the reader so that they will buy your book. Don't fill the front of the book with advertising, save that for the end, and don't put a bunch of pictures at the front of the book as well. Make sure you have some quality text in the first 10% to maximize your exposure and sales.

This will take care of almost all of your formatting needs and make your book easily convertible to both the Kindle and Nook platforms. You can get a lot fancier if you need to, but this really is most of the formatting that most books use.

You should do a lot of testing to make sure that your formatting works, I recommend using a program named Calibre to convert your HTML to the MOBI format for the Kindle and the ePUB format for use on the Nook. You should use either the computer version of the Kindle Reader and the Nook Reader to check the formatting after conversion, or better still use an actual Kindle or Nook. Don't rely on the Reader in Calibre as it is not accurate. One more tip, I have found that if I need to change or fix the formatting I need to remove the eBook from the Kindle Reader and also remove the eBook from Calibre, then re-import the fixed HTML back into Calibre, re-convert to MOBI or ePUB, and re-install in the Reader, otherwise I have found that the changes don't always take.

George Peirson is a successful Entrepreneur and Internet Trainer. He is the author of over 60 multimedia based tutorial training titles covering such topics as Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. To see his training sets visit http://www.howtogurus.com/ Article copyright 2012 George Peirson

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