Reddit reviews Building Your Book for Kindle

Use this book (it's free). It helped me out a lot.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007URVZJ6

Amazon has an ebook that walks you through formatting for Kindle. I used this when putting my boyfriend's book up as a Kindle ebook, and it helped tremendously.

1: Without knowing what your "45-page nonfiction book" is about, I'm just going to give you the general advice that a good cover moves units. Unless someone is specifically searching for your book, the cover is going to be the first thing he sees and what catches his interest. This may be considerably less true in the non-fiction section.

How you go about getting one is up to you, but I'd personally recommend not skimping on your cover.

2: In regards to turning documents into e-books, this is actually a fairly simple process. Amazon released an e-book of instructions, and there's also a printable PDF you can look at without having to have a kindle handy. The main parts are mostly about letting your word processor handle white space instead of manually inserting spaces, tabs, and extra carriage returns (do so with indented paragraphs, page breaks, and double spaced lines). If your work has tables, charts, or pictures in it, then that might be something else to worry about.

3: Amazon's program is called KDP Select. The biggest drawback is that you can't sell your digital book through anyone else, but you can still sell physical copies elsewhere (unless it's changed since the last time I looked into it). Their website will answer your questions better than I can, but I would say that in general, no, I didn't find that Amazon did much of anything to make it worth it. You're still on your own for marketing and such, they just allow you to do some promotional work like offering your book for free for several days to hopefully snag some reviews.

>I know they will not allow me to price it $0.00 and have a minimum price of $0.99, so that is what I will charge on Amazon.

The common method to get around this is to put your work on other sites like Smashwords that DO allow you to set the price to free, and then report the book to Amazon as cheaper elsewhere. Eventually, they'll either automatically price match it or, in some occasions, pull your book down off their site. I've never heard of this second one actually happening to anyone, but I'm sure it could.

In addition to the questions I just want to point out that 2500 words is too short for Amazon. I'd recommend going back and boosting it to over 3000 words at the very least (likely up over 5000 words would be better) before posting it to Amazon. Amazon doesn't like content that is too short and you could get in trouble for 'poor user experience.'

1. Grab GIMP (it's free) and look on free stock photo sites for available photos or sign up to a trial with a paying stock photo site. Look up tutorials on YouTube and build your own cover. You don't need to buy a professional cover from a designer (and could work against you because of both reader expectations and the cost of working with a professional designer) and as a bonus you'll learn a lot of new skills along the way. It's really not hard to put together a quick cover that is too market, just be sure to research what others are doing in your genre and play to the market expectations. Also research what is not allowed on Amazon (not too much butt, no undressing, etc.) and make sure you don't cross any lines.
   
2. It's important to remember there are two types of anonymity, anonymity in your personal life and anonymity from Amazon. It is impossible to remain anonymous from Amazon, they need to know your real ID and any pertinent tax information (variable depending on your geographic location) in order to pay out. With your personal life anonymity will come from using a pen name which is only linked to your Amazon publishing account by virtue of the name that you put into the book you're trying to publish. So you can use your personal account if you'd like, or you can set up a new one just for publishing, just bear in mind that you can ONLY have 1 Amazon publishing account. This account will house ALL of the books you publish through Amazon regardless of content or pen name. Everything you're going to put up on Amazon goes up through that account.
   
3. Amazon allows you to set up Print-On-Demand, so you can get a physical copy of your book (though to be honest with a 2500 word story it's going to be a leaflet and you're probably not going to want to get a physical copy because it would be cost prohibitive - hell I'm not even sure if Amazon allows paperbacks that small - to put it into some perspective a short novel is 50000 words, so like 20 times longer than your story). As for getting it into sex shops there is no built mechanism for doing that. You'd have to order a bunch of copies and try to negotiate with the stores yourself for getting it into there.
   
4. Download this book: https://www.amazon.ca/Building-Your-Kindle-Direct-Publishing-ebook/dp/B007URVZJ6 and use the instructions to build your book for kindle. This is the easiest way I've found that makes a good looking book without going through specialized software. Otherwise you can use Kindle Create or Canva or Vellum or some other book creation software to take care of the grunt work for you.
   
   As a final note I'd really recommend reading the FAQ and sidebar on this subreddit and then doing searches to get a lay of the land. This subreddit has a wealth of information on it and spending a couple hours here getting yourself familiar with everything before publishing is really going to help you out a lot.
   
   Oh and congratulations on your first story!

this might help:

Building Your Book for Kindle [Kindle Edition]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007URVZJ6

Download the free guide from Amazon on how to format your Word document for Kindle.

https://www.amazon.com/Building-Your-Kindle-Direct-Publishing-ebook/dp/B007URVZJ6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483308983&sr=8-1&keywords=kindle+formatting

BTW if you're serious about this business get Scrivener as an investment. It'll make life so much easier for you. Vellum is for advanced publishers. You don't need it yet.

Thanks. If you're curious how to format a Kindle book, you can read up on it here: http://www.amazon.com/Building-Your-Book-Kindle-ebook/dp/B007URVZJ6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377352299&sr=8-1&keywords=building+your+book+for+kindle

It would actually be helpful to browse through it before you start writing. That way, you know how to format your text and chapters ahead of time.

If you have it in Word, I use this book. It's a little out of date but I used it for making a Kindle book last week. Building Your Book For Kindle (PS it's free)

or here if you are in the US.

Realistically, I think this would be a total waste of money. Amazon have an entire free ebook devoted to this, and you can find it here. There are a few simple rules, but the biggest one is don't use the tab button. There you have it.