Kindle Direct Publishing has this really nice tool called Kindle Create that lets you format and prepare your e-book before uploading it to their site for self-publishing.
I didn't know it could also format print editions.
So I worked for several days to get the paperback edition of my book ready to upload, but without Kindle Create to do everything for you, you have to figure out exactly how to set up the pages so it prints properly. Kindle does provide Word doc templates to help with this, but I forgot that if you copy and paste text from one doc to another with CTRL+V, it will keep the formatting and page setup from the doc you copied.
After several minutes of trying to figure out why some pages were larger than others and realizing my mistake, I then tried to fix it manually, instead of just starting from the beginning and re-pasting the text only. This was frustrating as well, because I kept having to compare the page setup of the original template with what I had, but as far as I can tell you can't have two page setup windows open in the same time in Word.
Finally I discovered that Kindle Create has a beta version that will work for paperback editions. I am often wary of beta software, since of course it's still beta and usually comes with a ton of bugs. But trying to format my book by myself was driving me nuts, so I tried it.
It worked perfectly.
All this to say, Kindle has some pretty cool tools if you're self-publishing. You don't have as many options when it comes to fonts and stylized features as you might if you formatted everything yourself. But if you don't care too much about that, Kindle Create is a super easy way to get your book ready for publishing on Amazon.
Oh, and Scripted is now available both as an e-book and a paperback.
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