Uploading And Publishing Your Kindle

upload kindle

If you have written a book and are ready to upload it and publish it on Kindle then this is how you go about doing it. First of all let me say that ideally you will need Word so that you can save your file as a .docx file. This is important if you have any images in your book.

I don’t have Word and use Open Office instead so I shall explain how you use that.

Using Open Office To Create Your Kindle

If you write your book using Open Office then you will need to save it as an .html file and upload that onto Kindle. However, if you have any images in the book these will not upload. You’ll just get a blank space.

In the instructions on Kindle it suggests that you upload your book as a .docx file especially if you have images because they will be uploaded with the file.

So I went online to find a .doc to .docx converter. Since I am able to save a file as a .doc file in open office I decided to convert that file to a .docx. I did find an online converter but when I uploaded the newly created .docx file to Kindle the image did not come out correctly on any of the devices except an ipad device. Therefore I rejected that and removed the image altogether!

In the end I uploaded the .html version and it looked fine.

The reason why I chose to save the file as an .html file is because I wanted to have a clickable table of contents. This is only possible if you save your open office file as a .html.

All the formatting of pages is really done when it gets converted into a Kindle. These are things that you need to know:

  • If you want a table of content that hyper link to the chapters then you will need to save your file as .html
  • Make sure that you remove page numbers as this is irrelevant for kindles as it depends what device you use and the size of font as to how many pages there are.
  • If you don’t know how to remove the page numbers from your table of contents then right click while in the table and click on edit index/table.
    • Click on the Entries tab along the top
    • Select Level 1 and click on the # tab. Now press your delete key (backspace won’t work)
    • Then select Level 2 and so on (depends how many heading and sub headings you have) and do the same for them all.
  • edit tableRemove any header or footer
  • If you want to hyper link to any website address then you again need to save the file as an .html
  • Make sure that you include a copyright notice and any other important legal information
  • Always add a link to your website under your name

Kindle Uploading Page

Book Details

upload kindle

  • Enter your title – this is the title you will see on the cover if you use the Kindle cover creator.
  • If your book is part of a series then you would add that in.
  • You don’t need to add an edition number or publisher.
  • You have plenty of space to add your description. This is where you will sale your book like a sales page but tailored towards Kindle buyers.

Verify Publishing Rights

  • When you scroll down the page you will be asked to verify if the book is public domain or if you have full rights – if it is your own work then it is not public domain.

Targeting Your Book

  • You will need to add a category to your book so that it is in the right Kindle category. If you are not sure then look at other books that are similar to your and use the same category.
  • You can also add some keywords that are associated with your topic. You might like to use Google keywords tool to come up with some typical phrases people might use to find your book.

upload kindle

Kindle Preview

After you upload your file you are able to preview it. This is very important to make sure that the layout looks fine and that there are no obvious mistakes. Apparently some images may not come out correctly in the preview.

How Long To Publish

I submitted my Kindle book at 9pm and by mid day the following day it was live so it doesn’t take long!

When your Kindle is published and live you will receive an email to say so with the URL to your Kindle book. You will also have details of the link to create an author page if you want to. I certainly recommend that you do this as it adds another opportunity for your readers to find out more about you and your business.

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