Archive for Self-Publish Your EBooks

Amazon’s Kindle Singles Section

Dig out your old writing because Amazon’s Kindle Singles Section might just be the arena for your old writing that didn’t quite become a full length novel.

Have you ever started a book and after 10 or 20 pages realized it was not going to be a full length novel?

But the premise of the story was so good, you saved it with the idea you might be able to do something with it later. If so take heart, this short piece of fiction you wrote could become a best seller on Amazon’s Kindle Singles Section of their eBook store.

Yes, Authors are making money there and the books range from 14 pages to approximately 140 pages.

From what I could see from the best sellers, the Kindle Singles selling the best were short with a twist ending or something unusual that made the eBooks stand out and get good reviews.

I really feel this Singles section of Kindle is going to become more popular. Time is short and most people want to be entertained in 20 minutes increments.

As I researched the top ten Kindle Singles, I found they range from 15 pages to over 140 pages. The mid-range is 40 plus pages.

Amazon’s Kindle Singles requirements are:

In my last post we covered “How to Add Footnotes To Your eBook” so in this post I would like to tell you about a quirk I found when doing an unordered bullet list when you use a style.css.

You know the type of bullet list I mean:

This is a bullet
This is the second bullet
This is the third bullet

Well if you specify a left margin in your style.css file for the unordered list like this:

ul {margin-left: 10mm; margin-right: 10mm;}
li {margin-left: 15mm; margin-right: 15mm;}

Then when you look at your ebook in a Kindle or a Kindle Fire, the bullet won’t be there.

You can do either of the following in your style.css to make the bullets show up:

Specify a Division (div) having the margins set and no left or right margins in the unordered bullet list style.css. For instance:

Writing is a business

I am so sick of Authors saying “I just want to write and don’t want to deal with all that other stuff like marketing.

Excuse me, but Writing is a Business!

If you want writing as a career where you get to stay home and make a comfortable living then you better rethink your attitude.

In the real world, it’s up to you to “wear different hats” in your writing career.

The first hat you wear is, of course, writing.

That’s a given. And you better be good at it or, if you’re not, you’d better get good at it.

Nobody writes a perfect ebook the first time.

If they say they did, they’re either lying or don’t take into the fact, they’ve been scribbling words on paper since they were two. Which means they built up their writing muscle and now, on their first ebook, their years of practice burst forth.

For the rest of us who didn’t start until later in life, we became good because we sat our butt in a chair and wrote everyday until we were satisfied with our ability (a/k/a voice).