My book formatting services now live on a whole new website – come and visit http://BookFormatter.com
What sells Kindle books? You may think its the quality of the writing, the beauty of the cover art, or even the keywords chosen.
I would agree that all those are important, but what really sells book are customer reviews, good, old-fashioned, word of mouth. If you have any idea about how to promote your book, you will make an effort to get some genuine, and positive reviews for your new book. But writers don’t control the reviews that show on their book’s page.
What’s the fastest way to kill sales of your book?
Bad reviews.
Reviews like these:
I bought this because it was advertised as having an active contents list. It doesn’t. The contents list is not presented immediately: you have to page back from the ”Note”. Then you are confronted with Section 1, Section 2 ,.. etc with no titles. The sections do have titles, but they don’t appear in the contents list. You can select a section and jump to it. Once there, you cannot go back to the table of contents directly. The big dot button, which takes you to the contents on other books and newspapers, doesn’t work here. All very poor in my opinion. All very unnecessary too One star review of “Pensees” http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2RPTH3VHNEWXC
Or this one from a frustrated author who possibly should have checked their book before hitting “publish”.
I am furious! Bad review for poor format upload! I uploaded my book following all of Kindle’s instructions. Today I note a poor review because of repeated sentences, typos, and errors and I opened the book in kindle to see what was going on. To my horror, there are dashes missing between words (self-employed became self employed), there are spaces either added or completely missing between words, and this was just on the first page!!!! http://forums.kindledirectpublishing.com/kdpforums/thread.jspa?threadID=43637&tstart=0
Another poor review of a cook book:
The table of contents does not work in this book. It is pretty short, but almost every cook-book on the Kindle market includes some kind of table of contents functionality. The exclusion of such a feature is really annoying, especially if you are in the kitchen, and you have to flip through these pages to find the recipe you need http://www.amazon.com/review/R24D8RCZ8F76UP/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B008PVIT6S&channel=rw-dp&nodeID=133140011&store=digital-text
This sums it up – a one-star review of a self-help book:
This seems like an interesting book. However it’s not readable. The formatting cuts off the first two letters on each page.http://www.amazon.com/review/R2F7JZR9ES0Q2H/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B007UEKZ5E&channel=rw-dp&nodeID=133140011&store=digital-text
I’ve read a lot of self-published nonfiction books recently. Most of them have had appealing cover design, have been well-edited, and the content has been fairly good.
But the formatting, has, in general,sucked.
Common Formatting Errors in Non-Fiction Books:
- no Table of Contents available on the Kindle’s menu button, sometime not even a linked (i.e. clickable) table of contents at the start of the book!
- indented paragraphs which makes sub-headings look strange and which is not the correct format for most nonfiction;
- bullets which are either not attempted at all (using an “*” or “-” character instead) or has unusually large gaps between the bullet and the first word of the bulleted line and/or inconsistent indenting of bullets and/or inconsistent style of bullets;
- inconsistent spacing between paragraphs and headers and sub-headings, sometimes very large gaps between individual words or between paragraphs.
I can Fix Your Formatting Issues
Formatting for Kindle eReaders is fairly straight forward, so long as you are writing fiction. However when you start writing nonfiction it gets more difficult. When I started writing travel eBooks because I noticed that the big publishers in the market (Frommer, Lonely Planet) were bad at it too.
I will take a manuscript in doc, docx or odt format, convert it to HTML, fix up the errors and test it until it’s perfect. I will then return to you the MOBI file ready for uploading to Amazon.com plus the HTML files for your book.
If you later need to make minor changes to your book, you’ll be able to without paying me or anyone else to do the work again.
From My Customers
Court Tuttle from www.TheBogBuilders.com
Phil Byrne from www.LiveWorkAbroad.com
After receiving an email from KDP Quality Review, I was in panic mode to correct formatting errors in my kindle book. I had no idea where to start and needed help. I found Lis online and decided to send her an email. She responded right away with a quote that was more than reasonable. Lis understood the urgency of my situation and worked with me to have the formatting done quickly and BEAUTIFULLY! I am so happy and grateful. I also bought her book, Kindle Formatting for Nonfiction, but her service is so great that I will probably just call on her again in the near future. I highly recommend her formatting service. Thanks Lis!
Lynn R Davis from LynnRDavis.com
The beauty of the digital age is finding someone 9000 miles away from home capable of meeting all my formatting needs. As a first time self-publisher, Lis provided the type of skilled services I was searching for to polish my book into a professionally produced product. In addition to the formatting, she assisted in my vision for layout, color, and organization. And this was all accomplished with a fast turn-around at a very reasonable cost without any sacrifice in quality. I will return to Lis with the final two books in my series without reservation.
Vel Grande
More books I have formatted
How Much Will It Cost?
For current pricing or a no-obligation quote please contact me at lis (at) bookformatter.com
Next Steps
Ensure that you have a completed, final copy of your book including front and back matter. Ensure that all editing has been completed.
- For more information on my Kinde, ePub and PDF formatting check out my new site: BookFormatter.com
- Send an email to lis@bookformatter.com including your book’s file(s) and any special instruction you have.
- I do NOT need your cover image but I do require any images that you are using inside your book: each image should be no more than 400px wide, 600px high. Images do not align in older Kndles so any image will be centered and text will NOT wrap around it. Images should be JPG or GIF format (NOT PNG) and preferably 300dpi.
- I will get back to you with a quote inside 12 hours. (Note I live in New Zealand, so my time zone is probably different from yours).
- If you are happy with the quote please deposit 50% of the agreed price in my Paypal account.
- I will aim to turn jobs around within 24 hours after your deposit, but will confirm a time frame on receiving your deposit.
If you don’t want to spend the money on outsourcing and are keen to learn how to format yourself check out my Kindle Formatting for Nonfiction book available in Kindle format (of course!)