If you are just joining us, yesterday’s post was all about finding blog posts and re-purposing them to create and publish a Kindle book this week. We’d love to have you join us and publish a book of your own this week.  Go here to catch up.

So, how’d you do? Did you find enough material to put together your Kindle book?  I’ll bet you found a whole lot more than you expected to and that you have enough material for more than one book. Maybe several. 

Now that you’ve decided on a topic and have chosen the content, did you organize it in the order that you want it to appear in your book?  Remember to think of your posts as short chapters.

Now here’s what you need to do today…

• STEP 4

You need to name your book.  This needs to be something catchy or very keyword specific.  I encourage keyword specific if you are publishing an information content book so you can be found in searches. But if you are publishing a spicy love story or a spy thriller, keywords aren’t going to necessarily work for you. Choose your title the same way you do your headlines.

• STEP 5

Now you need an ecover for your book.  You’ll want to keep it simple. The more colors and images you use the harder it is to read the cover in that tiny thumbnail in the Amazon listings. Remember, we tend to skim over the covers rather than strain to read the small print. Keep it clear and concise. No more than 3 colors – 2 is better yet. Use a crisp clear font.

I make all of my ecovers on this cool software.  I use it all the time for ebook covers, product covers, banner ads and headers.  It’s really affordable for almost everyone and it’s top notch. There may be free ecover makers out there or you can pay someone to create your covers for you.  I would be happy to help you with that, ask your social media colleagues or go to Fiverr.com and see if you can find someone to do it for you on the cheap. Keep in mind that you usually get what you pay for. Don’t let this step freak you out. Just do it or hire it done.  It’s not expensive. Don’t pay more than $25 or $30.

• STEP 6

Now’s the time to get started on your book’s beginning pages.  Using Microsoft Word and creating your book in DOC or DOCX format is best.  If you don’t have Word, you can download a free 30 day trial or you can use any plain text editor.  Plain text doesn’t look as nice and you can’t use images, colors, etc. but if that’s what you’ve got to work with, that’s what you’ve got.  It’ll work.  

Your first page is the title and author page. Keep it simple. Your ecover will be loaded onto Kindle separately, so you won’t need to add that to your document.  Your title page will look something like this:

After adding the title and author name, be sure to insert a page break(in Word under the “insert” tab.) Important: If you don’t actually insert a page break then your formatting will be all wrong.  You will want to be sure to insert a page break at the end of every chapter as well. This keeps the chapters from running together. 

Next you will create your copyright page. Keep it simple.  Something like this:

Copyright © 2012   Celene Harrelson

All Rights Reserved

Then your dedication page if you have one.

I think that’s enough for today.  

Your assignment:  Choose a title, create your ecover or outsource it, write your title page and copyright page.

Don’t for get to go grab your free copy of The Secret to YOU Making Money Online

We’ll meet back here tomorrow.