Giving readers the ability to “lose themselves” in your book has always been a main goal for the people who design and develop the Kindle at Amazon. Readers should forget about whether they have a paperback, a hardbound book, a Kindle, or a mobile phone in their hands and concentrate on the story you, the author, have written.
Here at LiberWriter, that’s our mission too: ensuring that nothing, including bad formatting, gets in the way of your readers’ experience. Your book should look good on the Kindle and have all the features that readers expect, such as a working table of contents that allows them to skip around, should they need to. We also do a thorough cleanup of the book to remove any formatting artifacts left by the program you used while writing your book. MS Word, for one, is notorious for its, well…we like to think of them as “droppings” in the sense that we need to clean up after them!
Fiction books are really where the Kindle shines. Having grown up with paper books, I’ll admit that, for certain kinds of reference books, I’m still partial to paper, even though I buy more and more on my Kindle just for the expedience factor; having the book within minutes without leaving the house is a huge plus. Also, books about rapidly changing topics, such as computer programming, quickly become out of date, so it’s better not to clutter up the house with thick books that are no longer relevant.
On the other hand, a novel is the type of book that you sit down and read from start to finish, usually for enjoyment, without flipping back and forth between sections, and this works wonderfully on the Kindle. I was impressed the first time I realized that I was speeding through a novel as quickly as possible on my Kindle, without any cognizance of what I was reading it on. I was really “lost” in the book, and I began to realize that eBooks were not just a fad or something to use when you have no other option.
The main reason why fiction books work so well on the Kindle, in technical terms, is that they “flow” very well. The contents do not need to be “just so” in order to read well, the way non-fiction often does. The rule for fiction books is that bad formatting will get in the reader’s way and detract from the story, so it should be avoided at any cost. Anything that isn’t bad is probably ok.
Since most fiction books are fairly straightforward, they do not usually need much work to make them look good. That’s why we price them at an intermediate price: http://www.liberwriter.com/pricing . Non-fiction books that are simply essays also fit well in that category. However, once you start to add charts, images, tables, and the rest of the great stuff that goes into many non-fiction books, then we have so much more work to do, so, naturally, they cost more.
Many of our customers ask us how to best prepare their novel for Kindle formatting. Luckily, the answer is easy: keep it simple! This is covered in more depth in this post: http://blog.liberwriter.com/2013/11/09/best-practices-in-word-for-kindle-conversion/ . When all is said and done, as an author, especially as the author of a fiction book, you should concentrate on writing the best book you can and worry about formatting only when the book is finished.
LiberWriter - Friendly, Easy Kindle Publishing 