E-Book Publishing Using Amazon's DTP Facility

Have you ever thought about publishing your own book? Do you have a great novel tucked away in your desk? Or maybe you have a collection of short stories that you just haven't got around to publishing? Maybe you would like to publish the biography of one of your relatives.

If any of the above apply to you then you may be interested to know that, not only there plenty of other people who share your ambition, but that the available publishing options are increasing daily. It has never been so easy to publish a book. It's not only easier - it is very much cheaper - and there are now options available which are one hundred percent free. As a matter of fact, if your book sells, you might even make some money.

For example, Amazon are a company who apart from being very successful, have a strong Association with books and reading. When they launched the original Amazon website in 1995, the way that many people bought books changed dramatically.

Later, in 2007, when Amazon launched the original Kindle e-book reader, the way that people read books also began to change. The launch of the upgraded Kindle 2.0 in February of 2009, followed by the large format Kindle Dx in the summer of the same year, saw e-book readers become accepted into the mainstream consumer marketplace and, although still very new, the market for both e-books and e-book readers grew very rapidly indeed.

One of the most important factors in the Kindle's success - apart from the fact that it was an extremely well designed piece of hardware - was the huge selection of Kindle books available for users to choose from. Currently there are more than 400,000 Kindle books available on the Amazon website - and this number is increasing by around 500 new titles daily.

As well as changing the way that books are purchased, delivered and read, the Kindle gives aspiring authors a great opportunity to have their work published and marketed by the largest book seller in the world. Having your book published in Kindle format is simple, fast and free. What's more - so long as you fix the price of your book at the value between $1 and $9.99, Amazon will take no more than 30% of the sales price leaving 70% for you (minus a very small the lovely free - typically just a few cents - based upon how many kB of memory your book uses.

Before you can publish your book, you will require your own Amazon account. This is free - as a matter of fact, if you have ever purchased anything from Amazon then you will already have a free account. With your account in place, all you have to do is to format your book and upload it to Amazon's website. One very simple way to do this is to format your book using Microsoft Word and then save it in HTML file format. This option can be found by selecting "save as" from the file menu. Other methods exist, but using Word is one of the easiest. Choosing a suitably attractive illustration for the cover of your book is also a good idea. This wil help to make your book more attractive to prospective buyers. This is also easy to do, simply upload your selected image to the Amazon site and you're done. After that, you just need to fill in a few fields, choose a good title for your book, set your price - and you will be a published author!

More information

Learn more about the Amazon Kindle e-book reader and cast your eye over the huge range of Kindle accessories available to help you customise and protect your new reader.