Kindle Your Blog

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Kindle Your Blog is a tutorial for publishing your blog on Amazon’s Kindle. It describes in detail what information and graphics you need to have at hand, and how to produce them, before you begin the submission process. Then it takes you step by step through the process in a clear, straight forward manner.

Why Kindle Your Blog?

Blogging is a burgeoning phenomenon, more and more people and companies are getting into blogging as a means of self-publication. Many simply want to make money, others have information or thoughts to share, others are promoting their books or products. Whatever the reason, blogs are micro-publications seeking an audience.

If you are a blogger – and I assume you are since you’re reading this book – why would you want to make your blog available on Kindle? Why would anyone pay for a subscription to your blog if they can read it for free on the web? To answer these questions accurately we really need to understand what a Kindle is and how it differs from a Notebook computer, NetBook, IPad or Blackberry as a reading device.

Kindle blogs are fully downloaded onto your Kindle so you can read all of the posts even when you’re not wirelessly connected. And unlike RSS readers which often only provide headlines, blogs on Kindle give you full text content and images, and are updated wirelessly throughout the day.

Kindles are extremely portable and are much easier on the eyes for reading. There is a growing number of people – avid readers – who prefer to do their reading on a Kindle instead of a computer screen.

If you subscribe to blogs on your Kindle, when new content is published, that blog moves to the top of the list in your Home screen, you never have to search around looking to see who has updated.

Bloggers are including the Kindle versions of their blogs in a symbiotic loop that can include Kindle books, your free blog, newsletters, your e-mail campaigns, guest posts, and on-line articles. All can be cross-leveraged to feed traffic to one another. Stephen Windwalker, author of KindleNation says, “Kindle blogs may be the ultimate long-tail phenomenon.” And “People far smarter than me are suggesting that there will be 25 million or more e-book readers by the end of 2013.” With Kindles new drastically lower price ($139 vs. the former $250) Kindle has surged ahead to be the leader in e-reader sales by a wide margin. As a blogger can you afford to ignore this market?

First let us look at how Kindle handles your blog.

As you can see, when the blog first loads the home page is displayed, showing you exactly how the blog looks – this retains your branding and identity. The Next Page, Prev Page buttons let you scroll down the screen. Do you see the square window with the magnifying glass in the center? That can be slid around the screen with the 5-way nav controller, pressing the center button will zoom in on the selected area. Pressing the BACK button zooms back out. Zooming in makes reading the very small font face better, but still not great.

But, if you press the MENU button, cursor down to Article Mode and press the 5-way center (equivalent to an ENTER button) the display goes into a text display mode that is far better suited to reading the blogs articles.

As you can see; your articles now display as clearly as any Kindle book or magazine article. Next Page, Prev Page steps the reader through the article. Your side bars do not show in this mode, only the text and pictures in the article.

In article mode, comments from the readers do not show up, but they are available in Web Mode. While you can navigate and complete a comment form, submitting it results in an error, informing you that this PHP file is forbidden to run on this server.

You are able to click on embedded links that lead to other web pages and those pages will display, so there is some limited web browsing capability here too.

Kindle Blogs pay the author 30 cents per subscriber per month.  To make this profitable, you will need a good base of steady subscribers.  And to limit the bleed-through you can take your blog to a subscriber-only status once it’s established and offer it exclusively through Kindle.