How To

How to Format a Book for Kindle, Step-by-Step

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How to format a book for kindle, in three easy steps.

Why you should know how to format a book for Kindle

Once upon a time, writers relied on traditional publishing to get their books in front of an audience. And it’s true that publishing through an established company means your book won’t get sent out into the world full of typos.

But every writer also knows this: sometimes, publishing houses release bland books that should’ve stayed in draft form forever. Conversely, sometimes even the best books never find a home through a traditional publisher. Actually, this happens all the time.

This situation has driven many writers to take matters into their own hands and self-publish books through platforms like Amazon. One neat thing about Amazon is that you can easily format an e-book using Kindle Create, a free formatting software that makes your book look professional before you upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

If you’re wondering how to format a book for Kindle, keep reading. We’ll show you everything you need to know in three simple steps.

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6 Tips to Improve eBay Listing Optimization

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Image showing text that says 6 tips to improve eBay listing optimization.

eBay has been an e-commerce seller’s dream spot for years — and for good reason. You can sell almost anything on eBay: used items, collectibles, refurbished gadgets, and of course, new goods. And while there’s a market out there for nearly anything you could sell on eBay, you need to keep your eBay listing optimization skills sharp and up-to-the-minute.

ebay listing optimization - listing for One ghost in a cardboard Amazon box
Any takers for this irresistible listing on eBay? Okay, so maybe the ghost-collecting market isn’t as big as the seller thought.

Also called eBay SEO, eBay listing optimization makes it easier for your target audience to find your product amidst the 1.3 billion listings currently featured on the site.

Here’s the key detail about eBay’s search engine, Cassini: its main goal is to keep shoppers — not necessarily sellers — happy.

Everything you post on your listing, therefore, needs to be aimed at shopper ease and satisfaction. By optimizing your eBay listing according to your buyers’ needs and desires, you’re optimizing the listing for eBay’s search engine.

Here are 6 ways to do just that.

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Copy Testing: The Secret to Better Sales

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Asian Businesswoman Writing on Glass in Office

Have you ever seen a really neat product on Amazon that you considered buying until you read the product description? Maybe there were missing words, misspellings, jumbled sentences, or glaring grammatical errors. It’s clear the company did not try copy testing before it went live.

What is copy testing?

If you’re a seller of any product, you know that clean, meaningful copy helps your product sell.

Copy testing is the best way to make sure you put your sharpest words before your customers’ eyes. You take your marketing copy (see examples below) and show it to an objective crowd. The test respondents then provide you with detailed feedback so you can know what’s working and what’s not before you put your copy out into the market.

Copy testing is especially effective when you’re selling across borders to ensure that your copy hits the right notes in the native language. Even British English and American English have distinct cultural differences, and you want to how customers in your relevant regions respond to your words.

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Why You Need a Mobile App Business Plan (And How to Make a Good One)

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Mobile App Business Plan

It’s not cheap to build an app. One source says that building a simple functions app like a timer or a tip calculator costs upwards of $10,000. A more complicated app is much more expensive — think a quarter of a million dollars. So to build an app without sinking your finances, you need to create a mobile app business plan.

Before we dive into what that plan should look like, let’s figure out why your brand should develop an app in the first place.

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How to Sell App Ideas: A Must-Have Guide

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A photo of a person sketching an app to illustrate how to sell app ideas.

If you’ve decided to step into the app developing game, congratulations! You’ve just started a business. And like any other business, you’ll have to find backers or buyers to sell app ideas to.

Maybe you’ve got a brilliant app planned and you want to sell it to someone else to produce. Or maybe you want to dive into the process yourself and see where the journey leads. Either way, you’ll have to:

  • Validate your idea
  • Define your target audience
  • Test a prototype to your target audience

This guide on how to sell app ideas will tell you everything you need to know about selling your app idea to financial backers or potential idea buyers.

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How to Choose an Online Panel

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Traditional market research methods such as telephone calls and in-person focus groups are cost-prohibitive and too time-consuming for many businesses. With an online panel, surveys can be completed quickly and easily, helping you collect a lot of data in relatively little time.

Before you get started, consider these factors in choosing a panel provider and start harnessing the wisdom of a crowd.

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The 5 Best Tools for App Store Optimization

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The 5 best tools for app store optimization, and runners-up

You’ve just released your newest app, which you worked on for months. You made sure that it focused on providing one unique benefit to the world. But now, you’re not sure how to make it easy for the world to find it. This is where app store optimization (ASO) comes in.

Put simply, app store optimization has one goal: to get people to download your app. But there are several sub-goals that ASO addresses. Let’s talk about those first.

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Amazon A/B Testing: What to test for the highest impact

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Amazon A/B Testing: What to test for the highest impact

Editor’s note: Thanks to Danny Carlson for this guest post on Amazon A/B testing.

As Amazon grows more and more competitive, a seller’s need for an edge gets greater every month. What if there was a strategy you could implement that made Amazon Ads cheaper, product launches more effective, and click-through and conversion rates higher? There is! It’s Amazon A/B testing.

Unlike your own e-commerce website, Amazon’s platform doesn’t allow you to install split testing plugins or tools. And messing with a listing too much can make the Amazon algorithm go haywire, putting your existing ranking at risk.

So how do we do it? In this article, I’ll dive into how to split test your listing, what to test, and how to gather the best data without messing up your Amazon indexing or ranking.

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How to Get Back Into Writing: 8 Tips

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How to get back into writing

There’s a saying among writers that writing is indeed an art: the art of getting your butt in the chair, staying there without checking Facebook, and writing.

Even before laptops and iPhones, this was true. Short story master Flannery O’Conner famously said, “I don’t know if the muse is going to show up on any given day, but by golly, I’m going to be at my desk every day from 8 to 12 every morning in case she does.”

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