Tips for Effective Amazon Kindle Conversion
How would you like to open your book to 200,000 potential new customers on Amazon Kindle and iPhones? Did you know that Amazon automatically provides electronic previews (about 1,000 words or 10%, whichever is less) for people who shop Amazon with these devices? These benefits are only available to you if you convert your book to the new "eBook" format used by Amazon kindle.
Here are some tips that will help you prepare your files for Amazon Kindle conversion. Whether you are going
to do-it-yourself or hire-it-done, document preparation is critical to your success.
- Keep your latest, best version updated in Microsoft Word. Even after you have had typesetting done andchanges made to your typeset galleys, go back and make those same updates in your Word files. Kindle conversionworks far more accurately from Word files than PDF files.
- If you are using Tables in any way, you'll need to convert them to JPEG or PNG (preferred) images of the tables. Kindle doesn't support Tables like Word or HTML does.
- Beware of diacriticals: any foreign words which use accents such as "résumé," need to be dumbed downto plain text equivalents.
- Embed an image of you bookcover as the first page of your Kindle book. It gives a nice professional opening page appearance rather than just plain old text.
- Remove "drop caps", these just don't work on Kindle. (That's the big, multi-line letter "O" in "Once upon a time)
- Avoid font changes, especially font size changes, whenever possible. The Kindle lets users choose their preferred font size for reading. Also, font sizes will not be proportionally matched to your font size choices.
- Never, ever reference another part of your book by page number. The page numbers WILL change when converted to Kindle. Instead of "see p. 200" put in "see chapter 12" or "appendix A" or whatever