Amazon’s Kindle, both the standalone version and the iPhone app, make a compelling case for self-published books. The service is quick, free and (mostly) painless. And if you format your books properly, they will look every bit as good as those from traditional publishers.
When I was preparing my short story The Variant for the Kindle, I found a lot of confusing and contradictory information about how to do the formatting — much of it on the official help site. So I’m writing up this quick guide aimed at somebody with roughly my level of coding or design experience.
If you feel comfortable hand-coding a site, you can get a book formatted in 30 minutes or less.
You’ll want to download the source file for The Variant to follow along. If you compare it with the published version as it appears in the Kindle store, you’ll see how it matches up.
(If any of this is over your head, there are several more comprehensive tutorials out there, including Joshua Tallent’s Kindle Formatting.)
So here we go.