Quickly publishing on Amazon

It’s not that difficult to publish a book on Amazon, but of course I did it the hard way, submitting an actual MOBI file rather than a more straightforward Word document or PDF. In fact, if you just created a book  using a Word template, creating a table of content by using Word’s hyperlinks to Word bookmarks, you could probably be publishing in a jiffy.

Next in difficulty would be submitting separate HTML documents, allowing you to create a separate cover page, title page, copyright page, etc., that a Kindle could recognize as such.

In fact for most people, the only difficult thing about creating an ebook is creating a book cover, rather than using using the boilerplate book covers Amazon provides. I went down to Union Station, took a picture, created my type in Illustrator, assembled it in PhotoShop and saved it as a JPG.

One caution: Don’t use the Optimization button when Saving for Web and Devices in PhotoShop. And remember to use the Latin-1 encoding if creating HTML documents.

I will create a full fledged article on publishing to Kindle later. Please don’t hesitate to post questions here until then.