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A client of ours recently sold his book internationally. He got good deals in the UK, Europe, China and a nice five figure offer in the US, from a top class NY publisher. For various reasons, however, it looks likely that we're going to turn that US offer down and instead simply publish direct to the Amazon Kindle store. That gives us total control over the timing and the pricing - and we'll get very attractive royalties too. Here's what you need to know. Creating your book You can write your book in any word-processing document you like, but to get it ready for the Kindle you need to save it as an 'old' Word document - that is a.doc file, not a .docx or .pdf or anything else. You can have basic formatting (bold, italics, etc), but more complex formatting (eg: bullet points) won't work. It's fine to insert pictures (as long as you own the copyright, of course). They should be inserted as .jpg files, and make sure they're centred in the page. Don't try to wrap text round them, though. That'll look OK on your screen, but won't work on the Kindle. Then you need to create title pages, acknowledgements pages, etc. - insert a page break wherever you want a hard page break to appear on your final Kindle book. There are a few other, somewhat technical issues, to consider. You can find out about all of them on the Amazon site. If you're very capable on word-processing, you'll be fine. If not, then get help. A badly formatted book will look awful. Don't put your name to something that will let you down. Also, we won't let our client upload anything at all to the Kindle, until we've copy-edited his manuscript and then proof-read the copy-edits. That's a time-consuming process and it does cost money if you get it done professionally, but it's your book. Shoddy spellings, punctuation, grammar, or sentence structure will make your book look bad. If you want to do the job, do it right. Finally, you need to convert the document you've created into a Kindle-ready file. Information on how to do that can also be found on the Amazon site, but it's not hard and if you're half-competent with computers you'll be fine. Create your cover image Most self-pub books look bad because they have rubbish covers. A strong cover design may be the first thing that draws a reader to your book, so don't skimp on it. Once you've got your cover design, do road-test it with friends and acquaintances. Don't decide too soon - give yourself time to figure out what works.