If you’re self-publishing through KDP, how do you make sure your book has a professional appearance?.This section takes the long, jargony Kindle formatting guidelines and condenses and simplifies them, so you can easily see which steps you need to take to make your book picture-perfect.If you decide you want an e-book, how do you know which formatting rules you need to follow?.
Here’s what we’re going to talk about, in even more detail, in this guide all about how to format your book to get ready for the next step of self-publishing … Part 1: Decide–Print, Digital, and/or Audio? Design (or hire someone to design) an eye-catching book cover–on any budgetįormatting Your Non-Fiction Book - The Definitive Guide.Create a professional-looking manuscript that you can effortlessly transform into a physical book.Perfectly format your nonfiction book manuscript for the Kindle platform (also called KDP), so you can easily self-publish without a billion error messages.Choose the book formats that work best for you and your audience (digital, print, and/or audio).By the end of this definitive book formatting guide, you’ll have the tools to: In the next article, we’ll talk even more about self-publishing. Formatting is enough of a job on its own. To be clear, this article is all about HOW TO FORMAT A BOOK–it’s not about the actual process of self-publishing. Once it’s up on Amazon and you hit bestseller, you can take your sweet time getting it on other platforms that might hit more specific markets around the world and help you grow your audience. People pop over there every single day to search for answers to problems–and often, there are people looking for the very answers your book will provide. Our time, money, and energy are all super limited, so we want to make sure we use our time in the smartest way possible.Īmazon itself is the largest platform by far, and it’s a BEAST of a search engine. But as entrepreneurs, we don’t have a TON of resources to work with. “ Aren’t there other publishing platforms?” Pinky promise! Why Amazon Self-Publishing at all? It can be kind of a pain, so brace yourself and slot some time in the ‘ole schedule. Writing the book was your first hill your next hill is going to be formatting this sucker for Amazon, once for the Kindle format specifications and once for the paperback requirements (keep reading!). Now we need to know how to format the book! Your Next Become-An-Author Hill to Climb = Book FormattingĪ little intense to call ‘formatting a book’ a hill? Maybe, but not really. “After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.” The hard part’s over, right? In a big way, yes! Just what your audience needs and will rave about. You’ve poured your heart and soul into it, and then you’ve edited it down into something usable.
You’ve done the hard part of actually, physically, writing a book for the first time. If you see a reference to “Create Space,” just replace it with “KDP” or “paperback”! Now that you have a book coming together, let’s talk about: “How to Format a Book for Self-Publishing”!Īs of late 2018, “Create Space” is no more! Now, we can do everything for paperback book printing through our same login with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) as we can for Kindle books.