LiberWriter – Friendly, Easy Kindle Publishing

Formatting books for the Kindle ranges from easy novels to more difficult assignments like textbooks, which still don’t work terribly well on such a small screen with limited formatting capabilities.

Cookbooks are somewhere in the middle, but still something that does work fairly well on the Kindle.  Here are some of our tips and tricks for how to format them.  This advice is for the LiberWriter system, but should be applicable to anyone working with HTML to format their book.

Like everything else on the Kindle, you want to keep things “linear”, so that the text flows.  If you try and lay things out with tables, you’ll get frustrated, and it probably won’t come out looking very good.  Paragraphs separated by spaces, or a bullet list are good for ingredient lists.

So, for recipes, just lay things out one bit after another:

1. Start off with the name of the recipe.  This is something that will be linked in the table of contents, so make it interesting so people will stop to look at it.  In LiberWriter, use a chapter or subsection, and if you use the latter, be sure to put a page break before it.  The chapter and subsection buttons format the heading in a certain way, and also ensure that it will appear in the table of contetns.
2. List the ingredients.  Rather than using “fancy” characters like ½, you can simply write 1/2.  While the former will probably work on most readers, the latter is guaranteed to.
3. Add the directions.  In order to ensure that each line ends where you want, you can push control and return together to make a line break, rather than a new paragraph.

Fairly easy.  Let’s go through an example from The Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe :

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In this clip from City Slickers, Jack Palance, as Curly, talks about the “one thing” in life (with a bit of swearing, if that’s of any concern).  With Kindle formatting, there are many tips, tricks, pitfalls and things to learn, but there’s something of a “one thing” as well.

The “one thing” is that content should be linear.  Each thing follows the next vertically, and not horizontally.  Two columns?  Forget about it.  Wrap an image in text?  No.  You need to place the image between blocks of text, vertically.  Tables?  Only the simplest will work; anything more complex and you should look at ways of making the content work in a more linear fashion.

For instance, if you had a table like so:

You could transform it to work like so:

Lance Armstrong
Weight: 67 kg
Height: 177cm

Alberto Contador
Weight: 62kg
Height: 176cm

… and so on.  Granted, a table is easier to use to quickly compare and contrast data with, and if you’re really desperate, you can always make an image of your table, but where possible, transforming it into one-thing-after-the-other is your best bet for easy formatting that will work everywhere with no hassles.

Bullet points, on the other hand, work fine, if you know what you’re doing, because they’re a linear element – one comes after the other.

Like Curly, at some point in the future this advice will probably shuffle off this mortal coil due to advances in ereader technology that allows fancier formatting, but for the time being, it’s a good rule of thumb.  And even in the future, we’ll still be faced with the problem of disparate reading devices from cell phones to PC monitors, so content that “flows” is always going to be superior to content that needs very rigid formatting.

I have been reading Peter Meyers’ Breaking The Page and find it fascinating to see some of the ideas of how books may be “improved” in the future.  I have my own ideas about what could and should happen with eBooks, but he has clearly put a great deal of thought into it, and his free preview book is well worth reading.

Something that I find interesting though, is the economics of the particular moment we are in right now.  Once upon a time, publishing looked like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hBztGX-2i1M – a very time consuming and expensive process, to say the least. Self publishing back then was out of reach of anyone not independently wealthy.

In the future described by Meyers’ book, things will never be that expensive again, however, especially for certain kinds of books (reference books for instance), it may be possible to throw in all kinds of “extras” to make the books more useful and valuable for people.  That’s mostly a good thing, but it will likely cost more to produce those books. Even novels, which are currently the books that work the best on the Kindle and other dedicated eBook readers because of their nearly exclusive reliance on text, and linear structure, may have extras like timelines and character notes, even if they don’t go all in with videos, graphics, interactive charts and the like.

Compare that with Kindle formatting as it currently stands: at LiberWriter, we can format your book for just $50, and it will look as good as most books from the major publishers.  The open secret of eBook publishing right now is that there just isn’t that much leeway in what can be done with books, so the emphasis is mostly on making sure the important elements like a table of contents are in place, and not making any major mistakes.

That’s a pretty amazing state of affairs if you think about it.  Between formatting, a cover image, and some editing, it’s quite possible to put together a very professional looking book and publish it for several hundred dollars.  Put another way: given good writing, just several hundred dollars are the only thing between you and being pretty much indistinguishable from an eBook from a major publisher!  That’s very, very little, in the grand scheme of things.

The question is: will it last?  If it becomes possible to do more and more “fancy”  things with eBooks, production costs for the high end will go up, putting more distance between what the “pros” can afford, and what self-publishers can do without spending a lot of money.

What do you think?  Are we in a golden moment for self-publishers?

My Kindle Fire finally made its way over here to Italy.

First impression: it’s alright, as far as these things go, but not something I’d “fall in love with” like the regular old Kindle.

The Kindle is a single-purpose reading device.  Sure, you can view web pages with it in a pinch, but it’s not the most pleasant experience.  The advantages it gains by doing one thing really well, though, are impressive: very slim, lightweight, and an amazing battery life.  For whatever reason, I tend to get anxious over whether my devices are running out of battery life if they’ve been running at all (I don’t like the gas tank in the car to be below half full, either, for that matter), and the Kindle is really nice because it doesn’t stress me out that way!  Also, the eInk screen is vastly superior for reading compared to any LCD screen.

In contrast, the Fire has about 8 hours of battery life, which isn’t bad, it’s just not amazing, like the Kindle.  For an LCD screen device, I like the screen, resolution, and so on.  But it’s not eInk.  And it’s certainly a heftier package than the Kindle in terms of its weight.  So for reading, the Fire can’t really hold a candle to the Kindle, with one exception: color images.  For most of what I read, this isn’t that big a deal, but one area where I think the Fire is clearly superior to the Kindle is for children’s books.  Nice, color images, and a touch screen are a killer combo to make the device much more accessible for children’s stories, many of which simply would not work very well on a regular Kindle.

Naturally, all the extra weight, lower battery life and LCD screen are made up for by the fact that in many ways, the Fire is a much more capable device: web browsing is pleasant with it, you can watch videos, and listen to music.  Sure, you could listen to music on the regular Kindle too, but the interface is pretty raw.  So for “media consumption”, which is probably what Amazon wants you to do, the Fire is a pretty good device.  What with two small children, and a business to run, though, I don’t have much time for “media consumption” of the TV show or movie variety, and I can listen to music on my laptop or phone.

As someone who wants a device to use actively, rather than passively, though, my initial feeling is that the Fire is in something of a no-man’s land between my Android phone, and my laptop.  With the former, I can take pictures, quickly write emails in English and Italian, read email and web pages wherever I am via a data plan, and access any application in Google’s Android market.

Which is where another problem with the Fire puts in its appearance.  Amazon, rather than collaborate with Google, took the open source Android system and made their own modifications to it, and do not include any of the super-useful Google mobile applications on the device.  No gmail, no reader, no maps.  I knew that when I bought it, but the presence of those applications is sorely missed on the Fire.  Also, the app store that Amazon provides is fairly limited compared to the regular one available for my phone.  Ultimately, this leaves my mobile phone as a more useful “on the road” device.

With no camera, or even a microphone, I can’t take pictures, or, something that I personally would have loved to be able to do, use the Fire as a ‘skype device’ for video chats.  The device’s shape and size would have made it perfect for that.

Of course, I knew most of these things before I purchased one, and went ahead anyway, because I want to make sure our customers’ books look good on the Kindle Fire, especially when Kindle Format 8 finally rolls out.

However, I think otherwise I would have waited for version 2 to come out next year, which will doubtlessly be a big improvement.  For reading, I would continue to highly recommend a regular Kindle, with my preference being for either the basic one, or the one with a keyboard.  The Kindle Touch, with visions of grimy fingers swiped across the screen, sounds like something that would bother me.  For the price, the Kindle Fire is a nice bit of hardware, but the problem is that it just doesn’t fill a need I have.  It’s not as convenient as my mobile phone, and not nearly as efficient for doing anything useful as my laptop.

This is an interesting bit of news I thought I’d share with the world:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000729511

“Announcing HTML5 Support in Kindle Format 8″

•  CSS3 support
•  Floating elements
•  Fixed layouts
•  Text on background images
•  Embedded fonts
•  Numbered and bulleted lists
•  Drop caps

In other words, rather than the very limited format we’ve come to know and… if not love, at least make peace with, we’ll be able to do pretty much anything that’s possible with a web page – which is quite a bit.

In some ways, that’s a good thing.  Some kinds of books really need more than the current Mobi format can deliver in terms of tables, charts, fonts and images.  Textbooks especially, tend to be very laborious to translate into something that works well on the Kindle, because they tend to have lots of sidebars and tables and images and other things that require some thinking about and serious work to make them function well on the Kindle.  With the new possibilities offered by a more modern HTML and CSS, it may be possible to do some more interesting things graphically.

With that power, though, comes responsibility, and, I’m worried, “enough rope for people to hang themselves with”.  Many people don’t realize it, but one advantage of the very simple formatting that the Kindle currently has, is that even if you spend a lot of money, your book is not going to look much different from one done simply and competently, because there just aren’t that many things to change.  In other words: your self-published book is going to look as good as many books from major publishers.

With fancier formatting options, this may break down some – you might be able to get that “pixel perfect” layout (if, of course, you forget about different devices for reading), but it may also require a lot of work to get it just how you want it.

Another issue is how they’re going to support this on older Kindle devices.  The Kindle 3 has a fairly decent browser, so I’m sure it’s possible for it to handle this new format, but it remains to be seen exactly how it will work out.

Indeed, without the new Kindle Fire, and the new tools, we can’t actually say much with 100% certainty, with the exception that this is going to be a major change for the Kindle formatting and conversion industry.

As part of LiberWriter’s marketing efforts, I read various forums to keep up with what authors think about this, that and the other thing, and where it’s constructive or useful, put in my two cents as well.

There’s an interesting discussion on the KindleBoards’ Writer’s Cafe right now:

http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,83185.0.html

It made me wonder…is the relative ease and accessibility of digital publishing allowing some authors to put up works they perhaps know are not ready for prime time, with the thought that it can always be fixed later? But in the meantime, let’s make the rounds of the blogs and ring up some sales…

This is a  very interesting discussion because it highlights one of the big differences between traditional publishing and digital.  With a traditional book, you’d better get a lot of things right for your first print run.  The cover, editing, formatting… everything, because once all those books are out there, you can’t go out and fix them.  With digital publishing, you can go back and fix things as you find problems.

We’ll come back to that in a minute, but someone on the forum mentions that software is the same way, which is certainly true.  The reason is purely one of economics:

It’s possible to build software in a very solid way, but it is extremely expensive compared to a more incremental approach, and most people, voting with their wallets, will opt for the cheaper software that’s “good enough” even if it’s not perfect or has a few bugs.  The other tradeoff is time: one person with a given amount of time can either release the system they’re building to see if people are actually interested in the product, or spend 10 years perfecting it, at which point it will be out of date, and have no hope of earning back the time sunk into it.  In other words, “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, or as the old saying goes: “fast, cheap, good: pick any two”.  For a lot of software, then, a more fluid style of development makes sense: it may be aggravating for users who find bugs here and there, but it keeps costs down, and it also allows developers to better concentrate on what people are actually interested in.  Better to release a feature early, and then discard it if there is no interest, than to spend months making it absolutely perfect, and *then* discover there is no interest.

Back to the world of writing, I think a similar approach is not mistaken for self-published authors, especially those working on their first book or two.  If you put it out there and see that it’s just not a subject that’s of interest to people, or the writing or story are so bad that it’s just never going to sell, why bother fixing it up?  The phrase that comes to mind is “polishing a turd”.  Chalk it up to experience, and move on to a new project! Keep writing and your persistence will pay off, but sometimes you need to know when it’s time to let something go.

If, on the other hand, you see some interest in your writing, and receive positive feedback, at that point you can confidently start investing in it – get a nice cover, spend some money on editing, and of course, make sure the formatting and conversion are good!

Naturally, the exact balance can be tricky to get right: if you do want to kick off your book’s launch with a big splash, you’re going to want to make a good first impression, and should therefore invest more time and money up front.  If you’re content with a soft launch to see how things fare before going all-in, you can hold something in reserve to invest when it seems like it’s going to be a worthwhile use of your resources.

A common problem for authors of Kindle books is how to give out free copies of the final version of their book for review.

At LiberWriter, we’ve created a solution that I think people will find useful.

Once you’ve bought a workspace, and your book is ready to go, on your documents page, there is now a link to press to create a review copy.

That link pops up a form that asks you for the name of the person who will be reviewing the book, and then generates a custom book just for them, with their name inside it and in the title.  This turns out to be a fairly effective, cheap, and pain-free method of ensuring that a book only ends up with who it’s destined for.  If it were somehow leaked, it’d be pretty obvious who did it.  Aside from that, though, the book is exactly like the one that you’ll publish via Amazon’s KDP.   You can then email the newly created mobi file to the reviewer.

Or, of course, if you implicitly trust the reviewer, you can just use the ‘download’ link, and send the person that copy of your book.

We just rolled this feature out, so if you’ve got any comments, questions, or ideas how it could work better for you, let us know!