What a perfect moment.
You have taken your book back from your writer, with every correction you needed, but at this point, the manuscript isn’t ready to be uploaded. You need to format it and add some mandatory section into it in order to be able to be sold on Amazon.
Mandatory sections
The mandatory sections of every book you publish, should be the following:
Copyright
This is where you will write all the copyright information of the book. Who it belongs to, who has the legal rights, who is the publisher, author, when it was published, etc.
You can find the sample copyright sections I use in my books, in the resources section.
Disclaimer
Some times, depending on the niche, you might need to include a disclaimer in the book about who you are, your promises, etc. For example, if your book is in the health/nutrition niche, you might need to add a disclaimer that “you are not a licensed doctor and all the advice in this book is for informational reasons only.” That kind of statement analysis.
Again disclaimer samples can be found in resources section.
Facebook/Website link
You should also add any links (together with icons) for your social media or website. This way you will increase the traffic to your other pages (essentially for free).
It’s very important to leverage this traffic any way you can. Some readers might want to connect with you in other ways as well. So it’s always useful to give them other options, like subscribing to your mailing list, or follow you on your social media pages like Facebook and Twitter.
Lead magnet
A very good idea is to also use what we call a “lead magnet.” A lead magnet is any piece of content (eBook, report, other resources), in order to get your readers’ email addresses.
This is a very legitimate way to promote your other books and services in the future. More information on this powerful promotional technique will be given in later articles.
Table of contents (optional)
Depending again on the niche, a clickable table of contents (ToC) might be a good idea. ToC’s are usually used in longer non-fiction books, in order to make reader’s navigation easier. In any case, it doesn’t hurt at all, so I would advise you to use it.
A ToC is also useful because you can send your readers directly to other sections of your book like a promotional page, a freebie, some bonus books and stories, etc.
Here’s a helpful video of how to add a clickable table of contents in your eBook
Main content
This is the main body of the book. Essentially this is the corrected deliverable of your writer. The heart of the book. The whole content goes here unobstructed. Nothing fancy really.
What’s very important after the latest changes on Amazon’s Kindle Publishing guidelines, you should be very careful on your content in order not to disrupt reader’s experience and always make sure that superb quality of the content is guaranteed.
This is of course very vague and I would suggest you to take a closer look at the document I’ve linked just now, to make sure your book follows the major guidelines Amazon has set.
For example on the links guidelines, Amazon states that some examples of prohibited links include:
• Links to pornography;
• Links to commercial eBook store sites other than Amazon;
• Links to web forms that request customer information (e.g., email address, physical address or similar);
• Links to illegal, harmful, infringing, or offensive content;
• Links that are malicious in intent (e.g., virus, phishing, or similar).
Amazon reserves the right to remove links in its sole discretion.
So because Amazon “reserves the right” to remove links in its sole discretion, you better be careful than sorry.
It won’t harm to send an email to KDP and ask them before you try anything fancy.
List of other books by me
After you’re done with the main content, this is the perfect place to promote your other books, assuming they are somehow related.
This works really well in fiction books, and in well-correlated non-fiction books. Just a simple link (with a small image), will be more than enough here.
What I usually do here, in order to attract more links is to also include a small preview of the other books I promote, like the first couple chapters.
This way you can lure the reader, and make it easier for him to follow over your next book.
Lead magnet
In the end of the whole book, as a final call to action (CTA), you can use your lead magnet again in order to make sure every reader has seen it at least once.
Formatting your book
A lot of people keep asking me what formatting I use in my books. In order for the books to be readable and to increase the KENPC (the metric of normalized pages, Amazon is using), I use the following format:
- Headings: Georgia 22pt
- Body: Georgia 14pt
- Margins: Top, Bottom: 2.54cm – Left, Right: 3.25cm
- Line Spacing: 1.5 to 2 lines
- Spacing between paragraphs: 2 spaces (hit “Enter” key twice)
- Always use a “break line” when a new chapter begins
Nowadays, with KENP 2.0 and soon KENP 3.0, this formatting isn’t playing a vital role, but, it’s good to know that you provide your customer the best possible reading experience at all times.
Exporting your book as a Kindle file
The only format the Kindle device can use it the .mobi format. But you don’t really have to worry about that. You can upload your book in either .doc, .docx or .pdf file. All of them work just fine as a file format.
I personally use the .docx file (word 2009 and later) for convenience reasons.
The whole formatting procedure is very standard and fairly easy. It might look like a lot if you do it for the first time, but after a couple of times, it will become pretty trivial as well.
Of course, you can always try and experiment with your own combinations of fonts, spacing, headings, etc. After a couple of books, you will learn a lot, and you will streamline the whole process to perfection.
*As a final note, because you often ask me what is the exact methodology I use, the authors, the designers and the exact promotion techniques I utilize in Kindle Publishing, I decided to put together a thorough program, in which I explain in every detail (videos, scripts, resources), the exact same method I use to get these results.
In case you are interested, this is the program I have put together. Thanks!
