10 Tips to Make Your Kindle Novels More Appealing #Mondayblogs

1. Hire a professional editor before you publish your book. Someone who doesn’t love you. Someone you pay. Some authors use street teams, and they are great, but they are not a substitute for an editor who does this for a living. I’ve edited hundreds of books and I still hire editors to review my own novels. Publish polished work. Professional editing is an investment in your career.

2. Justify your margins. Ragged right margins look sloppy and unprofessional.

3. Don’t greatly indent the left margin to begin a new paragraph. A half-inch indent is too deep, in my opinion. 0.25″ is my favorite indent for a new paragraph and set it within MS Word. Think about the size of the screen device when setting margins. And do not use tabs to set margins. There should be no tabs whatsoever in a Kindle book.

4. Your cover is extremely important. If you are writing a series, have a professional create a set of covers for the first three books in your series. In working with a cover designer, it is helpful to hire someone who is willing to read the book…or at least part of the book. Getting a feel for the story helps the book cover artist to develop a visual concept. You’ll want to have a consistent look and feel with books in the series because you are building a brand identity.

5. If your titles are catchy and not too long, so much the better. Two-word titles are among my bestselling titles.

6. If you’re writing books that could jeopardize your day job, use a pen name and keep it a secret from every single person where you work. And from everyone who does not have a “need to know.” This includes from your kids, parents, or anyone who might want to brag about your true identity. Using pen names also helps to build specialized fan bases for certain types of books. If you write YA romance, for example, you don’t want to use the same author name for erotica that has an 18+ fan base.

7. Something very exciting should happen in the first chapter of your book. It’s called the hook. Don’t cram it with back story and descriptions of what characters look like.

8. If you have foreign words in your book that use an alphabet or font that is not supported by the Kindle platform, your text is going to turn into a big mess. A sneaky workaround is to make images of those words and insert them into the manuscript with the insert/picture feature of MS Word. Png files work best for this.

9. If you can move the plot by using dialogue and action, do it. The story will be faster paced than if you used narrative. Show, don’t tell, wherever possible.

10. Your hero / heroine (at least one of them) should be likeable and your readers should want to root for them to overcome their conflicts and obstacles to whatever the goal of the story is. Know your goals for each character.