Publishing your romance book:

Since Kindle offers options for templates and font sizes, as well as text selection to even save your favorite snippets, the file you send must be your EDITABLE text, i.e., no PDF! Accepted formats include Word (.doc, .docx) and web page (.html) files. The page layout of the e-book depends on the preferences of the reader, so it will not be visible in the final result, but other elements will, making it pertinent to bet on page breaks and titles selected to delimit chapters and footnotes, when necessary, they will be present both on the device and in applications for cell phones and computers.

On the other hand, they will not be considered different fonts, so watch out for that! My chapter beginnings contain an elephant and the pauses musical notes, both coming from different fonts, and I had to convert this into an image, since KDP turned everything into a normal letter. By the way, speaking of images, they work normally, see? In black and white, of course, but with quality and sharpness. The special characters inserted throughout the text, such as shapes and symbols, for example, also work.

This tool is divided into three pages on the site. The first one with information about the romance book, to put title, subtitle (since my title is in English, I chose one in Portuguese, since this is an international store), synopsis, author’s name, keywords, categories, among others. Fill out all the fields that you think are appropriate with much attention, because they are the ones that will make your story a sure-fire search for the reader when he or she searches for it! The second page is for the content, where you upload the text file and the cover, which can also be made on the spot from a “Cover Creator”, which I did not use because I already had mine, made by Mari, my friend. At the end, after the processing is finished, you can preview your e-book to see how it will look and even download the .mobi file to read on your or other devices.

Selling the romance e-book:

What about the third screen? Well, this is where you set the price of the romance e-book in the Kindle store! They give you several options to choose the best one: WHERE it will be sold (it can be globally or in selected territories), how much you will receive in royalties, how much you want to charge in the currency of your choice (and the system itself converts the others based on that!), if you want to allow user-to-user lending. Read this part very carefully and sell wisely! There is no point in wanting to charge a lot for a short story and it makes no sense to bargain on a didactic production, for example, right? If you don’t have any notion of this, as I myself didn’t, look for the value of similar titles to base yourself on.

Then there are two options: publish the romance e-book now or put it on pre-sale! If you opt for the second, the charge on the reader’s card only arrives on the day it is released and you can still edit your content up to 72 hours before the chosen date. By the way, my personal tip here is to keep an eye on the time zone of the shipping limit! I got it wrong and the people who bought it earlier received a version that was not the final one, with some very annoying errors that until today I couldn’t send them the update, even though I have already resent the corrected book. These little things catch us sometimes, but it is by making mistakes (and crying a lot!) that we learn.

Physical romance book and author copies:

OK, the e-book is nice, but if you REALLY want to have your physical romance book in your hands Amazon has a solution for that too: the regular paperback romance book, which is printed on the buyer’s demand. It’s a VERY SIMPLE edition, with a cover with no dust jacket or fancy stuff like that, but also possible to customize in some ways. Once again you are sent the editable file, but in this case, it will be EQUAL to what you created, with pagination, top-of-page elements, and all the things that already existed in the digital version. It also has a cover creator, with the option to download the template to assemble manually in some image editor taking into account all the final measures, as I did, and right there you can generate ISBN and barcode of your volume. In fact, it is having your romance book in hands, with everything you are entitled to, even the option of a matte or gloss cover, white or cream pages…