DMR #15: Ashly Lorenzana – Do you need any special software to create a Kindle book?

David: Do you need any special software to create a Kindle book? How do you format a Kindle book and do you publish a Kindle book? Those are just three of the questions that I intend to ask our special guest today, Ashly Lorenzana. Ashly, welcome to DMR. Ashly: Thank you so much for having me. David: Thank you for joining us. Ashly is an expert in Kindle publishing, book marketing, blogging, and also freelance writing. You can find her over at AshelyLorenzana.com. Ashly, is publishing a Kindle book easy or is it a bit of a learning curve to grasp the essentials? Ashly: I think it's getting easier. I think there are some aspects of Kindle publishing that are still somewhat of a challenge for people who are new to the whole process. The formatting is one of the trickier areas, cover design, a lot of people struggle with that it seems like, but other than that, I would say it's fairly easy. Amazon has made it pretty easy for people at this point in time is my opinion. David: Is this a logical area for businesses to be getting into as a promotional tool do you think or is it largely a medium just for creative writing and authors getting themselves published? Ashly: I think it's definitely got huge potential for both. I see a lot of different people coming from different backgrounds, bloggers or business people who are doing really, really well with it, so I think it's very flexible. I think it has huge opportunity for both crowds. David: What about the actual creation of the books themselves? I understand that you can simply get even a Word document and essentially publish that as a Kindle book, but is that the right way to go down or are you better to actually choose some kind of more specialist software to actually produce your book? Ashly: There's a lot of different ways you can go about it. They accept several formats. You're right, you can just do a Word document and that works. They also have specific templates for Word that work really well, but as far as the best or the right way to do it, personally I haven't really seen any software that I was really impressed with for formatting. That's just my personal opinion. I'm old school. I just do the HTML myself and then make an E-Pub. That's technical for a lot of people. I don't know if that's really the best thing for someone who is new to all this to be getting into. Word is probably the easiest. That's what I would recommend.