682 – Leverage the power of Amazon: Tom talks Kindle Create

Episode 682 – Kindle Create
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with episode 682 of Screw the Commute Podcast. Today, we're going to talk about a free piece of software that could literally change the course of your life and your business. I'm talking about Kindle Create software. This will allow you to turn tons of things you may have already written, easily into the Kindle format so you can put them on sale on Amazon and take advantage of their hundreds of millions of customers. Amazon Kindle is one of the best small business opportunities available where you can leverage the power of Amazon for free to bring in money and expose you to those hundreds of millions of Amazon customers. Now. I'm going to give you the brief course on the software today. But if you'd like a complete masterclass on using Kindle and making Kindle ebooks, check out screwthecommute.com/KindleMasterclass for I think it's 197 bucks. You can have a three and one half hour really in-depth course for all the little nitty gritty details, but I'm going to give you the big overview today. All right. I hope you didn't miss episode 681 that was on hashtags. Now, they've only been around since, I'd say 2007, but they're one of the Internet things that have stood the test of time, and they're actually increasing in use and they're really, really important to you to use in your different pieces of content.

[00:01:59] And it's again, it's free. So it's a crazy for not taking advantage of it. So if you want to check out episode 681, go to screwthecommute.com/681. All right. I want to thank folks that are contributing to Patreon. You know, we are financing our scholarships for persons with disabilities with a go fund me for one time donations and with Patreon for ongoing donations. We start as little as three bucks a month. And for the I mean, this episode I give you a loan could be worth a million bucks to you. All right. And I have over 300 of these at screwthecommute.com/training. That's all the training episodes. And then we have 400 other episodes of, you know, very great entrepreneurs that are inspirational and have good tips for you. So so kick in at Patreon at screwthecommute.com/patreon and help us out a little bit to fund that scholarship program. All right. Make sure you pick up a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. You can't believe I. I interview some really top people in the world and when they hear this thing about my automation book and how it saves them millions of keystrokes and hours and hours of time, all of these people, again, they're luminaries in their field. They just never were taught the kind of things that that that can really automate your business and save you time and effort. So pick up a copy of that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree while you're at it. Pick up a copy of our podcast app. It's at screwthecommute.com/app put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road.

[00:03:42] All right. Let's talk about Kindle create software. I mean, it used to be a real pain to get a Kindle eBook up on Amazon. Html was involved and there was nothing easy about it. Then Amazon came out with Kindle create software for both the Mac and PC. Now this isn't something you log into. You actually download this software to your computer, either Mac or PC. I'll tell you a little bit about once the software creates your e-book for you, then what you do with it. Now this software makes it really easy for you to format a Kindle ebook in two different ways, and also it can get a book ready for print on demand. So you can also have a physical copy selling on Amazon without printing up thousands and having boxes in your garage if unsold books. All right, it's print on demand. Now you can use Kindle create to format the text. So it looks nice on all these different readers.

[00:04:44] It will build a table of contents for you. You can add text or edit text. Pretty much you want to write your stuff outside of this and then just edit it inside of this. You want to import files into it. You can add, delete, resize and move images around. You can come back later and re-edit it. No problem. And you can preview it in different tablets and cell phones and readers and see what it looks like and then you can publish it. All right. Now, the two basic formats for Kindle is one is called Reflow Table. See, whenever you go to start a project that's going to ask you, do you want it to be reflow able? And the other one is called print replica. I'll tell you what, these are in a second here. So reflow is good for text heavy books. Now you can still have and I encourage you to have graphics to make the book more interesting to read. Now, with the refillable format, the reader can change the size of the font to suit their eyesight and their preferences, their reading preferences. There are no page numbers in refillable ebooks because every time the reader changes the font size, the page number would change. So it doesn't make any sense. So refillable ebooks have what are called position numbers. If you want to find a certain place in one of the refillable books.

[00:06:25] Now, normally you just import something like a word document, and I'm suggesting and I'll touch on that in a minute. You import it without your graphics. All right. Now, the other format is called print replica. And that's for books that have really complex formatting and lots of graphics. In that case, you import a PDF file that looks the way you want it to. It's already been finished off. Now, with this format, the reader can't change the font size and the book looks exactly like the PDF version or the print version with page numbers and everything. Now the only drawback besides the font size not being adjustable in the print replica format is that it doesn't work on every device, but most of them it does. Oc. I mentioned graphics a moment ago. If your reflow able book has graphics. I suggest you take them out of your word document. I think you can use pages too if you're on a mac. And you take the graphics out and leave placeholder text where the graphics should go. For instance, I usually take a graphic out and I put five X's in the document along with the graphic file name. You know, like Tomshat.JPEG or something like that. So when I put the five X's in the document, I can search for the X's to locate.

[00:08:06] This is after I get it into Kindle, create software, just the text. Then I search for the X's and I locate that place in the document and I delete the X's. I delete the file name of the picture or graphic. And that's where I put the cursor. And then I go and tell the Kindle software insert Tomshat.jpeg into this place. And the reason you do it that way is because you can it's already formatted properly. So you can change the size and you can change the location left, right, center or wherever you want it. But it's formatted so that it's going to look good in any kind of cell phone or tablet or desktop. Say, where if you just imported the whole file, the doc word document in with the graphics in it, God help you. It's it'd be a nightmare to manipulate the graphics. So take the graphics out, import the text and then put the graphics in one at a time and you'll have a beautifully formatted document. Now, when you import your document, you also take off all the front matter like the. This is I'm talking about the reflow of the one you take off the front matter like the table of contents. And and when you do the import the software recognizes your headings and subheadings and generates a clickable table of contents for you which you can edit if something should or should not be in that table of contents.

[00:09:43] Also, your book cover is not imported into the Kindle software that's put in separately when you publish your book on Amazon. Now, another thing to keep in mind is that you can preview your e-book to see how it looks on various cell phones, tablets and desktops. That way, if anything looks strange, you can fix it before taking the file. See, this Kindle create software is going to generate a file and that's going to be taken over and put into Amazon. But you don't want to go through that hassle if it doesn't look right because you'll just have to come back and do it all over again. So you preview it over in the Kindle software and get it all looking great and any problems, you fix it there and then you take it over and publish it. Now, if you're not familiar with the actual publication process, you will get at CDP, that's called Kindle Direct Publishing. That's an account on Amazon and you just Google it and you can sign up for it. If you have an Amazon account, it's just another add on that you can have on, you know, Amazon has tons of things, you know, services for you. So that's just another one. So it's Kindle Direct Publishing, CDP and that's where you will take the file you created with the Kindle software and upload it along with your book cover to Amazon.

[00:11:14] And you're going to answer some questions about the book like the author and whether it's part of a series and the copyright date and things like that. And you'll submit the e-book for review. And that can take a day or so, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. But remember that here's a big thing. Don't put any. No, I want you to put affiliate links in books and links to your stuff. But if you put a crazy looking affiliate link, you know, like so-and-so.com/af= and a bunch of numbers and letters, you won't get the Kindle ebook except it. They just don't go for that. So use something like the WordPress plugin called Pretty Links. So it makes a normal looking link that nobody notices redirects to an affiliate program. So that'll get you covered. Now don't use link partners like bit.ly because they're considered spam and they're the same thing will happen to you. You might not get accepted. Probably won't get accepted. Now I'm going to put a link in the description of this episode on called Getting Started with Kindle. That's Kindles briefing on what Kindle software does and where to download it and all that stuff. But seriously, if there's loads and loads of details, if you want to do this, write correctly on what categories to pick and just all kinds of little details.

[00:12:45] I mean, it took me three and one half hour master class to teach it to people. So if you're interested in that, grab it at screwthecommute.com/Kindlemasterclass. It'll be the best one of the best Christmas presents you could get for yourself. I can tell you that. So, so low. We love Kindle. It's a great business opportunity. You can leverage Amazon's hundreds of millions of customers, so it's really worth it. And you may have written the stuff already. You don't have to create new stuff, although we encourage you to create new stuff. But it might be stuff you've already written that you can format and it doesn't have to be a whole e-book. You can do special reports and things like that and articles. It's all sells on Amazon. Just the one warning is if it's really short, don't call it a book because you'll get bad reviews and that'll kill the whole thing right away. But if you call it a special report or white paper or something like that, you know, people, people don't expect it to be 300 pages long. So so that's an extra little tip for you. But check out the master class. It's at screwthecommute.com/Kindlemasterclass and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.