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Have you ever thought about publishing your own book? Maybe you’ve had the next great American novel tucked away in your desk drawer for years. Maybe you have a collection of poetry – or maybe you would like to publish the life story of a relative of yours.

If any of the above strikes chord, then you may be happy to learn that, not only are you far from alone, but that the options open to you are increasing all the time. It’s easier than ever before to publish your work. Not only is it easier, but it is cheaper – and in some cases it is free. In fact, you can even make money if your book sells.

For example, Amazon are a company who apart from being very successful, have a strong Association with books and reading. When they launched the original Amazon website in 1995, the way that many people bought books changed dramatically.

Later, in 2007, when Amazon launched the original Kindle e-book reader, the way that people read books also began to change. The subsequent release of the enhanced Kindle 2, quickly followed by the large display Kindle DX in 2009, ensured that e-book readers became accepted by the public and, although still fairly new, the market for both e-book readers and e-books began to grow exponentially.

Apart from the fact that the Kindle was an excellent, well designed piece of hardware, which satisfied customer needs, one of the important features in its success was the large amount of Kindle books available for readers to choose from. There are currently well over 400,000 titles on offer – and this is growing by, on average 500 titles daily.

In addition to changing the manner in which books are bought, delivered and read, the Kindle reader gives would-be authors the opportunity to have their work published and showcased by the world’s largest book seller. Having your book published in Kindle format is simple, fast and free. What’s more – so long as you fix the price of your book at the value between $1 and $9.99, Amazon will take no more than 30% of the sales price leaving 70% for you (minus a very small the lovely free – usually no more than a few cents depending upon how many kilobytes your book takes up).

Before you can publish a Kindle book, you will need an Amazon account. This is free – in fact, if you have ever made a purchase from Amazon’s website, then you already have an account. After that, it’s simply a matter of formatting your book and uploading it to Amazon’s website. A very simple way to do this is to format it using Microsoft Word and then to save it as an HTML file. You will find this option when you select “save as” from the file menu. There are other alternative methods, but the Word option is one of the easiest. Choosing a suitable cover illustration is also a good idea – as this will make your book more appealing. Again, this is easy to do, all you have to do is upload your selected image to Amazon’s website. After that, you simply need to fill in a few fields, give your book a good title, set your price, and you will be a published author!

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