So finally, I have finished editing and now uploaded a second novel – voilà – to Amazon’s Kindle program, which this weekend as a launch promo, to hopefully gather in some feedback by encouraging downloading and reading, is available for FREE on all Amazon websites from Canada to Japan. As is my previous and quite different book.
I’m still getting to grips with the whole process of formatting the book for Kindle. Amazon offer a guide of sorts, but one thing it doesn’t cover is font size. When I uploaded my first book I discovered that the two smallest text options on the Kindle are illegible. Times New Roman 11 obviously not a good choice then. So this time I ran a few tests, copying my compiled book (converted with Amazon’s Kindle Previewer) directly onto the device, and found that 16pt gave a good all-round result. However, having uploaded it properly and downloaded to the device, the range is a little different. The smallest option is readable, but could be smaller. Does this mean that 14pt (in Times New Roman, at least – other fonts will obviously produce different results) is the best. It’s something that Amazon need to consider.
(The test copy to the device is also good for a readthrough – it’s easy to miss errors when reading an A4 size page or a screen-width of text, but on a small, book-size screen they are much more detectable.)
There are plenty of cover designers out there too, but if the book doesn’t have one specific theme, it may be difficult to come up with something satisfying. I take a lot of photographs and find that a bit of editing in Photoshop, a decent text for titles, a bit of a colour tint, can produce something acceptable and, I think, reasonably eye-catching. Amazon recommend a ratio of 1 to 1.6 for cover image sizes, which is standard-ish for a book but not for a photo, so a bit of cropping required. But it does allow complete control over the style and content of the book, which is a good thing.
The uploading done, the free promo launched, and this time I added an endnote to both books, asking politely for comments to be left, whether people loved or loathed the books. So here’s hoping…
the curse of the inking classes 