Want to Revise Your Kindle Book?

As independent publishing — both by the individual author and small presses — has exploded and matured in recent years, so have the tools available to those writers. You can spend as much, or as little, as you like in getting your book into print. An industry of editors, formaters, cover designers, image suppliers, etc., have emerged to support the ventures of thousands of authors. You can pick and choose what you farm out, and here I would like to skip a few steps ahead in the process and write about editing your Kindle files.

You have your book formatted and listed for Kindle readers and tablets. Then something happens. You discover that typo you missed each of the one hundred times you read through your manuscript. Contact information or other book listings need changed. You forgot to thank someone very important in your acknowledgements. Don’t fret, updating you Kindle file is actually an easy and quick process.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, first watch as author Hugh Howey shows step-by-step in this video how to edit your file. You will need to download two programs: Sigil Ebook and Calibre Ebook Management. These are needed for converting the Kindle format (mobi) to an editable html (epub) format, then back to mobi. There may be a single platform that does all of this, but these two are standards for your toolbox.

One of the benefits of ebook formats is this ability for authors to update or revise their work. This is also something authors can easily do themselves.