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Old 11-22-2007, 09:02 AM   #1
Steven Lyle Jordan
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Indie Publishing to the Kindle

As an independent, I naturally took notice of a service that allows me to get my e-books into Amazon.com, essentially with no contract, and with no cost to me other than giving Amazon the lion's share of any profits I made.

So, naturally, I'm checking out their Digital Text Platform. I want to see how my books are received, if they get any exposure against paid advertisers and big publishers, and how they'll look on the Kindle. Personally, I have my doubts that I will get any kind of exposure at all through Amazon, but if people who already know me buy Kindle versions of my books, maybe it would generate notice at Amazon. Who knows?

So far, I've discovered that their DTP system is easy to use, allowing you to type in a book's title, description, ISBN (if you have one), volume and series info, author and any contributors, and name your own price (of which Amazon takes 65% of, and they ultimately decide if your price is reasonable. I believe their intention is to keep people from charging too high a price for books, but we'll see how they like lower prices.) You must provide a bank account, so any profits you make will be sent electronically to your account by Amazon. Then you can upload your book, click a "publish" button, and wait for the cash to roll in (cue laughter).

However, the system is a bit buggy, mainly in relation to uploading and converting documents. Although the server will accept multiple file types (including Mobi, HTML, and Word Doc), it treats each one differently in conversion. Occasionally, it makes its own decisions about converting, with the result of an occasional line or paragraph that is in a different font size, or odd paragraph spacings. Just uploading and publishing your work, therefore, is not a good idea... you need to look at every page in their previewer first.

If you need to edit their converted document, Amazon lets you download the file as HTML in a zipped package. Then you can open the HTML file in your HTML or text editor, and edit it manually. Their HTML has particular tags used, and others they ignore, and it comes out as a bit bloated to accommodate their formatting requirements, but it's easily interpreted and fixed.

I've been trying to do this with one of my novels. However, last night their server began giving me "Conversion failed, try again later" messages every time I tried to upload the edited file. It now no longer accepts Word or Mobi files either, so it's clearly their system having a problem, and not my files. I left a message in their forum this morning, but haven't seen a reply yet (and now that it's Thanksgiving, wouldn't be surprised if I don't hear back before Friday, but we'll see).

Amazon states in their forums that a published book could take 12 hours to a few days to actually show up on their system. So far, it's been 2 days for me just trying to get one book into the system! And then, we'll see how easy it is for Kindle owners to actually find them. Stay tuned.
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