Have you ever thought about publishing your own book? Maybe you’ve had the next great American novel tucked away in your desk drawer for years. Maybe you have a collection of poetry – or maybe you would like to publish the life story of a relative of yours.
If any of the above strikes chord, then you may be happy to learn that, not only are you far from alone, but that the options open to you are increasing all the time. It’s easier than ever before to publish your work. Not only is it easier, but it is cheaper – and in some cases it is free. In fact, you can even make money if your book sells.
Amazon for example, are a company who, apart from being very successful, have a strong Association with both books and reading. When the original Amazon website launched in 1995, the manner in which many people bought books changed forever.
When Amazon launched the Kindle reader in 2007 the way that people read books began to change as well. The subsequent release of the updated Kindle two and the large display Kindle DX in 2009 saw e-book readers become firmly established and, although still relatively new, the market for both e-book readers and e-books really took off.
Apart from the fact that the Kindle was an excellent, well designed piece of hardware, which satisfied customer needs, one of the important features in its success was the large amount of Kindle books available for readers to choose from. There are currently well over 400,000 titles on offer – and this is growing by, on average 500 titles daily.
As well as changing the way that books are bought, delivered and read, the Kindle offers the opportunity for would-be authors to publish their work and have it showcased and sold by the world’s largest book seller. Publishing your book in Kindle format is simple, fast and free. What’s more – as long as you set the price of your book at between $ 1 and $9.99 Amazon will give you 70% of the sales price (minus a very small delivery fee – definitely no more than a few cents) for any sales made.
In order to publish a Kindle book, you need an Amazon account. This is free, in fact, if you’ve ever bought something from Amazon, you already have one. Then it’s simply a matter of formatting your book and uploading it to the Amazon website. One very easy way to do this is to write it in Microsoft Word and then save it as an HTML file (you’ll find this option when you choose “save as”). Other methods exist, but the Word option is one of the easiest. It’s a good idea to choose a suitable cover illustration as well – this will make your book more appealing. Again this is a simple case of uploading your selected image to the Amazon site. After that, all you have to do is fill in a few fields, choose a title and take your selling price and you will be a published author!
Learn more about the Amazon Kindle reader for yourself – there are over 400,000 Kindle books to choose from.
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