For those of you who are currently self-publishing or thinking of it, I’d like to offer some suggestions of tools that are available free of charge.

Kindle Create – https://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16536087011 – Format your latest masterpiece by simply uploading the document file and allowing Kindle Create to do the rest.

Canva Cover Designer – https://www.canva.com/ A free online layout program that can be used for cover design for the graphically challenged.

Book Report – https://www.getbookreport.com/ – Your one-stop source for reporting Amazon sales.

Kindle Create

Kindle Create is a new tool that Amazon is rolling out to help with the formatting of your Kindle stories. This targeted tool takes your Word document file and builds a version ready to be uploaded to Amazon Kindle. The program is currently in Beta but relatively complete.

Create searches your doc file and automatically formats the chapter heads and applies styles to your manuscript. A Table of Contents is generated for you, which is one of the most labor-intensive parts of publishing a story IMHO. At this time it doesn’t appear that TOC generation is working but I’m assuming will be available shortly.

You pretty much just import the doc file and Create does the rest. It will find chapter headings and format them appropriately. You get a list of suggested chapter heads and if it’s not a heading, just uncheck the box to remove the heading.

There are a number of styles to select from to vary the look of your finished story and when done, just upload the Create output file to publish it. I’m planning on publishing my latest story, House Party, with Kindle Create so I can see how it goes.

So far there are some loose ends such as how to create a Table of Contents, but the beta version of the program looks promising. It’s nice that you can see what your story will look like on different devices such as a tablet, phone, or Kindle e-reader.

It will do cool stuff, like create drop caps to give your story a more professional look.

I’m still debating on whether I will use Kindle Create as it will mean that I will have yet another version of a story to keep track of. You cannot publish the same exact story for Amazon or SmashWords, for example. Embedding a link to SmashWords will get your story instantly rejected by Amazon and vice versa. I’ve created a methodology to package stories for specific publishers that is still a work in progress but an order of magnitude better than when I originally started.

Canva Cover Designer

Canva, an online layout designer allows the user to select from a number of templates and then edit the individual elements, such as text and images to your requirements. There are a number of book templates available to start from.

This will help those without a graphics design package or problems using crayons to create a cover. Just find the template, which is laid out in the style that you like. Then replace the original text (words) with your text and the image with your image.

When you are done, simply export the image, and you have a JPG file ready to publish.

Disclaimer: I do not use Canva as my goto layout program is CorelDraw, which I’ve used for years but from my testing, I’d recommend Canva for those who don’t want to lay out the money for other products.

Book Report

BookReport – An add-in for Chrome that summaries your Amazon sales in one easy to read sales report, automatically updated to the latest figures. The basic version is free if your sales are under $1,000 per month.

Book Report shows your sales between dates, such as last 30 days, top earners, and earnings per day.

Book Report will display your sales over time as well as the ranks in the Kindle Store. Your reviews are shown with the number of stars, etc.

You can drill down and examine your sales from a number of perspectives, and the thing I really like about it is how everything is in one tabbed report that is continually updated every time you refresh your browser.

Am Writing – Currently, my story de jour is House Party about surprisingly a house party. House party is an acronym of a swinger’s party with a number of twists and turns from my normal fare. I’m still not sure how it’s going to turn out but will hopefully be HEA in the end!

Thanks for reading and if it’s the 24th, it’s another bit of smut from Larry Archer. Visit me at LarryArcher.blog for more pervy stuff. Sorry, I can’t offer any cooking or house cleaning tips but if it involves abusing yourself, drop me a line: Larry [at] LarryArcher [dot] com.