My First Kindle Book - Improve Your Flower Photography

Black Eyed Susans or Rudbeckias

One of the new ventures I undertook in the first couple of weeks after my temporary job finished was to create and publish my first Kindle book - Improve Your Flower Photography. I'd had the idea in the back of my mind for months but trying to work out how to format it for Kindle in the evenings after work had proved tiring and time consuming. Once I'd finished work though, I could tackle the challenge fresh in the mornings and have all day to work it out.

The writing part was actually the easiest bit - like this blog, I was writing about stuff I know well so it just flowed easily. Finding the best photos from my portfolio to illustrate each point was a little harder and I had to make some tough decisions as to which ones to include.

US Kindle Store

Being your own editor can be pretty difficult - you have to try to look at your photos without bias and not include a sub-standard picture just because it's one of your own favorites! But once I got the images selected, it was fairly straightforward to adjust the sizes for inclusion to my book.

Uploading to Kindle was also fairly straightforward but when I downloaded the 'new' Kindle version to check the layout and formatting - oh my word! It was bad! Kindle says you can format your book in a Word document but there are many limitations on what you can and can't do in Word. Much of my layout just went haywire once it was processed through the Kindle system so I had to then work out how to correct it!

That took me nearly two days but I got there in the end. It didn't help that I needed to zip all the separate bits into one zip file to re-upload and although Windows 7 has a zip facility, it isn't compatible with the Kindle system! I must have tried about 10 times in various ways to zip that damned file but it just wouldn't work so I had to download Winzip in the end and use their free trial to get it sorted out!

UK Kindle Store

This first book is a practical guide on how to improve your flower photography - a fairly niche subject but one I know a lot of amateur photographers struggle with. My book isn't aimed at experienced photographers at all - it's aimed at those people who love flowers and use their cellphone or little point and shoot camera to take photos in their gardens.

As the sub-title says - you don't need any fancy equipment to get some good flower photos if you know the rules of composition and if you spend just a few seconds thinking before you take your photo. One lady left me a 5 star review and said it inspired her to go find some flowers to photograph!

I have a few other topics in mind for further books but those are more travel photography photo essays rather than practical guides. I also have a couple more how-to book ideas in mind. I really enjoyed putting this book together and even without much promotion by me, it's selling too! That, of course, makes it even better and gives me some hope that I can continue to come up with book ideas for future income generation! It's just one of the mini projects that I have on the go at the moment though.

They say everyone has at least one book in them - I'm not sure a small, 30 page Kindle book is quite what they had in mind but hey I did it!

(500 Word Challenge - Day 8 Word Count 600)

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Check out my other projects
Gifts for Gamers and Geeks

and my photography site
HVS PHotography

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