Publish on Kindle: Offer Your Special Report to Thousands of Kindle Users

Want to publish on Kindle?  Since buying my Kindle device, I've been purchasing ebooks right and left and have finally decided that it's time to get my works published on the Kindle platform.  Amazon makes it easy to publish on Kindle since the Kindle store is set up as a direct publishing tool allowing you to publish your own ebooks and sell them through Amazon. Kindle is fast and fairly simple to use.

To sell your ebooks on Amazon, you have to participate in their royalty program, which will pay you up to 70% of the selling price, depending on the program you choose. And, you're not limited to selling in your own country -- you can publish in several languages, including German, English, Italian, Portuguese, French and Spanish, and can earn money in various currencies such as dollars, sterling, pounds and euros.

Your Kindle publication doesn't have to be a full book-size publication.  Many ebooks on Kindle are actually what I would call special reports, ranging in length from 15-40 pages. The fact that you can publish special reports on Kindle makes it much easier to get your ebook up and available on Kindle.

It all sounds simple, but there are a few tricks and tips can help you to better utilize Kindle publishing. Here are my 7 best tips to successfully publish on Kindle:

• Title and Topic:  If you're creating a special report, do a bit of keyword research to determine how frequently your topic is searched in the search engines.  More importantly, in order to enhance your book's ranking, you may want to title it using a commonly searched phrase that you discover as a part of your keyword research.  And, if you're publishing a special report, limit yourself to just one topic for your report.

• Formatting.  Formatting your ebook is the most difficult part of the process.  You can hire a freelancer to do it for you, or use a program like Scrivener to help you with your formatting. You'll also want to check the formatting of your ebook via the Kindle Publisher Tools (available free of charge from Amazon) to ensure that your ebook looks like you think it does.  Nothing is more annoying than trying to read a Kindle ebook that's really badly formatted.

• Category. Be sure and pick the appropriate category that best fits your book, since that will control the placement of the book and decide the ranking within Kindle.  You might want to get more specific with your category rather than less specific, as you might go to the top as the bestseller of a more specific category that has less competition rather than a more generic category with more constitution.

• Book cover.  While I've enjoyed a number of ebooks on Kindle that I chose despite an unappealing cover, spend some time on having an attractive cover designed.  Because I like my covers to appear like a normal book cover, rather than the square shape that Amazon recommends, I have my covers designed to be 600x900 pixels.  Be sure that the resolution for your cover image is 300 dpi.

• Introduction.  Just like hard copies of books, you have the option of letting readers "Click to look inside" of your ebook.  Unlike hard copies of books, you are limited to displaying the first few pages of your ebook only.   So, you need to ensure the first few pages are interesting enough to compel the browser to want to buy the book to finish it.  If you offer to let the browser download a sample chapter, be sure that the chapter leaves your browser hungry for more.

• Give your book away.  I highly encourage you to participate in the portion of the Kindle Direct Publishing program that permits you to lend your book to Amazon Prime Members for free as well as the 5 days you have within a 90-day period to offer your book at no charge.  Amazon will compensate you for every Prime member that borrows your book.  Unfortunately, you make no money on your free giveaway days.  However, if you have linked your ebook to other books that you offer, your sales on those other titles will likely increase on your giveaway days.

• Call to action.  Just as with any other marketing you do, your ebook needs to serve a higher purpose for your business (other than making you a published author).  Include links back to your web site in your ebook, make a special offer to the buyers of something on your site that asks them to opt into a list so that you can begin to market to those buyers, and if you have other ebooks, be sure and provide links to purchase those related books in every ebook you publish.

Kindle allows you to easily publish an ebook so that you can create a source of recurring income for your business, as well as increase your business growth and marketing leverage.  Start to publish on Kindle today as another way to leverage your authority online.