My Own Kindle books

I'm still starting out with Kindle books, and so please don't expect me to preach to you like some sort of expert in this field. If fact, quite the opposite is true. I am trying to create as many kindle books as I can to help supplement our somewhat meagre family income, and hope that this will build into a nice little passive earner for me.

It's early days as yet, and I have found out that is can take a few weeks for your new kindle books to get established and noticed before you really start to sell any decent quantities. So if you were thinking of publishing kindle books yourself, I think you must look at it as a long-term slow-burner, rather than a quick-fix way to make some money.

Kindle is an ebook reader designed to make reading ebooks as convenient as reading paper books. Kindle is fairly new in the UK as I am writing this lens, but is much more popular in the USA, and whatever launches and succeeds there inevitably succeeds in the UK too.

Amazon will not own up to exactly how many Kindles they have sold since it's original launch, but it's estimated to be around eight million, with on average two milion more sold each and every year. But Amazon have revealed that they are now selling more ebooks copies than physical paperbacks - which works out to about 130 ebooks for every 100 paperbacks sold. So you can see from these figures the obvious potential for getting involved in the Kindle publishing market.

As with regular paper books, Amazon are more than happy to let anybody publish their own ebooks for reading on the Kindle, and they will sell them in their ever-expanding Kindle book store on your behalf, then pay you a royalty for every copy sold.

This means easy money for Amazon, but it could mean a good, steady, passive income for you too. Think about it - you will only have to write/create your book once, then it may well go on to sell multiple copies for years to come.

But it's not just Kindle you can write for. There are now new smart apps that allow Kindle books to be read on modern smart mobile phones and mobile devices, such as the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry and some Android based phones.

If you are a little nervous about writing your own books for the Kindle, or you just want to test the water and practice the whole process of publishing a Kindle book to become completely familiar with the system, then why not try putting together a simple recipe book for example?

People buy cook books for the Kindle, and if you do a quick search of the Amazon Kindle store for recipes or cook books, you can see there are a whole variety of simple text based cook books on there.

Maybe you have grannies old collection of recipies hidden away at the back of a draw, or a scrapbook of recipes you have clipped from newspapers and magazines of your favourite recipes. Or you could even compile a number of your own tried and tested family recipes that you eat on a regular basis.

The book does not have to be fancy. People buying cook books on Kindle will not mind that the recipes are not acompanied by lots of glossy photographs. Often, they are just looking for a book of simple, clearly written recipes that they can read from in the kitchen as they cook.

If you have read this far - congratulations!

But if you are still sitting here reading this lens and thinking to yourself - hmmm, but I don't even think I could write a recipe book, then I have another idea for you.

You may have heard about PLR ebooks and articles, or you may not. PLR stands for private label rights, and all you have to do is to type PLR into your search engine to find endless lists of sites that sell the stuff on just about every topic you could possibly imagine.

You can often buy private label right material quite cheaply, but I would check out the quality of the writing and if it is still current and up to date before parting with any money for it.

What you do once you have found some good, well-written quality material is most important. NEVER-EVER just publish it as it is to the kindle store! If you do this you will risk having your account banned from Amazon for ever. Instead take the PLR material and use it as a framework or the inspiration for your ebook.

Re-write every single paragraph in your own words, and try to write as if you were having a conversation about the subject to someone else, either face to face or over the telephone. Writing in this more conversational mode will make your book more reader-friendly, and will encourage people who like your writing to return to buy other titles from you in future.

Do more research on your chosen subject by searching the internet or reading books on the topic, then work your research into the book to better explain a certain aspect, or to offer the reader more information on the subject.

If you fancy having a go at writing fiction, but need some inspiration to get you started, why not take a free public-domain classic, such as Wuthering Heights, and write your own more up to date version using your own characters. You could borrow the plot lines and character stories from the public domain book, but essentially you would be writing your own original story.

This 'borrowing' theme has worked well for many authors, for example the Bridget Jones' Diary books were a modern version of stories roughly based on Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin. Romance stories based around a love triangle are big sellers on kindle, and some of the best selling books and most enduring books in history have this premise at their base.

So once you have your book in mind, how do you get it onto the Kindle bookstore?

There are a few different file formats that you can upload to Amazon, such as doc, pdf, and html, but the easiest way I have found is to prepare your book using a word processor such as Microsoft Word, or Open Office. Format your page from the default A4 size to A5, as you will notice that the screen size on a Kindle is much smaller than that of a PC or laptop screen.

Change the text font to Times New Roman with font size 12 point.

You will need to create an eye-catching cover for your book in jpeg format, and you can use your own photo editing software to do this, such at Photo Shop, not forgetting to add in your title text, and any other wording you want on the cover.

You actually don't have to upload a cover with your book, but if you don't, Amazon will substitute with something of their own choice, and it may not be as appealing or eye-catching as you could do yourself.

Once your book is ready, go to Amazon.com and scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will see a link saying 'Self publish with us'. Click on this link and it will take you to Amazons DTP site. Log in using your existing Amazon account details, or if you don't have an account, you can easily create one from here.

Once logged in, I would advise reading the Kindle Pulishing guide to really understand about the process from start to finish - don't worry, it's really quite easy!

I use the MobiPocket creator to turn my books into PRC file format ready to upload to Amazon. The Publishing guide will guide you through these steps.

Once uploaded to your bookshelf, your book will be reviewed by Kindle technicians before being published. If there are any issues with your book, they will come back to you via email with what needs fixing, which you can easily do in edit mode from your bookshelf.

Once your book has been reviewed, it will then be published, which can take 24-48 hours before you book is actually live and available for purchase online.

You are now a Kindle author and publisher, so now what?

You could sit back and let Amazon do the work for you, and having the power of the mighty Amazon behind you is nothing to be sniffed at, but what you really need to do is a bit of self-promotion to get your books out there and noticed!

Everyone's sales figures are different, so you may know a friend who has a handful of books for sale through Kindle that sell quite well, and on a regular basis, but you are wondering why your books have sold practically zero since you created them.

The first thing you should do is to check your selling price. Are you selling your books for too much money? Your friend's prices could be much more attractive, so he sells more than you do. Lowering your price might give you that much needed boost to your sales figures, which in turn will help your book rise in the Kindle rankings, and become more visible when people search for your topic.

Once your book has started selling well you could raise the price a little, or leave it as it is to make a good consistent income for you.

I hope you have enjoyed my lens, and it has inspired you to give Kindle a publishing a go if you were worried about trying it for yourself.