Some indie authors are tech savvy and masters at formatting their completed manuscripts into the two most commonly used ebook formats, ePub and Mobi. Some hire someone to format their eBook files. However, the approach taken by many is the simple one, upload a Word document to Amazon and let KDP convert the file. If you’re only publishing through Amazon, this works great. At least until you want to send an eBook to a friend, submit your book to a reviewer who requires an eBook file for submission, or … well, you get the idea.
If your book is already published and you followed my advice to not use DRM, you might consider purchasing a copy of the book from Amazon and copying the file from your Kindle or the Kindle for PC directory to use for these purposes. (I’ll leave it to you to figure out how to do this.) But if your book has DRM or you want to send an eBook file in advance of publication to reviewers or beta readers, another approach is needed. There are many ways this might be accomplished. The approach I’m going to outline here is using a free program called Calibre. Continue reading “How to Convert Your Word Doc into a Mobi file Using Calibre”
I thought it was a simple question, just like my answer. Kat Brooks mentioned that while sampling books using the “look inside” feature at Amazon she’d been seeing a lot of books front loaded with reviewer quotes among the front matter before the start of the actual book. Her question was whether the reviewer quotes were going to influence our buying decisions.
Sometimes I feel like my posts at Indies Unlimited help too little, or maybe that should be they help, but complain too much. Largely, I see that as a difference between my logical role as a contributor here, and the majority of IU’s other contributors. While most of IU’s posts are written by authors, Cathy Speight and I are exceptions. We’re book reviewers. Other contributors can talk about how to craft proper dialogue, their experiences with KDP Select, and various marketing techniques, and all of us can pass on our experiences with social media or (in Cathy’s case), help with punctuation usage, but there are areas Cathy and I can talk about that the other minions can’t. We see the best indie books out there (largely written by IU readers) and the worst (the authors who I’m guessing frequent those other sites instead). When we see trends in those “worst books,” we can point them out. These can be reminders or cautionary tales for those faithful IU readers and, for those other people who stumble in from elsewhere, possibly help them see the error of their ways. They’ll not only become better at their job as an author, but may eventually rise to the level of the faithful IU reader. Raising everyone’s game, helps us all. Which leads to my current criticism. 
A recent story on